Eternal Ascent - 3rd place Full Creation Breakdown

hey guys Mitch Mitch here the king is dead long live the king is the title of my latest CGI art piece I a firm believer in promoting knowledge sharing and PE learning to ignite our Collective creativity and expression so I am thrilled to unveil to you guys my entire creative process from start to finish now I want preface that this is going to be a long video intended to be more of a conversation between you you and I however for those of you who are only interested in specific sections of the b

reakdown I've got you covered with a chapters overview and timestamps I do encourage you nevertheless to watch the full video to understand the context of my artistic choices so over the course of February Clinton Jones challenged thousands of 3D artists to express their unique interpretation of that very simple template the rules are simple create a 5 Seconds animated scene keeping the idea and the shape of the staircase and a main character climbing up those stairs with the provided animation

before we dive in I have to say how astonished I am with the overall quality of submissions seriously if you have not watched the top 100 Montage yet do yourself a favor go watch it now and only then resume this video but with everyone's work being so beautifully crafted and creative I could not believe it when I was awarded the third place out of 2800 talented artists from all around the world so with regard to to do thousands of hours of learning trying working failing persisting perfecting my

craft over the years this result feels extremely rewarding to me I really want to reassure aspiring artists who look up to the top 100 submissions and may feel intimidated or discr believe me I have been in your shoes wondering if I could even dream to reach a level within a couple lifetimes it actually took me five participations to cleans challenges to reach that Rank and I did not even get into top 100 once until my third submission I can assure you that there is no secret ingredient apart f

rom work work and work if you're passionate about the art you create I know that you will get there one day it's only a matter of time so I always start my creations with the message the idea now this is a very personal opinion you may not agree with me but I think that the visuals should only be at the service of the idea the purpose of the visual language is to convey the substance it's a bit like a nice speech filled with fancy words and long winded sentences and obscure references if you don

't have anything interesting to say well your nice speech is just an empty shell yeah I really value what other artists have to share um terms of perspective emotions experiences what they're generous enough to share with the world but the concept or the idea behind a render does not necessarily need to be prec precisely worded out in my case it was more of an emotional state state of mind more than an explicit action it's the calmness in the midst of battle it's the rest within the rage it's th

e brief moment suspended in time in which reverence and Universal respect emerges from chaos it's when the racket gives way to silence when heads turn and when breath are held in that short instant in time when clocks stop ticking and beauty and elegance Trump Despair and anguish now with that General Concept in mind we have to find the words of the language the visual elements to convey it as genuinely as possible what stried me at first uh when looking at the template is the sense of motion th

at's suggested by the Twisted shape of the Circ case which is Vanishing into the diagonal and with the challenge name being Eternal as sense it only felt natural to play with that idea on multiple levels obviously the C element is bringing a sense of direction to the Ascension but then we have the characters that are bringing a sense of motion um a decisiveness an urge for elevation if you want and we can add a third layer on top which would be a slow crawling wav likee movement Rippling upwards

in the wake of the main character now this will be important for guiding the eye where it needs to go and for pacing and slowing down the entire shot and so the general Rhythm of the render with the r kneeling in the wake of a majestic character uh came quite early on in the creative process now at this point I like to start asking questions to the template and uh I'm doing that by playing with some very rough blockouts inside of blender I try to make sense of the visual language which I'm goin

g to use and to me a funeral procession carries just the right elements the right amount of gravity now I will always always recommend you to check out what other artists before you have expressed on similar topics not just in Visual Arts but you know any medium any art style in film the movie The Seven seal has a notorious procession scene with a very interesting dynamic between the procession and the crowd in traditional Bhutan culture chol ceremonial processions are very vibrant and striking

perhaps even a little bit too much for what we're trying to achieve here of course you just can't ignore traditional painting there are so many pieces that have explored relevant topics first we got depictions of large processions on crowds or Gatherings with a sense of directionality um there's the procession of the league by fra bunel which is flourishing with life and energy with great attention to detail to each and every characters and you got the procession to Calvary by bugal the Elder wh

