PROJECT CONCEPT & RATIONALE
Lucid Dreams is a 3D animated story about the dreams of a depressed man. Throughout the story, the audience will be in first person view of different surreal scenarios and immerse themselves into the depressed world.
In this project, I want to visually express the desperate inner-worlds of depressed patients and raise awareness for mental health care and suicide preventions. We all have been affected by emotions in different ways at different times but few people are aware of the negative impacts of serious mental health problems. In the modern age, especially on the Internet, people often misunderstand or even laugh at others for being ‘soft’ or ‘weak’, labelling depression and mental health patients. Some simply do not care and think it is not too big of a deal until it’s too late.
The project aims to communicate the idea of caring for your friends and families with related mental health issues, preventing suicides and self-harm acts.
Presentation method
The audience will be standing in a small, isolated space to simulate the isolated feeling of a depressed patient’s world. They will be able to watch the animation on the screen with headphones. There are some questions at the end of the animation and the audience can freely choose if they want to answer them on papers and put the folded papers into a box. No personal information is required and they can write whatever they want to answer.
TECHNICAL RESEARCH & EXPERIMENTATION
After the last assessment I decided to dive deeper into the Blender 3D world. In Assessment 1, I have created simple scenes such as the dune, the glowing ball above the ocean, and floating block in a dark room. They may look cool but they are missing some details, for example the dune is missing sand texture, it’s only a yellowish landscape. The ocean is simply a thin layer of ‘ocean’ texture without depth, and the dark room only has basic lighting.
Before starting the design project and constructing the final outcome, I want to look into a few aspects of the 3D software so I can produce the final piece in a more professional manner.
Lighting in Blender 3D
Lighting is a big part in Blender. You can build a magnificent scene but without appropriate lighting the scene won’t look good. In the last assessment I have created some abstract scenes yet the lighting can be improved.
Before starting the new project, I checked out these videos made by popular Blender 3D artist Blender Guru (famous for the donut tutorial), Max Hay and Mitko Nikov. These three videos covered different aspects of lighting in Blender, from the basics such as the categories and functions of different lightings, to skills such as adjusting texture value and integrating with volumetric nodes, etc.
From Blender Guru’s video I learnt how to set up studio lighting, which surrounds the ‘point’ and ‘cone’ lighting, the relatively weaker lightings in the software, depending on the lighting value.
He also talked about setting up backdrop and color management, which are some useful knowledge that I can use later on.
Max Hay’s video is my favourite part of lighting - creating natural, cinematic or cyberpunk kind of lightings by using color, emission value and the ‘Sun’.
He also breaks down how to set up the scene and the logic behind the sun lighting.
Mitko Nikov’s video talk specifically Volumetric Lighting, or what we call ‘God Rays’ in photography. God rays, when created in a scene, can add depth and a mysterious vibe.
I really like god rays in photography (they are not that common in real life) so I will be implementing that into my scenes.
These concepts helped me with designing and building my project scenes and creating cinematic lighting.
3D modelling
In the last assessment I have only messed around with default shapes, such as cube or sphere. If I want to do detailed 3D modelling I have to learn more about the keybinds, effects and tools in Blender.
This tutorial by tutor4u have an in-depth explanation of the modelling basics. He introduced some tools and settings, and the mostly used effects for tweaking the model vertices, Extrude, Bevel, and Loop Cut.
tutor4u also talked about modifiers, which can help us model complex structure efficiently. For example, if you want to divide the plane into numerous small squares, we can use the ‘Subdivision’ modifier and set our desired value.
Particle System in Blender 3D
In Blender 3D there is a Physics Modifier category, Blender can calculate and make cloth, fluid, even explosion effects. Among them, Particle System is a popular way to generate randomised items within the terrain plane.
In this tutorial by MK graphics, he showed how to create a realistic grass terrain with the particle system.
MK demonstrated a new technique that is very useful in creating terrain, the feature ‘Proportional Edit’ allows users to move several subdivided surfaces and tweak them into small troughs and valleys, creating an upheaval and realistic landscape. We can also use the heat map to make adjustments and have a clear look of the heights of the surfaces, red mean the most tweaked and highest, while green is relative lower, blue is the part that are not yet edited.
The funny thing is we generate grass on the surface with the 'hair' modifier. We can adjust the thickness of the tip and root to create the desired grass width and look. We can give the grass a realistic look by applying a green gradient texture.
I followed the tutorial and gave the Particle system a go. The settings are complicated and sometimes confusing when you are trying to adjust values like radius, density, thickness to get the desired overall look.
