Sunsets (& How I am slowly) Discovering the Style
Added 2025-10-17 23:42:51 +0000 UTCI knew this would be the hardest part of my new piece, titled Sunsets.
When I started on this test, I wanted it to feel completely different than my other pieces. But after almost 2 weeks of work, I wanted to share the progress and how I got to this point.
My first step was
Putting together a Pinterest board of visual references that inspired me.
These could be related or unrelated images, from media, paintings, other existing animations. Anything that (when combined together) would create your vision for the style.
After that
I created a simply lit 3D render in Blender––my second image.
My objective wasn't hyperrealism or trying to recreate the Pinterest reference board, but instead having a realistic lighting setup for the environment and tone.
The animation isn't complete yet so I'm working on creating a functioning single image before having this work while moving.
From here I started learning and watching videos on Blender's Compositing Editor.
Normally I would use After Effects to composite, but I think being able to share this workflow in a free software like Blender would be easier to understand if I ever made tutorials on some of the techniques that I used.
There is a lot going on node-wise and probably more simple ways to get the same effect, but it's really just iterating on iterations, reworking and trying again, to carve out a result that I like.
Very soon I will have to deal with how this works in movement, since there are some projected images that follow the camera and not the character. But, that's a problem for future-Alexander.
I'll continue to share as I go, and let me know if you'd want to see tutorials on the things that I learned while creating this result!
