I’d like to share some still images from a recent project. The characters and obstacles were all rendered in Blender Internal. The background was shot separately, then stabilized and sped up to match the speed of the animation in Blender.
The project took over three months to complete, as I had many things to learn and was working in my spare time. By far, the most difficult task was creating the Irresponsible Dad character. I had next to no experience with armatures and using constraints with them.
Today I will be uploading the .blend to Blendswap for people to look at and play with. Once I see it has been approved, I will explain how it works, and am happy to answer any questions!
Thanks, harleynut! I’ve put a few images together to show a little more about how we made the video.
Individual body parts were shot on greenscreen, to save time in masking. I actually did this twice, once on a sunny day, and once on an overcast day, since the background plate hadn’t been shot yet and I didn’t know what the weather would be like when it was. Fortunately, It ended up being sunny.
Once everything was masked out, it was saved as a PNG and loaded onto a plane as a shadeless material in Blender. I knew I wanted to keep the rig as simple as possible to animate, so I setup the dad character to be constrained to the bike, and the bike is constrained to a simple “master” object. Moving the master moves everything, including making the legs move, the pedal and tires spine, and the head bob up and down.
Glad you found it interesting! I recommend using the same version of Blender I used to make it, 2.66a. When I loaded the file into an older version (2.63 I believe) the edges of the transparency in the PNG textures didn’t look correct. I’m not sure what the cause was.
I’ll be starting a new WIP thread in a few days, documenting the progress of our next video, if you’d like to see that!
Thanks, ulquiorraad! Based on the number of likes and comments the video received, we will definitely look into doing another level sometime in the future!
Interesting bit of info, the actual creator of the game (Jim Bonacci) liked and commented on the video, so I was very pleased about that!
Lolxxx… The blood effect is epic. It is looking damn too realistic And yes. Here’s a site I found over at Google that offers happy wheels game for free: http://www.happywheels-game.net/ <-- Tell me if it’s worth it
Thanks, Allan! You may have noticed that the fluid sim used for the blood effect at the end stops abruptly mid-air. This is because Blender won’t allow you to start a fluid simulation at a specific frame (other than 0, of course!). So, my workaround for that was to run the simulation for the number of frames required, bake the cache, then manually rename the three files generated for each frame. Basically, you just have to rename them to the frame you actually want them to appear on. So, I ended up with around 50 or so files to rename. Once I’d done all that, rendered and viewed the animation at full resolution, then I realized there were some blobs still hanging in mid-air. But, my PC is pretty under powered, and I still had a lot of work ahead of me to finish the video, so I just decided to move on.
Having the ability to start a fluid sim on a specific frame would be a great little time saver! I don’t code though; would it be difficult to incorporate into the current solver?
Thanks for your support as well! 
