HONK® Deluxe
Earlier this week I started modeling a megaphone for fun, just to see how it would turn out. I had made a similar megaphone many years ago when I was 3D printing little toys, but I wanted to make an even nicer one.
The megaphone was turning out pretty cool and I thought it would be fun to animate it floating or doing something. I added the HONK® branding and thought maybe it should be an extremely loud goose honk?
Well that sent me on another rabbit hole trying to sound design a very large sounding honk to put in here. This is probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever made but I had a lot of fun making it.
GLOBO
A couple of weeks ago I threw a party that was themed around this fictional company I’ve been doodling for years. The party was a “shareholder summit” where everyone was employee.
The idea for this animated thing was to create something GLOBO branded play on my TV during the party. In the end I was so busy I completely forgot to turn it on 🙃
One of my favorite music videos of all time is the DVNO video from Justice. Everything in this video is incredible and I wanted to try making something similar.
The actual blender file is pretty basic – but I am pretty happy I figured out how to do the huge X glares on everything. All of the fun pixelation and VHS noise was all done in After Effects.
Peppo’s
I’ve been slowly working on animating a short thing with this Peppo’s delivery driver. I took the Honda Civic I made years ago and started rebuilding it so that I can rig & animate it more effectively.
The fun and weird challenge with this is making a giant, cylindrical city block to animate this on. I still need to go through and finish adding some details + texture everything, but I’m liking how this is turning out so far.
Wacky Bus
Back in June I started working with Tony & Kyle of Mostly Bits on a game for the Playdate. They had the idea to make a little game where you drive a bus that changes shape.
The thing I wanted to figure out was how to actually model and animate all of this in Blender, and then export a bunch of sprites to use on the Playdate. I started by modeling everything and then making materials for the black & white. It also helped that I had already made a lot other vehicles and props to drop in there.
This has worked surprisingly well, and it’s been really fun to see the animated pieces working on a Playdate.
My favorite thing so far has been this character I drew for the “administrator” of the Wacky Transit Authority. He hates Wacky Bus so much.
We’re trying to put together a playable demo right now, so hopefully I’ll have something to share very soon here 🚌💨
Ollie
Airport
The plan was to eventually animate this little luggage truck swerving and dodging stuff in this airport scene. I got pretty far along before hitting some technical snags that slowed everything down.
I do want to eventually figure out how the “correct” way to rig this truck to tilt up on two wheels like this. Seems like it should be possible!
Wasteland
Something I had a lot of fun figuring out on this was how to get those 2D smoke trails to work. I originally planned on using Blender’s Grease Pencil to do this, but it turns out they were limited in how they could behave (this might be changed soon?).
I ended up having to animate the dust separately, in 2D, and then bring in the clip as a plane that was rigged to the back of the car. Here’s what it looked like:
Shoe
Budbot
Budbot was a game that I worked on for a few months at the beginning of 2022. My friend Mark and I were trying to build a soulslike game together. I talk about a lot of the process we went through in my 2022 Recap, so here I just wanted to show some of the details that went into working on this.
I started out the project trying to make a unique character that I could have some fun with animating. Early on the the idea is that Budbot would throw his shield to stun Bossbot. Later we moved toward Budbot using a hammer because that seemed like it would make more sense.
From there I just started going super hard on environmental design & animation. We definitely over-indexed on making the art and animation before figuring out what the core gameplay loop was. Even so, I think some of the art that came out of this is still pretty cool.
Animation
Learning how to do gameplay animation on the fly was definitely the most challenging part of a project like this. There is so much nuance and technical detail involved with making great feeling gameplay animation, and I was 100% out of my depth there.
Power Core
I made this power core to try out using EEVEE in Blender, but it was later incorporated into Budbot.
Frog Run
Garbo
That yogurt cup is actually based on the Siggi’s Mixed Berry yogurt I still eat every day.