Anyway, below is the final render.
Revisiting the Dune
I have created several versions of the Dune in the last assignment, however it lacks some details and styles in the overall composition and design.
I am planning to do a sand scene in my final project, therefore I decided to revisit the Dune to investigate the professional techniques in creating the landscape, applying realistic texture and setting up lighting.
I generated the plane and cut it into 100 small planes with the subdivision surface modifier, then created the terrain with displacement modifier. I made use of the proportional editing and heat map tweaking in the grass tutorial and adjusted the terrain.
For the sand texture, I followed this tutorial by Magevo Studio. We used some various nodes such as Bump, Noise Texture and Displacement. Voronoi Texture is a crucial node as it helps generating the irregular shapes on the sand. When combined with the noise texture and randomiser, it can creates some abstract texture.
Project Development
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
In this project I want to communicate the emotions of people with mental health issues. Emotions are intangible and abstract themselves and it is hard to explain to others how one feels with words, especially for mental health patients who sometimes are reluctant to talk with others about their problems. Through the surreal landscapes and scenes in ‘Lucid Dreams’, I hope to visually present the emotions that patients go through and educate people about few things.
- Sometimes silence is louder than the scream. They can be going through something even if they are not talking about it.
- Many suicide cases are preventable if we talked and guided them at a suitable time
- Encourage people to care for their families, friends and peers.
The story narrative will be in first person view and immerse the audience into the story. Audience will have a better understanding as if they are going through the emotions and encourage them to reflect.
The Story
In Lucid Dreams, the audience is the friend of a depressed man and goes through his dreams and imagination. An ordinary phone booth in weird scenarios, is a place for the man to talk about his frustration and problems in life. He has no one to talk to, his friends (such as the audience) think he is simply overthinking or sad, and are not treating him seriously.
His only escape from life is this phone booth in the dream, as it is the only thing that ‘listens’ to him. He keeps talking even though there’s no one on the other side of the call.
We can see the man’s struggle. The dark room of glitching clouds represents his trapped thoughts and mind.
The falling in the ocean represents his drowning in reality.
The light at the end of the tunnel represents the hope from far away and the end of everything, going through the light implying the man took his own life.
The sand room represents the man's heart and mind - deserted and isolated. It is only a window away from the beautiful garden but he couldn’t reach it. The calmness and warmth in the air is a great contrast to the man’s letter, with intense thoughts he claims has had enough
The last scene we go back to the phone booth. In contrast to the first booth in the pink clouds, this one sits quietly in the empty dark room.
With the line ‘If I was on the other side of the call, what would I have told him’, I want the audience to reflect and encourage them to care for their friends and families.
MAKING OF THE SCENES
Phone Booth Model
One of the major elements of the story is the phone booth. Although there are many parts and structure details, the phone booth is relatively easy to build as it consists of mostly rectangular or square shapes.
I first created the basic structure of the phone booth and added in some detailed elements. At first I thought it would take a lot of time to make the wireframes but turns out Blender has settings dedicated to creating them. Simply use the ‘Wireframe’ modifier, cut the planes into numerous small boxes and adjust the thickness.
Thanks to the earlier technical research in 3D modelling, I made good use of modelling effects such as Extrude and Bevel. I created the Phone box, the phone itself, and the small table easily.
The phone wire is the hardest to model. From this tutorial, I found out I can model the wire by drawing a path and linking a cylinder with the ‘Curve’ and ‘Array’ modifiers. Curve tells Blender which curve path the cylinder should follow, and the Array modifier simply clones the cylinder to make it look like a tube.
For the texture, I created 3 different metal textures of different hues and roughness for different parts of the booth. I adjusted the ‘Emission’ value of the top light and set it to blue, giving it a cool lighting.
I have also designed textures in Adobe Illustrator dedicated to the phone booth advertisements, the instructions, phone box stickers and monitors. With the ‘Image Texture’ effect, I can put my designs onto the block surfaces and adjust them in the UV editor. The 'AusMobile' advertisment and empty instruction with Lorem Ipsum in the left photo are placeholders at the earlier development stage. Below are the designs used in the final outcome.
Cloud Phone Booth
Now we have our realistic, really cool phone booth, it’s time to design the cloud scene.
The first version of the clouds are very easy to make. We can make clouds in Blender by generating a cube, then adjust with its texture settings in the shader editor. Normally we use Principled BSDF node to adjust texture settings, as seen in the metal texture in the last section. However, for something that is volumetric, we use Principled Volume node instead, it gives us a better control of the object’s density and we can add nodes such as Noise Texture node for better results.
