[Update] Sweaty Summertime Shrinking – Working through Intro and other bits and pieces.

So, I've worked through all of the intro shots and the first shot of the foot teasing section that follows, though I still have a couple of small animation changes in mind for them before I move on to the next set:

• Having three bottles get picked out of the cooler instead of one in the first shot (S1), for better continuity with the shot that comes after.

• Extending the end of the shot (S6) where Lug puts his foot down on Hugo's lap, with Hugo blushing while staring at it (I need to figure out how I want to handle blushing stylistically though).

As per usual, I'll be leaving scene-building for later on into things, I'm still going back and forth between whether to go with a beach setting or somewhere out in the desert.

Switching over to EEVEE:

One big change is that I’ve shifted from using Cycles to using EEVEE for rendering. Keeping it simple, EEVEE is Blender's real-time renderer which prioritises speed of rendering over physical accuracy when it comes to lighting and shaders.

All the wip screenshots in this update have been rendered with EEVEE.

It comes with it’s own limitations of course, but I’m not particularly interested in pursuing photorealism so most of them aren't deal-breakers for me. Plus, having gotten deeper into compositing allows me more leeway to work around EEVEE's limitations and incorporate stuff rendered in Cycles (or outside of Blender) into the final renders as well.

I've kept the lighting setup for this one rather simple, but figuring out more lighting and material shader stuff (and in turn figuring out the kind of style I want to pursue more generally in 3D) is something I'll be continually working on.

Adding condensation and sweat droplets:

I've also been working on some fx-stuff too, spending some time adding in and animating droplets of moisture/sweat using the Geodroplets Plus addon:

I would usually leave stuff like this for later, but since several shots are framed around these droplets it felt like a good idea to get to this early on.

For scenes where they're not the focus of the shot they're procedurally animated, while for shots like this close up of Lug's foot I've opted to hand animate them. This addon lets you animate them along a curve so that's not much of a headache to do:

On the whole this animation is going to be rather light on effects (at least when compared to my usual destructive rampaging macro ones), but there are going to be a few bits and pieces of it throughout. For these shots at least, I'm planning on adding in some water vapour in the cooler as well as adding condensation on the bottles in the rest of the shots.

What's up next:

As mentioned, I've got those changes I want to make to this current batch, then I'll be moving on to animating another chunk of shots. There's still quite a lot to do (purple shots are what I've worked on so far, compared to the rest) so I'll continue to chip away at it bit by bit: