Footie guy

Sligo Rovers Fall guy

Been watching alot of Fall Guys game play and really liked the aesthetic.  

I did not buy the game as I was worried it would become a major time sink.  

What I did think would be fun would be to model some elements in Blender. For the player models I made one up in my home town football strip of Sligo Rovers (stripes).  Another model is based off one of the most popular snacks in Ireland - Tayto crisps.  The mascot looks like this.  

Mr Tayto

Tayto guy 

It was a fun exercise and the success of the game is based on the simplicity of the basic design.  

Footie guy mesh

Antibody test

Antibody test 3D Model

Full video is here    https://vimeo.com/445199206

Another instructional video.  This one is looking at the Covid-19 antibody test.  This test is not used for detecting cases.  An RNA detections system using RTPCR is used for that.  This one is useful for figuring out if someone was exposed to the virus previously and is really important when developing vaccines.  It can be used to assess the strength of the immune response or the efficacy of a vaccine candidate.  

It is made up multiple steps and I have made multiple 2D representations of this kind of method.  This is a 3D approach.  I have not seen many of these so it was a good exercise to model the assets out figure out camera angles ect.

Assets trials

Final models

To make it as efficently as possible I created one major scene and set up multiple angles to capture the important details.

Main scene with cameras

The cutting together of all the resuting scenes with text was a bigger task than I had budgeted.  Some of the difficulties could hve been overcome by shooting better.  All in all given the scale of the task  (the largest so far)  I was happy enough with the outcome

If you have any questions let me know.

3D animation editing

Driving to Work

Driving to work

Youtube video

A short animation trying ot some techniques and rigging.  Modeled a low poly landscape and set of buildings.  

Landscape modeled

Modeled two characters using the Blender rigify.  Gave a basic walk cycle to the security guard.  The thermometer was a child of the guards rig 

Guards rig

For the car  I used a driver expression and an emptys movement to rotate the wheels and the wheels were parented to the car.  

The car window movement was a shape key animated.

Car model

Everything was rendered in cycles.  The main action was slowed down during editing and the colour balance shifted. 

Pink sofa

Pink Sofa

Interior render 

Another 3D project.  This one was modeling a floorplan out in 3D.  The placement of furnishing was established which helped with scale. I took some time and populated the scene with props.   Rendered in cycles

Plate Fill

You tube video

This work evolved out what was going to be part of a larger project but as it developed began to eclipse it.  All completed in Blender 2.83.  The subject is a microtitre plate.  It is used in analytical laboratories to run tests.  This one has 96 wells.  It allows 96 reactions to be run simultaneously using very small quantities of reagents. 

 It would be on of the most common formats for running the Covid-19 antibody tests for research and diagnostics.  

They are usually polyproplylene or polstyrene and serve just as the assay container so not considered very exciting.  

The challenge was to make it feel heroic and to do that required some work.  

Tried a few different looks first then set up the animations.  

I used all the hard won fluid knowledge from the virus video to set up the fill.  

I used the clamp to constraint to move the camera along paths.  

I also added a music track and cut the edits to match and give a rhythm.  

This was a learning curve and a half but a really good challenge.   

  Lockdown concentrates the mind. 

I am streaming more regularly on Twitch  https://www.twitch.tv/dertypaws  and the bigger project is being worked on there.  You can catch me live or watch the VODs.  

Wash your hands

Link to youtube


Back again.  I have taken some time out to revise my portfolio and website and relaunch the business side of this enterprise.  I gave myself some personal projects and I will be publishing them over the next couple of days.  I will follow up here with some more behind the scenes work and explanation.  If there are some things among all this that interest you or you have some questions let me know here or any of the other social media sites.  

The updated website is www.dertypaws.com

One of the more contemporary projects was  'Wash your Hands'.
This was modeled, animated and edited in Blender. 
The structures were based on virus protein sequence data such as here
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/pdb/6Z43

The data was imported into Blender using the atomic blender utilities add on. This allows you to import the PDB data.  Had to play around with the import parameters to get the desired effect. 




After that the structure could be edited but for a virus where multiples were required it was not practical.  I went back to the sculpt tools and approximated the shapes.  The surface was created with textures.

The fluid simulation was a learning curve.  I had worked with the old fluid sim in Blender which was based on the particle system.  The mantaflow system is more powerful but complex.  Tweaking each parameter piecemeal was require and would be my biggest tip.  Make sure that the sim has recalculated after each change and review the outcome.  

After that was moving some cameras and editing the rendered movie.