Wild Little World

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Tardigradia - The Wild Little World

In each centimeter of soil there are hundreds of animals, so small that they can hardly be seen with the naked eye.
Industrial Motion Art created a short film about those creatures.

Blender was used for rigging and animating the tardigrade (it’s the cute one), for modelling, rigging and animating the rotifers (the slim swimming things), for UV and hair on the centipede and for some background elements. There have been plans to move the entire animation/render part of the pipeline to Blender/Vray, but in the end there was not enough time for this and it was rendered in Max/Vray.

youtube version:

vimeo version:

Turntables:

We used micro computer tomography to get the proportions right. As references for detail sculpting we had electron microscope images, which were also used as basis for texturing.

Tardigrade caught a rotifer:
http://www.industrial-motion-art.com/PressPics/Sz_04_10_fin_0030.jpg

Detail on the pseudoscorpion:
http://www.industrial-motion-art.com/PressPics/Sz_11_07_fin_0025.jpg

Predator mites use their front legs for feeling their prey in the dark:
http://www.industrial-motion-art.com/PressPics/Sz_08_03_fin_0022.jpg

The turtle mite hides its legs in special cavities below its body when it is scared. The other mite, visible in the background, has a spherical shape with its head fitting exactly to close the opening.
http://www.industrial-motion-art.com/PressPics/Sz_07_08_fin_0002-1600.jpg

Each of us drew some part of the storyboard, which was then discussed in the team:
http://www.industrial-motion-art.com/PressPics/StoryboardCollage-s.jpg

The backgrounds were built using electron microscope scans of soil:
http://www.industrial-motion-art.com/PressPics/Sz_07_03_fin_0008.jpg

To keep a high detail on closeups, each creature had several UV tiles with separate textures. The centipede had most of them:
http://www.industrial-motion-art.com/PressPics/Lithob_mat.jpg

For inspiration we had a microscope and some petri dishes with living mites, rotifers and centipedes crawling around in the office.

team:

Reinhold A. Fragner
Mason Doran
Simon Richter
Martina Fröschl
Anna Celarek

Industrial Motion Art
Industrial Motion Art at facebook

Attachments

Sz_04_10_fin_0030.jpg1024×576 43.5 KB

1 Like
2

Fantastic work!

3

5 starts - awesome stuff :slight_smile:

4

The most adaptive pluricelular organism discovered so far !

Thanks for sharing !

5

excellent work

6

Outstanding ! Well done!

7

Outstanding!!!
Congratulations.

8

Wow, that’s great! Well done, and the video is instructive and entertaining too, congrats!

9

An incredible undertaking, and brilliant execution! It’s very good to see that Blender was used in this project, as well!
I will watch it again when I get home, and will check out your other links as well. Outstanding work!

10

Wow…that was amazing. Fantastic work.

11

I must post it, even if it is only one word. Astonishing. I would love to see such documentary, with such a nice actor. Even if it is … (don’t know what kind it is) something, the story is human-like.

12

Awesome work! Congratulations to the whole team!

13

That should be moved to official gallery of Blender Artist. Moreover it’s a great example of how Blender can fit pipeline involving other softwares. Great models, renders, nice animation. 5 stars from me!

14

Very nice animation. Love the models. Excellent work on this.

15

Great Work! This is one of those renders that demonstrates what Blender can really do… Excellent!

16

cryomaro - it was rendered in Vray for 3ds Max.

17

Wait a minute… it is not in a gallery yet? Admins, what are you waiting for?

18

really nice rendering, good job. :slight_smile:

19

Thanks for the great feedback! :slight_smile:

Blender in the pipeline worked quite well, there were some issues though, for example no multiple proxies of the same character with different animation (which would have been nice for the scene with 3 tardigrades), no texture tiles implementation (which can be worked around, but is not user friendly), and issues with the export of linked objects to pointcache. But I believe this will be worked out sooner or later.
However, there were a lot of other programs involved too (sculpting, texturing, render, mite animation…), so I wouldn’t call it a demonstration “of what Blender can do”, rather “where Blender can take part in”.
(but I can tell you that the Max people envy Grease Pencil and unwrap :wink:

20

welldone!
I like… everything!
Btw, there isn’t any pipeline out there that use only 1 software to do everything :wink: but in this project I see Blender did a lot!