27 : Attack on Tagilla

Scene setup

The scene setup is pretty basic : two characters and their equipment. They are lit from above by a single area light. An additional area light is lighting Tagilla’s hammer to make it stand out a little more.

Animation

Tagilla was difficult to animate, as I has to make sure the position if his arms made sense on every frame.

As for the USEC, I animated his root on the Y-axis for his horizontal movement, and his torso for the vertical movement. The hardest part was to get the limbs right : I had no reference footage of someone being sent two meters in the air after behing hit with a hammer, so I imagined that the limbs would fall under their own weight and be “left behind” by the rest of the body.

Compositing

The original scene shows a soldier doing a sick backflip with a weird effect that shows multiple frames of the animation at the same time, with a sort of bright “ghost” effect.

To replicate this effect, I used a Group output node to render two sets of images from two view layers :

• base : a view layer with both characters and no effects.
• bloom : another view layer with only the USEC character, and a bloom effect.

Important

Both renders are on a black background with no transparency. This is due to how the scene will be edited, as well as the difficulty to render a bloom effect on a transparent background in Blender.

To learn more about bloom and transparency, refer to Michael Bridges’ and Game Abuse Studios’ videos.

The renders are then edited with the following setup (this example is in DaVinci Resolve, but it could be done with any other editing software).

• The base render is placed as a video on the bottom layer.
• Then, the bloom frames are placed on top in additive mode : the non-black areas of the bloom frames will make the base layer brighter, which not only creates this “ghost effect”, but also allows to cumulate the effect from all the bloom frames at the same time.
• Each bloom frame is static, has a 2-frame fade-in and a 2-second fade-out. Their maximal brightness is synced with the base frame that displays the same pose, so that the brightest part of the image is always the moving character.

This was a bit tedious to implement due to the number of bloom frames involved. I chose 1 out of 6 frames, but it would have been faster with an even lower number.