Create with Clint Weekly Challenge #194: Chop
Summary
| Biz | Biz Biz |
|---|---|
| Author | Project Somedays |
| Title | Create with Clint Weekly Challenge #194: Chop |
| 📅 Started | 2025-05-03 |
| 📅 Completed | 2025-05-04 |
| 🕒 Taken | ~6hrs |
| Render🕒 | ~10hrs |
| 🤯 Concept | Chop bot used chop! It’s highly effective… |
| 🔎 Focus | Perfect loop + efficiency of animation - one chop motion and offset the timing. Explode for the section of the tree he hacks off. |
| 🖥️Rig Deets | 64GB RAM, 13th Gen Core i9, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 4060 Ti |
Created for the weekly Create with Clint/pwnisher community
Check out his awesome YouTube channel or better yet, join the discord community!
🎓Lessons Learned🎓
- Rigging and Weight Painting:
- For harder to reach places, much better technique is to select a vertex and then SHIFT + expand the selection and copy the weight
- When you parent with automatic weights, Blender attempts to assign vertex groups to bones
- When weight painting, you can select the current bone you’re interested in at the top of the screen
Resources:
- “Junk Wheel” model by Rex Hans on BlenderKit
- “Lumberjack Flannel” material by NK Productions on BlenderKit
- Axe Model from BlenderKit
- “Pine Tree” by Benham Nekooei on BlenderKit
- Sounds
Stretch Goals/Extension Ideas
- Constrain the rotation of the wheel with distance travelled?
TODO:
Scenework
- Layout Basic Scene
- Background
- Sound design
[ ] Looping background?
Camera Biz
- Set up vertical camera
- Lock camera to Chop Bot
Blocking
- Block out the four phases: Tree gets taken away –> move to the next tree –> chop –> tree falls
- Timeline Markers
Lighting
- Set up sun lighting so it doesn’t change in the loop
Modelling
- Rough version of the Lumberjack Chop Bot
- Texturing
- Refinement
Animation - Chop Bot
- Markers on key points in the animation
- Rotation on the wheel
- Set up eye movement
- Constrain the top half to match the rotation of the pivotControl
- Rig the arms
- Chop cycle
Animation - Tree Fall
- Simulate tree falling over –> keyframes with bounce: worked great!
🪵Dev Log🪵
2025-04-05 Basic blockout 🕒1.5hrs
- Made chop bot
- Made chopped down tree
;
2025-04-05 Finishin off the overall animation 🕒1hr
- Sorted out the base animation
- Sorted out the rotation
- Chucked in the timeline markers (SO HANDY)
- Eyes now look at the next tree before moving there
- Camera now locked to the movement
- Maybe it’s all a bit fast? Can slow everything down later
2025-05-05 Arm rigging a d animation 19:20 - 22:00 🕒 2hrs40m
- Learned a lot about rigging, vertex groups and weight painting. Namely, the many way you shouldn’t do it and that internal faces are SUPER annoying
- Eventually got the weight painting right
- Got a basic 2 stage chop animation aaand stuffed it up again… but it’s not so bad
2025-05-09 The final push 🕒 3hrs
- Fixed animation
- Duplicated animated arms and adjusted angles to avoid self-intersections a little
- Offset the animation by 2 frames in this pattern: TR, ML, MR, BL, BR, TL
- Chop Bot was clipping through the log so moved the second tree over
- Found a cool tree
- Spent a while learning all the ways NOT to get a slice of it in the middle
- Cell fracture the target puck and apply rigid body physics to it
- Applied physics to the axes (not sure that was super necessary)
- Hid the transition behind the body of Chop Bot
- Added in sound effects
- Sorted render settings
