Anatomy of a Shot: Marching Army

In this series I dive into the most important aspects of making a shot such as the one you see in the cover art.

Software used in this 4,5-hour course: Blender (Lessons 1-4), Character Creator (lesson 5), iClone (lesson 6), After Effects (lesson 7)

In lesson 1 you will learn how to approach making a quick environment in Blender using simple assets and images. It will show you that not all environments need to be full of meticulous detail to look good.

Lesson 2 shows you how to get a free character from Blendswap, rig it an animate it in Mixamo and then get it to Blender. Once there, you will learn how to adjust animation to your needs and also how to append various pieces of armor, weapons and even how to skin simple clothing to it.

Lesson 3 is all about transforming the 3D animated character from lesson 2 into 2D particles, to easier build a large-scale crowd made out of 2D planes.

Lesson 4 goes into detail on how to actually create a marching army in Blender, combining 3D characters and 2D particles.

Lesson 5 introduces you to Character Creator, where we'll generate a mesh for our main hero in the foreground. You'll learn about the software, start using morphs, hair, Skingen texturing, add clothing and finally, export the model to iClone for animation.

In Lesson 6 you'll learn how to work with animation clips in iClone, re-purpose them for your needs and then export everything out to Blender, where we'll continue to adjust our animated character and append some gear onto it.

Lesson 7 focuses on rendering out the scene from Blender and compositing the result in After Effects.

Bonus lesson: Fast Volumetrics - You'll learn how to combine Blender Cycles render passes with Eevee volumetric passes together into one composition.

In the Project Files you'll get:

• my textures that I used for the environment
• the soldier we create in lesson 2
• animated 2D soldiers for the particle army
• volumetric dust preset