ich conveys the recurring theme in historical painting of both the carrying of the Cross by the Christ and his subsequent lamentation which is sort of the two faces of the same coin and and then you got the wedding procession by bugal doer uh with a sense of eality in the emotions so here is the joy of a wedding but it's in the middle of an immutable landscape that encompasses the characters then we have depictions of slower scenes with more gravity and more truth and honesty in the way they dep

ict human emotions like a boreal at or no by Krist cor which takes a traditionally grandio subject in history painting and paints it in a new found sense of real ISM and linearity in the face of death were all equally insignificant and the raw human emotion is represented as truthfully as possible then you got some more traditional paintings of mourning and reactions to death mostly centered around the figure of the Christ the madona of carel and The Souls of the patry by Toro got the desense fr

om the cross byas uh lamentation by joto de bondon and the inment of Christ by kavaj and finally if you got paintings aiming more at the intimacy of death and the carnal attachment you've got laa by mikelangelo stunning sculture you've got the burial of Atela by jod The Death of Marat by Ja David I've also been greatly inspired by the naturalism of Thomas Cole and specifically his rendering of nature the abundancy of life and how insignificant and shortlived human footprint is that's very strong

ly suggested in his five painting series that's named uh the course of the Empire which uh depicts the rise and the fall of an Empire outside of the visual arts uh music has also played its part I think there's two pieces of music that greatly inspired me during the project first one is the Rak manov symphonic poem that's titled the aisle of the Dead which I really recommend you go listen to right now if you haven't and then there's a track from the movie Gladiator which is called the wheat writ

ten by H Zimmer and performed by liisa I also want to briefly mention the cultural inspiration for the sets the costumes the props I wanted the designs to speak to the viewer not being too FR in some sense while still adding a little touch of exotism and Novelty so uh my Inspirations were mostly from ancient Egypt Assyria Mesopotamia ancient Greece uh but also a bit of Far Eastern cultures and Pagan [Music] Traditions I want to tackle the queen and hair characters first in the project templates

we were provided a mo cap climbing animation and we want to swap this placeholder with a custom character so I first created this lady using [ __ ] genen and made the Armature using met rig now the next step is to transfer the provided animation to my custom rig which is known as retargeting now what I did is slightly different from traditional retargeting I used bone constraints to match the animation on very specific key Parts um mostly the feet and the hips and thanks to Universe kinematics t

he rest of the body parts will naturally find their place during the animation I've then added some secondary motion to the animation U mostly the heels lifting up before taking each step or some subtle Sway in the shoulders the arms and of course some head rotation now I made the baby using M human and I gave it a similar Armature from meta rig but since the baby is supposed to be dead and therefore inert and floppy his legs and arms are supposed to bounce around and the easiest way to do this

is by using the bone Dynamics plugin which automatically adds those motions using blender simulations now let's talk about the dress based on the cultural references which I mentioned earlier I started by gathering some interesting pieces of clothes especially from ancient Egypt I love the usek necklaces as well as the NES but most importantly I greatly admire the work of Trisha bigar who was the lead costume designer for Star Wars and particularly she made the numerous costumes W by Pamida and

there are such interesting shapes and colors and textures to take inspiration from and I went ahead and started drawing some sketches and paper um was looking for the right shapes and volumes I gave her a meter to suggestor status but I didn't want it to look too stereotypically religious so I tried softening the shapes and looked for more natural angles from there I used Marvel's designer to make the Jo itself now the key when making digital clothing is to always stick to what works in real lif

e I found this awesome blog called rosal's medieval woman which I'll link in the description that explains how to sue medieval dresses it's all shown in a very practical Manner and it's easy to follow I did my best to make something believable in Marvelous Designer with multiple layers and some interesting details the simulation itself is not particularly complex one key element is to add VY in the fabric materials based on their function and purpose the inner layers of the dress are more elasti

c and flexible because they need to stick to the skin and be comfortable to wear so silk is a good candidate here but on the other hand the outer layers of the dress are more protective so they would be thicker and stiffer like wool now I have a couple tips for simulating clothes in Marvelous Designer first you can use the layer system when suing the garments together to ensure that each piece of clothes remains where it should be however that setting must absolutely be turned off when simulatin

