[Jan] Infinite Crawl Animation

My unedited first render

It's always great to spend time learning new tools and tricks. To make the above animation I followed the Entagma Louis Brodnig guest Blender tutorial (Part 1 | Part 2) to make my very own alien worm generating file.

The one crucial thing the tutorial video was missing was how to get the bezier curve vector modifications (scale) to affect the worm itself, and part two didn't have the keys that Louis was hitting displayed as a reference this time around, but I'd say this tutorial is extremely onboarding-friendly, especially if you're already familiar with node-based workflows such as Houdini's.

Viewport Screenshot from earlier in the process. I spent a lot of time defining the composition.

Another thing I ran into was that - because the worm piece(s) were made from voxel fields, there was some visible stepping in my final geometry, which required messing around with the smoothing and remesh modifiers to get the best result. Aside, I am interested as to why there's a certain point where face inversions occur when increasing the intensity of smoothing parameters.

The render time was most influenced by the animated glow effect on the worms. Without it my test renders reduced from minutes to seconds! But I love the pulsating glow effect and wouldn't dare leave my glow worms lacking.

First checkpoint render test result. Cancelled at this point to optimize.

For the current render, I left the samples at default, and used this video to find the optimization settings that worked for me. In the end I reduced some bounce light and oversampling as I wasn't looking to cull any scene geometry. As an effect, I added some camera focus and without creating any worm instances the about-10-worm 1080p scene render left my computer occupied for around exactly 24 hours. There's a ton of noise in the up-front shadows, but my theory is that since the noise is happening in a spot specifically intended to be out-of-focus that I may be able to blur it out without having to re-render everything with higher quality parameters and leave my computer untouched for a week. Additionally, the version being shared here is a shrunken, 480p gif where the noise is clearly not as prominent. We'll see how this changes if I choose to include the footage in a reel.

Regarding the shader - I've experimented lightly with Blender shaders previously, but it has been a while. Though the Blender shader node building system feels familiar and friendly, I was a little disappointed by the out-of-the-box noise option selection. At convenience, the two options available were perlin and voronoi, and though a lot can be done with them, my love for Redshift and it's more extensive noise selection never waivers.

I looked into adding some bump noise, but the significant impact of displacement on the already heavy render time made me back off of that for my worms. For my version of the final worm shader I emphasized adding sheen for that squishy, velvety-soft caterpillar vibe.

Overall, I grew more comfortable with Blender through following this tutorial and do recommend it. It took a short amount of time to complete what I intended to and the tutorial definitely paid out more in terms of growth than the time investment that was put in.