Hey Reader,

Zach here,

With new resources and inspirations from the 3D world.

Today we have a new Robotic Planet course update, a cool free Blender Constraints tutorial and a VFX breakdown of a cute Disney short.

Let’s dive in.

​Robotic Planet - 2 new Breakdown Videos & a Bonus Scene​

​Robotic Planet has just received an update to the two latest chapters. These chapters leave more space for students’ self-driven explorations and learning, providing insight into more specific, unique new techniques.

We’ve heard the feedback from some students who found it a bit challenging and wanted a little more guidance to understand the full process better.

This is why Louis created 2 new breakdown videos for the Snail Bot and the Ostrich Bot chapters (these videos are free for everyone to watch).

​In the Snail Bot breakdown video, Louis goes over all the main steps to create this crawling boom-box, like the hard-surface modeling techniques used to model the speaker/tape deck shell, the shading setups, and the logic behind the Snail Bot rig.

In this Ostrich Bot breakdown video, Louis explains the modeling and rigging techniques used to create this running machine, with a special focus on the more sophisticated rigging of the hydraulics and feathers, and a useful instancing technique to create multiple copies of the same animated character in a scene.

This final update also means the course is now complete.

To celebrate this, we added a bonus photoshoot studio Blender scene for everyone who owns the course to download. This will let you present your bots in a fun and easy way.

​Learn to animate using Blenders Constraints​

If you ever wondered what Constraints are for in Blender or just found animation tricky and hard to manage, you’ll find this video by Elijah Sheffield (aka Sweetboy) very useful.

Elijah explains four basic tools that let you control object relationships for animation. This includes Hooks (not a constraint, but they work similarly), "Child of" constraint, Follow Path, and Damped Track constraint.

All of this is done in a fun and thorough way with a downloadable stylized bow blend file to practice on.

​"The Boy and the Octopus" - VFX Breakdown​

​This cute Disney holiday short film about a boy and an octopus mixes real video with 3D animation very nicely.

Untold Studios who did the VFX on this have shared a nice breakdown video that gives great insight on how these kinds of effects are achieved by professionals.

Rigging, animation, motion tracking, and compositing - you’ll find traces of this all across this production. It’s not a tutorial, but it can give you a good understanding of how much VFX tricks are used to create such projects.
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That’s all from me today, have a great weekend, and till next time.

~Zach