KRUGSTON Episode 3 - "Dasher Appears" (PREVIEW and BTS)

Happy February everyone!

Hope everyone is staying warm (but not too warm) this nearly spring season and having a productive week.

I've been spending my time working on new animated shorts, KRUGSTON episode 3, and a top secret project for a friend of mine.

Speaking of episode 3, I wanted to share some behind the scenes technology for the preview you just watched. You'll have to forgive me for the unfinished sound design, but on the visual side of things I think the geometry node setup involved with creating the footsteps are pretty cool!

For this scene I wanted to build a system that would let me generate footsteps along a curve that I could then tweak later on into any shape or amount I needed for a given scene.

 Footsteps following a curve which can be animated to reveal each step one at a time.

Of course I also need the system to be scalable and generate any number of footsteps along the curve without issues.

 Completely adaptable amount of footsteps pulling from a random collection of 4 options. Look at all those feet!

I've just recently dedicated time into learning the math and documentation behind Blender's geometry node system RECENTLY. There's some hurdles to overcome like learning vector math and how to interface with Blender itself, but once you get a start on it the process becomes really rewarding to improve at.

If you're interested in the setup for this particular tech, check out the screenshot below to learn for yourself!

 Footstep setup in Blender 4.3 pulling from a collection of 4 numbered footstep meshes which can be applied to any curve object.

Overall, really pleased with how this scene is coming out and super excited to continue work on this episode - the dialogue has been a ton of fun to animate too if not a LITTLE bit tedious at times (Building a pose library has helped a TONNNN with getting the character acting to feel more natural) but I'm still pumped either way.

I'll get back to work now, thanks for reading to the end!

-Noah the G the Winnerman

PST. check this shit out