g otherwise you will get artifacts and bad results second make sure you use the right time step during the simulation this number represents the amount of real time that passes frame after frame by default it has a value of 0.033 33 which is 1 over 30 or 30 FPS if we simulate an export like that Marvel designer will assume that our original animation was also in 30 FPS but since our project is actually in 24 FPS even though the speed of the animation will be completely fine the gravity bouncines

s and the physics of the CLA will look odd because they would be slightly accelerated in fact 30 over 24 = 1.25 so we know that they will react to physics 25% too fast so we must change the is setting to 1 over 24 and that equals to 0.041 667 next if you want your simulation to be more realistic you need to turn on nonlinear simulation and turn off GPU simulation if you have weird collisions or cloth garments sticking to each other I found that the only relevant parameters is the number of simul

ations I've made a mistake in the past of increasing the self Collision interation count and honestly anything above one or two will actually decrease the quality of your simulations finally you can also set your CG finish condition to residual and decrease its value to something super small think of this number as the margin of error accepted by the simulation when vertex have trouble finding their ideal position for example when two vertic Collide and should be repelled by each other a smaller

value will force the simulation to take more time to find the ideal outcome to create the material of the dress I use this interesting fabric pattern I found on the smithonian Open Access Library which by the way is an absolute Gold Mine of a reference library I tell it in Photoshop using the content aware fill and then I created texture Maps using substance designer I then painted the entire dress texture Maps inside of substance painter using the pattern maps on generated and trying to give a

n interesting combination of gold and dark green colors in blender the Shader itself for the dress is very simple it's a simple bsdf Shader that uses the Bas map from substance with a bit of Sheen for the Velvet aspect of the cloth and I have to admit I did spend way too long on some details that are not even visible in the file render such as these embroidered writings on the dress best but uh hey at least it was a good [Music] fun now the issue with my initial concept is that it calls for a la

rge amount of people in the crowd if the crowd is too sparts it just doesn't work now it might block out uh I ended up being satisfied with a crowd of 66 people which is absolutely insane and way too over ambitious but uh I guess I'm a bit stubborn so I went with it anyways the most essential thing when dealing with large amount of heavy assets is to keep things optimized as early on as possible in that case each character is comprised of multiple similar elements a skeleton a body mesh costume

we want to use instances for things that are shared among multiple assets this ensures that uh we only load those assets once in memory instead of 66 times here's one concrete example even though all the characters have a different skin color they're all actually using the same Shader that means 66 times less memory now the trick is it's really simple uh we're just adding random variations with within the Shader uh driven by the object data now let's focus a bit on their animation hand animating

is difficult but it's definitely achievable if you simplify the process and you take it one step at a time first off you need to get out of your chair and act it out yourself perform the animation slowly multiple times try to get a feel for the gravity and balance stop at multiple moments during the movement and ask yourself if I unclench my muscles right now do I fall down and if yes am I falling down backwards on the side downwards that g gives you a good indication on where the balance is at

all stages of the movement a simple rule of thumb for balance is that you are balanced when your center of gravity lays within the area of your joints resting on the ground when standing upright my center of gravity falls between my feet I'm balanced and I lose this balance the second my center of gravity goes beyond that area performing the movement also helps you decompose a complex action into smaller parts so when I kneel down I need both feet to be spread apart in a ver vertical line to al

low the legs to bend when I lower myself and from a standing position I can get there either with a front step of my dominant leg or a back step of my non-dominant leg also notice how your pelvis moves while you are doing that front step when I raise my leg and move it further I Am shifting my center of gravity forwards the center of gravity is not aligned with my ankle anymore and that unbalances me and makes my pelvis fall forward until my front leg contacts the ground and absorbs the pelvis m

ovement that will help you time correctly the movement of the pelvis compared to the foot and then as I lower myself I can either squat directly down which will make me use my glutes and hamstring and which isn't the natural way to kneel or I can lower myself a bit more towards the front which is almost effortless but that just my center of gravity even further in front so now I need to use my arms against my dominant leg to absorb that additional movement of the chest and keep my balance when m

y knee is about to contact the ground I am going to drastically expand the balance area which becomes a triangle formed by my foot my knee and my other foot that means that I can now move my chest backwards to its resting position all in all that kneeling movement can be summarized as the shape of the letter Z of course with 66 different characters you're going to have to add some variety into that um people don't kneel the same not at the same speed not with the same energy some have weaker leg

