Eggby's Profile Pic - Blender Behind the Scenes

Hello everyone! I'm Eggby and I'm new to the GFX scene.

I'm a hobbyist artist who uses Inkscape, Krita, and Blender. I thought I'd share a behind the scenes for my animated profile pic—hopefully to inspire some others to try their hand at making their own!

This won't be a tutorial but I'm happy to answer any questions! For posterity I'm using Blender 4.4.3, but any version of Blender will work.

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(fig 1. ya boy)

Scene Composition

Below is a quick look at how I set up the scene. I've modeled everything by hand.

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(fig 2. scene preview)

The composition contains a backdrop, the egg, the egg's pedestal, the character (made of yolk and whites), the character's knife, the little popup nameplate, and all the lighting gubbins to make it look pretty. The backdrop, the lights, and the camera are all children under an empty object which kinda acts as a camera rig.

[image: i.imgur.com]

(fig 3. scene collection, list view)

The entire camera rig spins while the main subject stays still!

Having all the spinning bits as children to the camera rig means that I can just spin the camera rig, and everything will follow, keeping their local displacement. So instead of animating three things, I'm just animating one thing.

Character Materials - A Little Trick

You may have noticed that the main character is shaded funny in this black and white view—shadows where lights should be and lights where shadows should be. That's because I've inverted its normals.

[image: i.imgur.com]

(fig 3. ya boy, mugged of all color)

Normals tell the rendering software which way a surface is facing (as a map of vectors). By inverting the normals, I've effectively turned him inside out. After turning him inside out, I created material that enables something called backface culling—in essence it means faces pointing away from the camera are made invisible. 

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(fig 4. the material node layout for a shadowless solid white material with backface culling)

All of this complicated hoo-hah was so that we'd end up with the egg whites of the character always being concave relative the camera, so that the yolk (contained within the whites) is always visible from any camera angle.

[image: i.imgur.com]
(fig 5. ya boy, color restored, yolk visible)

Camera Tracking

How do I get him to look at the camera all the time? It's super easy. Just give him Object Constraint that locks the yolk (his head's) rotation to the camera.

[image: i.imgur.com]
(fig. 6, wow object constraints)

I had to limit rotation so that only the Z axis (the vertical one) is the one that his rotates around. It's not really necessary, since the camera doesn't have any complicated motions for this scene, but I kept it in out of habit.

All of this work is a bit of a hack so that I can have him look at the camera without having to worry about armatures, or rigging, or giving him a neck so that I can deform the character model like a proper animator.

Nameplate

For the nameplate, the animation is really simple.

I just lock it to the camera in the same way that I did the head/yolk, and animated it by changing the scale of the object to 0 to make it disappear. Note that if you're trying this yourself, be sure to set your object origin (the tiny orange dot where the gimbal is centered on) is placed where you want the object to shrink to (in this case, the tip of the nameplate's arrow thing).

You can precisely set where the object origin is by going into edit mode, selecting a vertex where you want the origin to be placed, Shift+S > Cursor to Selected (the bottom option on the radial menu), then going back into object mode, then going to Object > Set Origin > Origin to 3D Cursor.

This is the most useful tip I have in this whole thing for beginners who wanna get into Blender.

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(fig 7, the nameplate in wireframe)

Note that I didn't 3D model the text letter by letter. That's insane. I just created a text object, typed out the name, and used Object > Convert > Mesh. To give it some thickness I used a Solidify modifier. It's a bit overkill, but it produced a good result.

Exporting

There are plugins you can install to export natively as a gif, but I like to export at a very high resolution as an mp4, then convert the mp4 into a gif. (I have my own script, but you can use something like ezgif super easily). For some reason this yields better results and better compression.

Some rendering performance tips (Cycles rendering engine):
Blender Guru mentions all these tips in greater detail

* Set your Device to GPU compute so you can leverage the power of your gamer PC to speed up the render
* Use Render Properties > Light Paths > Fast GI approximation
* Use Render Properties > Light Paths > Clamping > Indirect Light > Change 10 to 3
* Use Render Properties > Performance > Final Render > Persistent Data

Conclusion

That's all there is to it!

• Make the scene with all its bits
• Set up the camera to spin
• Lock his head to the camera
• Any extra animations like knife movement or text bubbles
• Export as an mp4, then mp4 to gif
• Make a behind the scenes that nobody asked for 

Bonus

As a bonus, here's some close ups of his knife. Fun fact: its a model I designed for a space marine character I've been working on.
[image: i.imgur.com][image: i.imgur.com]

(fig 8,9, a knife in matcap and render preview)

Thank you for reading! If this inspires you to try out an art software and make your own stuff instead of just prompting an AI, let me know and share it with me! I love seeing human-made works on Torn.

really cool, always impressed by people that can work blender or other 3d media creation tools!