Add all the nodes in, adjust the value of color and density to get the right size, level of details, noise, etc. I duplicated the clouds and set up the scene. Imported the phonebooth and put it into the clouds, and the first version is done.
However I don’t really like the result, I think the clouds are not volumetric enough and can be improved.
This tutorial by Default Cube is very detailed and I learnt another way to generate great 3D clouds.
Unlike the first one, instead of building a cloud, we let Blender do that for us. This time we magically changed the solid cube into a cube of noise, then we let Blender calculate the size of it by using some ‘Math Nodes’ like ‘Multiply’, ‘Add’ and ‘Less than’ (Really complicated). Add in ‘Noise texture’ and ‘Linear Light’ nodes and we can generate the clouds by calculating noise textures. Clouds generated this way are more realistic and look more volumetric.
Some of the cool nodes are ‘Texture Coordinate’ and ‘Object Info’, these two nodes allow Blender to calculate a new, completely random form of the clouds by tweaking any value in the math nodes. This really came in handy when I model the cloud in the Dark Room in the next section. The downside is it requires much more time to render as the cloud now is made with a cube of noise.
I updated the scene with new clouds and rendered the animated scene. The rendering of 250 frames took around 5 hours to complete.
Dark Room with glitchy clouds
The Dark Room is probably the easiest scene to set up. As mentioned above, I used the cloud system in this scene and it worked really well.
Currently there isn’t a built-in function in Blender to animate by changing the value of math nodes. I have to manually change the value and render each frame one by one.
It is important to have adequate lighting in dark scenes to highlight the main object. I setup two light points behind the camera and one cone light from the top for the creepy lighting.
Ocean
The Ocean scene is the hardest of all the scenes. Although Blender has its own ‘Ocean’ modifier tool, I still need to edit a suitable texture for it to look good and realistic. I tried different tutorials and decided to follow this one by Oby1.
The first version looks weird even though I followed every step of the tutorial, and the worst thing is after an hour of adding nodes and tweaking values Blender crashed. Lesson of the day is to save your work…
The ocean texture setting has a similar approach to the cloud one, by using math nodes and mixing shaders, we can tell Blender how to calculate the light rays in water and how noise, transparency and different textures work.
I then create the ocean cube by extruding the ocean 2D plane into the 3D form. At last, I set up and animated the camera sinking into the sea, and then render. It took me around 3 hours to design and 3 hours to render 250 frames. I don’t think the result looks good for the huge amount of time I put into this scene, but that’s the best I can do for now.
The structure for the tunnel is straightforward. I generated a cube and stretched it over the Y axis to create the long corridor, and created a rough concrete texture for it.
I made a hole in the wall using the Boolean Modifier, similar to Pathfinder in Adobe Illustrator, the modifier cuts shapes by the path of the other objects.
I encountered a problem when I tried to set up the lighting for the scene. I put down a strong light at the end of the tunnel to create that bright, all-white look, and I generated another white backdrop behind the light. The light doesn’t seem to be working and the tunnel is dark even though I pushed the lighting value all the way up. After checking the elements within the scene I found out it is the backdrop that is blocking the light for some reason. I removed it and the lighting is working fine.
This is an animation scene and I want to adjust the movement speed of the camera. I experimented with the animation curve in the Graph Editor to tweak with the easing and velocity.
The scene took around 3 hours to make and 2 hours to render.
Sand Room
For this scenes, I made use of elements that I created during the technical experiments including the sand and the grass.
Some of the new skills I learnt during the technical research are the sculpt mode and proportional editing. These two functions allow me to tweak the terrain and create these hills of sands in the corners to make a more realistic scenario.
Another interesting thing I did is ‘Volumetric lighting’, by utilising the similar volume concepts previously used to generate clouds, we can increase the invisible density in air and create god rays, a cinematic and beautiful lighting for the scene.
I also designed the man’s letter in Adobe Illustrator, then pasted it onto a plane using the ‘Image Texture’ feature.
Last Booth
This is a cinematic but very minimal setup. I imported the phone booth and added a giant backdrop for the background, as well as adjusting the ‘emission’ value of the top light in the phone booth as it is the only light source in the scene.
Video Editing
After hours of rendering, I put them all in Adobe Premiere Pro and added in music and sound. I used 'Dawn' by Rights Free Sound as the background music. The piano gives a calm yet sad emotion. I checked and made sure the music is royalty-free and free for commercial use. I also did some small color and exposure adjustments.