s and stronger arms or the opposite some are kneeling on Stone and that will be uncomfortable for the knees and so on and so forth when it comes to actually animating start by focusing on the key joints to make up the majority of the movement that will be the pelvis and the feet only when the global movement is blocked out and the balance is correct you can add the secondary animations like the head turning also think of the position of the characters in the crowd are they watching the queen cli

mbing up before kneeling or maybe they're more in the back and they struggle to see her so they're looking more at the people around them and they react a bit later now we still want that crawling movement uh of people kneeling one after each other to produce that visual wave movement upwards the stairs so we also have to Time Each character's movements to achieve that now let's talk about the clothings it's all made in Marvel's designer as well I wasn't sure if I wanted the crowd to be mostly l

oyalty and Nobles and Priests or a mix of peasants and middle class people but anyway the main takeaways from my little research on Ancient clothing is that most garments are very simple in their conception ancient Egyptian robes are nothing more than a rectangular garment which is rubed in a way that gives it an interesting shape the Ness which also looks complex and intimidating when woring on the head is not much more than a rectangular garment that's been cut in curved angles using those sim

ple principles I made a few variations of clothing which by combining together and changing a little bit each time helped getting 66 unique costumes rather quickly now in terms of shading um the clothes all Shar similar shaders there's a lot of Randomness which is involved in the Shader to break up the patterns and make each one quite different I'm using multiple noise nodes so in multiply mode to break up the regularity of the albo channel as well as the Sheen and specular values I started by b

uilding a height map using GA now the strength of this software is that it allows you to quickly generate a realistic terrain based on erosion effects on the ground in blender to have the most control over the Mon's geometry in my scene I used the geometry node setup so I'm basically starting from a plane but because a plane is centered on zero and Dimensions go from Min -.5 to +5 and the texture coordinates of the height map is in 0 to 1 we start by moving the plane like so then we subdivide it

and we displace each vertex based on the corresponding height map value and the geometry node setup allows us to quickly adjust the height and the various parameters that we want it also allows me to easily extract portions of the background to selectively add more geometry where we need need to we also want to add an atmosphere to give more realism and depth to the background so in a large mesh volume I started with two different gradients which represent the density of the atmosphere both in

altitude and in the distance and I've combined them both to drive the density of a volume scalar Shader and a volume absorption Shader I've also used a plane with a MZ texture driving the alpha channel to uh cast some interesting Cloud Shadows on the background now let's talk about the set for a minute in my early blockout I played with different dispositions of stone blocks on both side of the staircase where the crowd was stand I've also played with the idea of verticality by introducing colum

ns at various intervals and I wasn't sure at that point if the scene was going to take place outside or inside a building but I think I liked the ambiguity of it I tried to rrange the stones in an irregular fashion the intention here is that this Temple or whatever the surway leads to is is not necessarily actively used more like an ancient Temple that's only used for very special occasions now the stone aspect that spoke to me the most in that manner is rocks of this style those old worn out gr

anite or Sandstone blocks laid out in the weather by time and nature now once I was satisfied with the overall placement of the stones I started sculpting some details on them using texture Maps I've prepared from Google images and I've Tred my best to add both large and smaller details to make it as realistic as possible for the plants I used the free plugin from grass World which is called G scatter which allowed me to very quickly spread vegetation in all the crevices and cracks of the stairs

and then I've added some IV all over the place using the IV generator from Baga which relies on Geometry nodes to uh allow for fast iteration and placement in the scene modeling The Columns themselves was not too difficult using reference images and I did not get too fancy with them I've just used some basic green columns designs I think that this helps bring it such of familiarity in the overall artistic direction for the stone block material themselves I once again did my best to break the re

petition of textures by introducing some Randomness in the tiling thanks to uh objec info nodes also some additional noise uh mixed together with various blend modes for the lighting I started by searching for a good th angle the idea is to push the contrast and find a nice Sun angle would produce some beautiful highlights and Silhouettes we want the scene to be as readable as possible in its most basic shapes if the scene is too noisy even have that simplified stage it's definitely going to be

