Hey Reader,

Zach here,

With a new dose of inspiration and resources from the 3D world.

Today, I’ll start with a realistic, animated Tiger made in Blender, followed by an epic Lego Pokémon battle. Next, I’ll share a funny animated short about the dangers of Bayblade and a cool Environment and Game Art tutorial pack.

Let’s dive in.

​CGI Tiger made in Blender - Breakdown ​

Making photorealistic animated animals is not an easy task, and I rarely see top-level work like this done with Blender. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, and this breakdown video shows how Jurrian Witmans was able to achieve such stunning results.

The sculpting part was done in ZBrush (but it could be done in Blender as well, for sure), and the rest of the pipeline was done in Blender (texturing, hair grooming, rigging, and animation).

​How the Lego Pokémon Sets Should Have Been​

Are you ready for an exciting Pokémon battle, but in Lego? This amazing Blender animation made by TiNKLe​ (the recent 5th place winner of the Pwnisher’s challenge) offers a vision of an epic duel between Eevee and Pikachu.

The design of characters is made from almost basic Lego building blocks, and I think it beats the actual Pokémon sets released by Lego this year (they look more sophisticated, but lack the old-school Lego simplicity).

It’s a real treat for every Lego and Pokémon fan (and TiNKLe suggests there may be more battles to come, which I’m looking forward to).

​Playing Bayblade can be Extremely Dangerous… and Funny!​

​

​The Good Times are Killing Me (whose animations I shared some time ago) made this hilarious short with their mad-scientist-alien characters, this time goofing around a rotating office chair (Bayblade style).

It turns (pun intended) out to be a truly hazardous activity, told with a great dose of humor and clay-mation style. It really made me wonder: What if "Spingularity" actually exists?

​Environments and Game Art Tutorials FlipBox​

If you’re interested in learning how to make 3D Environments and assets for video games, Flipped Normals released a cool and attractively priced tutorial pack (they call them FlipBoxes).

It covers different aspects of these topics (including: modeling, texturing, and procedural asset creation, as well as preparing and importing them into Unreal Engine 5).

All the tutorials are by Fast Track Tutorials and are available in three price tiers depending on your needs.

​Get the Environment and Game Art Flip Box here​
​

That’s all from me today. Have a great weekend, and until next time.

~Zach