Behind the work: Meowmobile
Introduction
The Meowmobile, is a concept that came to life through one of my digital sketches based on a cat that somehow acts as a car! Currently I’m in a period of drawing animals and creatures, which you might’ve noticed in my previous post.
After posting this on Reddit, I got asked to do a breakdown of how my final animation was done, which is what I’m going to walk you through here 😊
Tools
Sketching & illustration
I try sketching every day – loving the feel of drawing on my iPad Pro – so getting a lot of sketches done. Not all sketches turn out good of course, but they are needed for the process of creation. Once a sketch ‘makes it’, I start doing a clean and vectorized version of it. I’ll usually start out doing the line work and fill in colors. This time I ended up removing the lines, since it felt more right without dark outlines for the style.
Sidenote: Usually I like to do this type of sketches on the iPad version of Affinity Designer, but this one got done on the PC version.
Animation
Since I’m quite keen on using Blender for almost anything (except music - yet!), I decided I wanted to adapt this piece to a 3D space but keep a 2D look.
Camera
To avoid having the camera do perspective distortion when stacking my layers on top of each other, I used an orthographic camera.
Image layers
I separated my vector illustration into individual pieces and re-assembled it in Blender. I used “Image as planes”, which is an add-on that is bundled with Blender, it just needs to be activated.
Keyframes
The Meow-mobile
Most of the jittery movement of the car, was done with ‘noise modifiers’. I simply add 1 keyframe on frame 1. Then select the frame in the graph editor and go to the modifiers tab (press ‘n’ if it doesn’t show on the right). Select the noise modifier and to make it loop nicely, set the frame range to the length of the animation and make it fade out in each end. I’ve done this on multiple parts for the animation to be more interesting.
I usually add for all XYZ (pressing ‘i’ -> ‘location’ in the viewport) and then delete the channels I don’t use.
The tail
The tail was brought to life, by taking the plane and subdividing edges twice:
After that, I weight painted a vertex group so the movement could be more controlled
Then did some animation via a ‘simple deform’ modifier:
The road
Simple plane in a fake perspective, with a shader and an array modifier on top! Displace modifier to do the movement. Optically aligned with start and end frame - nothing fancy!
The shader is just a simple gradient with constant value change, so there’s no gradient in the shape.
The shader
The geometry setup
Sweat drops
Each droplet got exported and animated via a shader setup, that looked like this:
The group’s content.
Milk drool
I wanted the milk spill/drool of the vehicle to come out of the sides of the mouth. I did so by make a path which I extruded, applied a shader that would follow the UV coordinates and then animated the movement. It’s not purrfect, but it did the job!
Shader setup of milk drool.
Afterthoughts for next time
Had I known where this piece would end, I’d probably draw the wheels in full, so I could animate rotation on them, but other than that I’m quite happy with the end result! I really like focusing on keeping the expression that’s been captured in the initial sketches of my work, and I really feel like I’ve come quite close to this!
Wrap up
Thank you for getting this far in my first walk-through. 😊
I’m currently trying to focus more on educational work when it comes to working in Blender. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear from you!
If you like this type of walkthrough of my work, please let me know by writing me a comment or send me an email.
Further education?
If you’re looking for 1-on-1 sessions or have questions feel free to reach out on my About page!