difficult to read later on in the late afternoon when the sun gets lower on the horizon the light rays need to go through a thicker part of the atmosphere which is increasing the scattering now the effect is two fold one it changes the sunlight color and two it also creates some softer Shadows so what I did is that I doubled the Sun the first sun is a sharper version with a core temperature closer to warm afternoon daylight at around 4200 Kelvin and the second one is a little dimmer with a much

warmer color temperature of around 3,400 Kelvin and a much larger angular diameter producing some very diffus shadows and when both Suns superpose we still have the energetic highlights from the main Sun but with an additional Warm Glow around the shadow fringes which is helping to shape the Ethereal almost dreamlike look of the scene but we need to talk about lighting intention early on in a creative process I wanted to shape my late and shadowy areas to help convey the story by building cards

to block the sunlight in certain places my goal was to focus most of the sunlight onto the queen and hair while keeping most of the rest in the shadows it helped to frame the shot and to direct the eyes to the main elements but it's also giving a sub indication of how the characters are feeling in the scene the queen steps Out of The Shadow into the light but we eventually step back into some more Shadows the idea here is that the hair being dead is a very ominous event for the people in the sce

ne that has Dreadful consequences in their world however this ceremonial procession is a form of Hope the queen carries the dead infant to the top of the temple where a priestess might try to resuscitate him however at that point in the story The Future remains uncertain and all remains to be done hence the additional Shadow is further up the stairs by this point I'm satisfied with the overall lighting but the surroundings are still stealing too much attention from the main elements so I'm addin

g additional rim lights to the main characters using light linking to ensure that only them are affected by those lights this helps to reinforce the Silhouettes and detach the main characters from the set and the background but these lights need to remain subtle because we don't want the viewer to be aware of that trick the angle doesn't match the Sun and it's risking to pull the viewer out of his suspension of [Music] disbelief over the months the scene has become way too heavy to be run all at

once and I have a pretty beefy computer so we do have an optimization issue and sure I could probably optimize the scene and get to the point where I can render everything all at once but what I'm saying is it's only a 5 Seconds animation and I'm probably not going to come back to it after the challenge is over if you're going to spend longer optimizing your scam then what you will gain with a slightly faster render it's probably not worth the hassle so I have separated my Rand layers like so I

have one for the background one for the midr which is the hill that is closest to the foreground I have one for the set with the main characters and I have four different scenes for the crowd alone one problem with working like that is that it limits the amount of changes that you can bring in your scene if if you tweak say the sun angle then you will need to change it in every other blender file and one way to overcome this is to work with linked collections you can tell blender to use collect

ion from another file which means that any change that you bring to it will be applied to other relevant blender files I personally did my splitting as late as I could in Project after all the big changes were baked in basically so I did not need to do that but I still need to optimize my scenes a little bit one of the easiest fixs is to delete all the nonvisible geometry that includes the geometry that's below the stairs or outside of the camera frame be careful however not to delete the geomet

ry that's casting Shadows into the seene now sometimes when rendering almic with Cycles which is the case with those clothes imported from Marvel's designer you will get the occasional jumpy vertex bug or transparent meshes where you can see the character's skin below the clawes now the first issue can usually be solved by turning off photo smoo which by the way should always be turned off um it just breaks everything that has motion blur applied to it and the second one took me a while to figur

e out but basically when we animate our characters in blender we usually use the bezier interpolation on our key frames to smooth out the animations but the close simulation that's baked into the almic file assumes a linear interpolation between the key frames so the result is that when rendering with motion blur within a small fraction of a single frame the skin geometry will still follow that baser interpolation and end up temporarily above the claws for a fraction of a second second which is

producing that weird result there's probably a much better way to fix this but what I did is simply bake my character animations and force their key frames to be linear now let's talk about rendering settings for a minute I'm using cycle to render on GPU I commonly see people asking what sample count is required to achieve a certain render quality that's the wrong approach by default Cycles is configured to use a noise thresold which is the amount of noise that you will tolerate in the fontal re

nder the max sample count is just the absolute maximum amount that Cycles will throw at your render in case it does not reach the noise threshold Now by default that threshold is set to 1% I think it's a good value that provides almost no visible noise but to increase your render speed you can crank it up to something like 2% or 5% 10% is probably where you will start to have a little bit of noise visible in the more difficult areas with the noising that will get you some visible mushiness and a