Final Design Outcome
Lucid Dreams
Exhibition Mockup
Reflection
Three months ago, I didn’t have a single clue how to operate and use Blender 3D. I was thinking if I should choose this as my assessment topic, 3D is such an intimidating field that I didn’t know if I could handle it, and Blender is so complicated that I didn’t even know how to navigate and move around in the 3D workspace. However, three months later today I have had a basic understanding of the features, and have improved my skills such as 3D modelling, texturing, and animating. This allows me to construct my imagination in the 3D world and presents something surreal - it is surreal to think that I have actually created my own 3D animation video. I would say I have exceeded my own expectation by going this far. I am going to make good use of the 3D software and continue to create my style of artwork.
Something I did better in this project are the 3D modelling, image texture and lighting, especially in the phone booth model. I have learnt more about 3D modelling and the skills allow me to create accurate and detailed models. From the phone box and wire to the small table and glass panes, all are carefully extruded and beveled to present a realistic design.
Designing in Adobe Illustrator and pasting them onto the surfaces via image texture also helped with presenting a realistic model.
Lastly, lighting really plays a big role in setting the mood, I learnt more lighting techniques and applied them into the scene setting. The blue light in the phone booth gives it a clean and cool look.
I really like the noise-generated clouds and grass generated with the particle system. I think they look way better than I expected them to be and I would like to try out different values and data with them. Particle System is a really complex feature and I should investigate further to see its other functionality.
Although I have improved a lot compared to week 6, I still have a lot to learn and look into.
Texturing is one of the hardest and most important aspects in the Blender world. Your model won’t look good without a great texture. I did well with some easier textures such as the glass, metal, and cloud texture, but some other textures like the sand (I can’t get good with sand for some reasons), concrete and ocean, should be reviewed and see how I can improve the quality.
I also want to improve my storytelling and animation, or maybe my computer. Due to the hardware constraint I have to cut away some extra scenes that can explain the story further, build up the mood and help with transition. This final video still looks good to me, I would add some more shots if time and my machine allows. Animation rendering is really demanding to computers, every animated scene took around 2-3 hours to render and the cloud scene even took 5 hours to finish because of its heavy noise texture.
Lucid Dreams is a sad story and I put in first person narrative to immerse the audience as if they are the friend of the character. I think this allows me to communicate the idea more clearly and emotionally. Again, if my pc allows I would add in some more scenes to explain the story further and deliver the emotion in a better pace to the audience, but that’s the best I can do for now, and it looks good to me.
I am very pleased that I have the chance to learn and practice with Blender 3D, and now able to build scenes, setting texture and light, creating something I have always wanted to make. I am excited to take this new skill set further, improve and learn different fields of the 3D world and create more surreal and abstract artwork.
References
- Blender Guru. (2020, May 13). How to Make Studio Lighting in Blender [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UCc3Z_-ibs&t=158s
- Max Hay. (2022, Sep 28). How to Use Lighting in Your Renders | Blender Tutorial [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxNzfllPSJc
- Mitko Nikov. (2020, Jul 18). Ultimate Volumetrics Guide in Blender 2.82 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOulc9dy69I
- tutor4u. (2019, Mar 19). Blender 2.8 Beginner 3D Modeling Tutorial [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elUJCEC06r8
- MK Graphics. (2022, Apr 24). Blender 3.1 Tutorial | Making Realistic Grass With Particle System [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWRLO80X4vk
- Magevo Studio. (2022, Feb 14). Making a Desert Landscape | Blender 3.0 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VLl-bb4F-w
- Welcome to creativeworld. (2019, Sep 16). How to make outlet tube / Drain Hose Pipe In blender 2.80 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaLRvZLjvwY
- CGMatter. (2019, Dec 8). Create Procedural Clouds Fast (Blender Tutorial) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhMQN4vVMIU
- pinkpocketTV. (2021, May 19). How To Make Volumetric Clouds (Blender Tutorial) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYa5q0a7INM
- Default Cube. (2020, Nov 10). Clouds? EZ [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCvP917Z8uc
- Oby 1. (2020, Aug 12). HOW TO MAKE AN OCEAN + Cut-out in BLENDER- Beginner Friendly - with caustics and foam :) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9RQ83BKcyI
- RightsFreeSound. (2020). Dawn. https://youtu.be/fc6U0StkC3c