Hey Reader,

Zach here,

with some news and resources from the 3D world.
​

How to make a short film in Blender

Have you put off making your own animated short? Wondering how’s it possible to manage so many complex tasks without a big team and a few years time?

Our friend Pierrick managed to make an amazing animated short in Blender in just 2 months, and decided to share his experience and process.

In his latest YouTube video, he gives some priceless tips on how not to get overwhelmed by a big production and how to actually get it done.

One of the keys to Pierrick’s success was that he decided to use pre-made assets for creating the environments for his shots. That is a great way to get things done faster without compromising quality.

There is no shame in not doing everything by yourself. You just need to know what to use and when.

Free Photoreal Vegetation for Blender

If you’ve ever tried creating photorealistic environments in Blender - you know that professional quality 3D plants are essential to achieving believable results.

Graswald has always been one of the best quality 3D vegetation libraries out there.

Recently, they decided to move away from making 3D plants to focus on product digitalization for commerce and released their entire 3D plant collection for free.

This is a great opportunity for you to make your natural environment renders shine.

You can download the free 3D plants from their website.

They are sorted into biotopes (the natural environments where they grow together), which really helps with making your renders biologically correct and thus realistic.

That’s not all. Graswald library comes with a powerful free add-on called "GScatter", that can simplify and speed up the environment creation process in Blender.

Important note: GScatter is not yet compatible with Blender 4.1, make sure to use Blender version from 3.4 to 4.0 to work with this add-on.

The add-on might seem a bit complex to start with, but once you get the basics it is really flexible, and you can achieve great results with a few tweaks.

There are tutorials on Graswald’s YouTube channel explaining the basics of how to get started with that tool.

One of the coolest features it has, is adding pre-made environment setups that are a great starting point for your scenes.

Blender Police Chase Animation

So, maybe you are working on your short film, have some nice environments ready, but it's not feeling very cinematic.

A great way to learn is by watching others animate something epic inside Blender.

Here’s a cool car chase animation by Gaku Yajima.

I hope this will get you inspired and help you chase your animation dream

(without getting wrecked 😜).

Have fun!

~Zach