Road to Redemption – animation

If you’re from USA, Australia or New Zealand, please watch it on vimeo, as the YT has blocked the video in these countries.

Can you tell me a bit about yourself? For how long have you been using Blender?

Hello! My name is Patryk Rafa, I live in Poland and I’m 22 years old. I’ve been using blender for about 4 and half year.

Why did you create this video, and how long did it take you to complete?

The idea for the whole animation came to my mind after watching Kakashi vs Obito fight. Theme of duel in melancholic mood appealed to me so much that I had to do something like that by myself. Whole project took me more than initially assumed. I wanted to finish everything in 4 months but at the very end, I closed the project in 6 months.

How did you animate the characters?

As I wanted to make this fight “anime-like” I decided to animate characters mainly on 2’s with a mix on 1’s and 3’s. I knew that characters animated in this way in 3D very often looks like they are just lacking fps instead of make impression of intended effect, but I still gave it a go. To decrease impression of that “low fps”, I’ve animated all particles, sfx and accessories on 1’s. It didn’t fix the problem completely but I think that it helped a bit.

As to the pipeline of locking frames on 2’s, in 85% cases I animated everything on 1’s then baked the animation, locked frames on 2’s and made tweaks on single frames. Sometimes on short scenes I animated moves frame by frame.

What was the biggest obstacle to create the video?

I think creation of the fight choreography was the hardest task. Looking for inspiration, I’ve literally watched all of anime fight scenes which included sword/spear fighting. Beside that, every other thing was equally hard ;)