How to Make 3D Animated Movies in Blender | Ultimate Guide?

If you want to make 3D animated movies in Blender, you’re most definitely on the right path. Blender has proven over the years that it’s a very good software for creating short films as we have seen it done several times through the Blender open movie projects. The good thing about Blender is the fact that it can cover pretty much the entire movie production Pipeline from Preproduction to post-production. Which gives all the necessary tools to work on your film from start to finish.

1 – Pre-Production

In this stage what you are going to do for the most part is planning, creating a story, the world and the characters involved in it.
This is very important if you want to make 3D animated movies in Blender, and it will basically shape how your movie will look when it is completed. You might think that this is not very important, but if you skip this stage you will be facing more problems and wasting a lot of time as well. This stage is really detrimental because it can make or break the process as a whole, and it can lead to a great or poor looking movie.

Some of the important aspects of the pre-production stage that you should go through are:

The Story

Before you make a movie, you need to have an idea for the story and why it is important for the people who are going to engage with it. You have to define the main concept of the story and who are the people you are targeting.
For example the Blender institute worked on a short animated film in 2009 called “Sintel” in which a lonely young woman, Sintel, helps and befriends a dragon, whom she calls Scales. But when he was kidnapped by an adult dragon, Sintel decides to embark on a dangerous quest to find her lost friend Scales.

Of course, when you decide what the story is going to be you need to write a script for it: you are going to develop characters and their dialogues if it is going to be necessary. The script can refine flaws in the story by making it practical and allowing your characters actions and words the overall direction.

Concept Art

Concept art is also a very important part in preproduction to make 3D animated movies in Blender. The objective is to translate the story to images, in addition to setting the atmosphere and tone of the world that the characters are going to be interacting with. For this part of the project , the artists who worked on Blender movies before used open source software such as Gimp or Krita to create their concept art.

Concept art renders a possible visual depiction of ideas that hold the potential for a great short film. It involves visualizing sets, characters or environments that make up the design and overall look and feel of a film.

Story boarding

This is the process in which you transform the written story into a design on paper so you can outline or block out scenes and the dialogue that is going on between characters. Thus, it’s practically to make 3D animated movies in Blender that are consistent. The storyboard is going to allow you to see how your story is progressing and how long every action and scene takes to complete.

In Blender specifically we have a tool called the “Grease Pencil” generally dedicated to 2D animation in Blender. Which allows us to do storyboarding and another well-known process called animatics. Above all, you can add parts needed or remove parts of your story that don’t work well using short animated sketches if it is hand-drawn or simple quick animations if you choose to use 3D animation. With animatics basically you can plan the sequences of your scene and the visual effects you’ll have to add later on.

At this stage, you should finalize your scenes and dialogues as it will be more difficult to make these changes during production.

Model Sheets

Creating model sheets is considered the bridge between preproduction and actual production, because now you already have the characters for your movie and have an idea of what they’ll be doing.
Model sheets show every angle possible of a specific character, vehicle or environment props so that Blender 3D artists can use them to transfer concept art to 3D models that will be animated in the film.

These drawings will display all the sides and expressions of a character that will appear in the movie. Because having a detailed drawing makes the modeling of the characters easier later.

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2 – Production

In this stage you are ready to jump to the real work: I mean the actual stuff that you are going to show to people through your film. Because everything else we have done before serves as a stepping stone for what is coming next.

Modeling

In this stage, you take your 2D characters from concept to 3D Using 3D Modeling tools in Blender. And this will define how your characters will look in action inside the final movie you are creating. So to make 3D animated movies in Blender, we can easily describe this phase as a crucial one.
This is where your model sheet will be useful as it becomes easier to transform your character to 3D since you have already drawn all the angles. You have to note that a 3D model of your character itself is static.

Modeling also involves creating the environment or the scenes in which the action is going to take place, and I would say the most time-consuming part of modeling is this. And you need few artists working together to get it done, unless you want to spend months doing it on your own. Also one thing I want to emphasize here which is the fact that it all depends on the complexity of the projects. Because sometimes you need to create simple characters in rich environments with lots of props and complicated details. On the other hand, you can try to keep it simple so the projects does not take forever.

Blender offers to 3D artists the ability to sculpt, which is very important for creating characters and organic or intricated details in the environment. It even offers you a set of awesome addons for sculpting that can truly enhance the process. As I said Blender was made to be a complete package that can cover pretty much all the needs of artists in the animation pipeline. Especially helping them to make 3D animated movies in Blender: its potential is heightened.

UV unwrapping

After you model a character or anything else in a scene, the next thing that you need to take care of to make 3D animated movies in Blender is to UV unwrap it or UV map it to prepare for the next stage. This process here sometimes is not really required especially for simple things such as walls or furniture. However, as things get complicated it becomes necessary to be able to paint your 3d models correctly.

Painting & Texturing

Texturing is also a very important part of creating characters and scenes because it is going to make everything look like it is alive. 3D animation studios call this process surfacing, and it is all about creating textures, color for surfaces and interaction with lighting. There’s even a bunch of great Blender addons for texturing and shading that can really take it to the next level. In other words: to make 3D animated movies in Blender, it’s also about giving life to your models.

Rigging

Rigging refers to the process of creating the bone structure of a 3D model which can be used to manipulate the 3D model like a puppet for animation.
Pretty much anything can be rigged. A character, an animal, a vehicle, a tree you name it, it doesn’t make any difference what the object is. Adding bones will allow any object to be animated freely.

Blender can allow you to created complex rigs as well as simple rigs using auto rigging tools or even rigging addons.
When you finish the process of rigging you will be able to take your characters to action through the process of animation. Which is one of the final stages to make 3D animated movies in Blender as the name suggests.

Animation

After your characters are rigged you need to bring them to the 3D environments and 3D scenes you created for animation. In this process camera movements will be involved as well because they will move with the characters to capture their movements. Blender camera addons can be super handy in this phase.
In the animation stage, you have to create the movements of each character frame by frame.
This is one of the longest stages of production. It’s also where you can make your animated movie great or poor.
Artists and small studios who have the money and experience to work with motion capture technology this is going to make things a lot faster.

Lighting

Lighting is an art and a science in of itself. It is a very important part of creating your scenes and setting the mode of the film in general. It is one of few things that can take good work to an extraordinary level.
If you used strong lighting it is going be too bright, if you use too little light things are going to look dim and unclear to the viewer, so you need to find the right balance to tell the story.
You can create amazing scenes with very detailed and cool looking characters but if you can’t show your hard work properly through the use of good lighting it will not matter that much.

Rendering

The final aspect of production is rendering your work. And you are going to do this in the form of frames, for this the job you need a very strong high-end computer or you can use the services of online render farms. Which will allow you to get faster results unless you want spend months rendering which will probably fry your average computer. Because you will need to render thousands of frames, this will consume a lot of time if you are going to do it on one simple computer. As a final suggestion, you can take a look at some cool rendering and lighting Blender addons that can speed up the process sensibly.