Hey Reader,

Zach here,

with some cool inspirations from the 3D world.

This week we have a great stylized car racing scene by the Blender Studio, an NPR cat animation scene breakdown (with a free rigged cat to download), a beautiful 2D short animation about an old knight, and his horse and an impressive and funny showreel from KoalaOK.

Let’s dive in.

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​Car Animation with NPR Speed Lines​

This new video from Blender Studio shows how versatile and useful Geometry Nodes can be for creating cool-looking VFX and even achieving specific visual looks.

The "Color Void" project was inspired by the traditional graphic design of car racing posters that use a lot of flat shapes and some gradients. Recreating this in 3D seemed like a perfect excuse to use Grease Pencil, but it ended up as a procedural Geometry Nodes project (with a little bit of Grease Pencil too).

The cool thing about those Blender Studio projects is that you can get all the files to play with them, and you can learn a lot of cool tricks for your workflow by watching the breakdown video.

You can also read the blog post for some more in-depth explanations of the process.

​Cute stylized Cat Animation in Blender (Breakdown)​

This lovely Ghibli-styled 3D scene was made in Blender using pretty simple techniques and a lot of patience. Crzyzhaa who created it explains his workflow and shows how he models the assets and shades them to look this specific way. It’s also great to see him sharing his creation process in this video, which involves trial and error.

As a cherry on top, he shares the rigged cute cat model so you can use it for your animations (the download link is in the video description).

​"Old Knight" - Inspiring Hand-drawn Animation ​

George Hordos (a professional animator who worked on titles like: "Flushed Away", "Rise of the Guardians", "How to Train a Dragon" or "Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse") is sharing his solo animated projects on his YouTube channel.

​This short 2D animated movie has a lot of old-time Disney and Dreamworks classic hand-drawn animation style. Making this takes a lot of mastery, time, and effort. (Usually, such films were made by big teams of animators).

George has clearly made some production shortcuts that make this film look a little bit like a cinematic (the motions are not super smooth with in-between frames skipped, and the style is pretty loose and sketchy). This, however, does not take away from the storytelling power and delivers the final cinematic effect just right.

If you’re planning on making an ambitious project like an animated short on your own, there’s a valuable lesson here to learn. Focusing on the big picture and the story you want to tell and cutting corners where it’s possible is the way to go. This way you can deliver the final result and avoid burnout and losing motivation along the way.

​Showreel by KoalaOK - Creativity + Blender Combo!​

Here is a fun showreel from KoalaOK, the artist who created the Ping Pong Boy animation that won 2nd place of the last Pwnisher’s "Kinetic Rush" 3D Challenge.

​The showreel​ is a mix of stunning animations and some interesting visual experiments. All of this in the form of a video for a funny song, which sounds a bit AI generated, but the lyrics are quite entertaining, about never being productive enough (if you feel that impostor syndrome yourself you can relate).​
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That’s all from me today, have a great week and till next time.

~Zach