rtifacts now in the the advanced tab I make sure to turn on the animated seed for the noise pattern this ensures that each frame has a slightly different sampling pattern and it reduces the the noising effects that are caused by that over time frame by frame in the Light Pass tab you want to keep your bounces down to a reasonable level for diffus and glossy you will hardly see any differences if you go above three or four no need to go any higher than that transmission and transparence however t

hat will be very specific to your scene personally I need to have them set up a bit higher down in the performance tab the persistent data check box will ensure that some of the static data that is used in render remains in memory frame after frame which really speeds up the buildup at the start of each frame now let's turn to the output settings I render all of my layers in 4k except for the main layer which is the one with the set and the characters I've rendered that one in a bit more than 4K

and shrunk it down in post that helps a lot with uh keeping a very sharp image and alternative to that is to decrease the pixel filter width in the film tab then I'm exporting my passes in a multi-layer exr with 32 bits of data first off it's actually lighter than PNG even though the PNG stores less data and the increased bid depths allows a huge amount of nondestructive Boss processing after I didn't want to make the compositing too complex so what I did is I created one Beauty layer and then

for the ease of Mind of just being able to turn up or down specific lights in case I need to one additional layer for each relevant light groups and and then the masks that I will need for compositing thanks to Crypt mats the scene color management is set to default which should be using agx in the latest blender versions now note that turning it to false colors can be quite useful to check the overall exposure in your scene all right we tackled rendering let's move on to post [Music] processing

apart from just assembling the my layer stack into the fontal image in After Effects there's a bit of adjustments and small additions going on over over here first off the background likes atmosphere and depths I've added some clouds with a quite simple method so I have a folder full of cloud pictures I took which I can then turn into masks in After Effects now I know a lot of people simply use their texture in overlay mode the issue with that is that you don't have any control over the color o

f your texture so here's an alternative the color comes from an additional layer uh which can be a solid color or grading color anything you like and then you use your texture as an alpha mask for this layer now this will require you to use the channel shift effect to link the opacity of the image to its luminosity and if you want to mask out parts of that new image you will need to precompose both into a new composition and do your masking on that composition now at that point I'm seeing some b

ugs and issues with some of the render layers so I'm jumping back and forth between After Effects and blender and rendering very small ARS for quick and easy fixes I've also added a few glowy layers here and there to add some separation between the foregrounded back around I've also made the essentials of color correction here in After Effects my goal here was to achieve the naturalist look that I mentioned earlier from thas CO's paintings but with a bit more emphasis on the foreground and the c

haracters rather than on the vegetation so I kind of had to mute some colors and play with my levels to get there and then I moved into DAV resolve to finish off my grading and polish my render now most of my edits happen in the color tab now I'm kicking things off with a slight adjustments on my levels and the overall saturation but then to break the digital aspect of the render and get closer to an analog film look I add a little bit of blur and then some overglow on the image then a very Sol

vignette and then some local adjustments on color especially on the greens now I do have to mention that I am color blind so if you do not like my grading and then I've added some subtle lens reflection a bit of lens Distortion a tasteful amount of chromatic aberration and finally some film grein and that makes your rendered animation [Music] complete participating in this challenge has been exhilarating it pushed me beyond what I already knew and made me experiment with new tools and workflows

and overall I'm just so happy to be part of that Community experience where each artist is a unique brick in this huge Monument I just so honored to be part of the top 100 and baffled by the overall quality and the diversity in Styles and approaches and backgrounds to my fellow artists I want to encourage you to uh keep that Curiosity leading you in your quest for expression open-mindedness is our strongest quality so do keep exploring except to let go of social media trends and tropes don't kee

p yourself logged in full digital art history of art spans way back and is part of what makes us humans unique and nature and you are part of that mankind has crafted art in so many diverse ways and I really do think that in the end what matters most is the message not the language so a message of encouragement for every artist don't fet too much about what softwares you should be using don't worry about what people think of your art don't stress too much about what industry standards and textbo

ok methods dictate you to do just focus on what's essential for you learn to love the creative process you are unique you're awesome and you matter and you have the power to share your unique point of view of the world your emotional perspective of your surroundings now with that I wish you all the best take [Music] care [Music]