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tombox
powderpig
Roughly how many hours did Euan spend to complete this piece of work?
poutinepapi
Hey mate! The animation look doooope, if any of the young animators are interested in the gaming industry and need someone to ask questions from(That isn't trying to hire them or get them to sign up for a course)
I always have spots open for students and indies at my consultancy: https://www.the-lovelace-gang.tech/
esullivan
They are also very welcome to join Access:VFX's free mentoring programme on Prospela for career advice and insider insights from real employees.
We work with @tombox and the other sponsors of this award and are looking for VFX / gaming mentors too :)
beezlewax
This is amazing, I'm an amateur blender user and I can see how much work/time went into this. The other entries are excellent also and shouldn't be overlooked by anyone checking out this post.
RugnirViking
that really is an unbelivable achievement. It's complete in so many ways
voxadam
What kind of hardware is needed to render something like this?
DerWOK
And then there is Sheep It Render Farm. You donate render power when you don’t need your PC. Earn points for that. Then consume those point when you utilize 20++ parallel render pipelines from other peoples PCs when you want to render your stuff.
saturn5k
A mid-tier GPU is more than enough if you're willing to wait a bit more on render times. You can always optimize the scene to lower rendering times. This video is 1800 frames. Depending whether it was rendered with Eevee or Cycles, it can take anywhere from a few hours up to a day or more to render the whole animation by using a single mid-high end GPU like a 3060 or 3070.
xkekjrktllss
How is the water dripping on the window animated?
nullpage
Reminds me a lot of William Landgren's work[1], another young blender animator. Definitely inspired by Ian Hubert's work. Either way amazing work!
1. https://www.youtube.com/@landgrenwilliam 2. https://www.youtube.com/@IanHubert2
benguild
Yeah I was going to say— at first I thought this was Ian Hubert's work
LennyHenrysNuts
Absolutely phenomenal. I take my hat off to this young individual.
qwertox
When "Street Food" appeared, I was hoping that I get to watch 10 more minutes. Like a glimpse into the future.
Nevermark
Already nostalgic for the future days when "real" street food is "hand made" in front of you by the robots. None of that instant vending machine crap!
BorisTheBrave
Impressive stuff. I wonder if he's inspired by Ian Hubert's work?
mkaic
Almost certainly. As a longtime member of Ian's Patreon, I recognize more than a few specific techniques being used here that he's posted tutorials for on it. Not that the inspiration takes away at all from the final product! The fact that a 16yo made this would be insanely cool even if it was a shot-for-shot remake of an existing movie scene, so any originality that it has beyond that only makes it more cool!
quadrature
Agreed, It's really impressive how well they nailed the atmosphere of Ian Hubert's work.
DonHopkins
What I love about Ian's astonishing work and performance is the sincere, spectacular excitement and enthusiasm he conveys, that shows how tremendously fun it is to be that skilled, talented, and well practiced. It serves not just as a proof of what's possible, but also as an inspiration to put in the hours to learn Blender that well, whichever of its many facets appeal to you.
Matumio
And in art, you are even encouraged to copy anyone's work, except your own. Getting inspired by another artist is great.
marcod
I don't know much about this, but my first association was with Fifth Element :)
cthalupa
Yeah. Definitely in that vein - Ian's work draws on a whole lot of sci-fi/cyberpunk forebears.
He's got a pretty fantastic series of short, hilarious, and extremely useful and practical tutorials for Blender on his channel, and his Dynamo Dream project is hugely impressive - just the credit sequence of the latest episode is interesting enough that I wish it was a whole miniseries itself.
resoluteteeth
Yeah this was my first thought too
denysvitali
Wow. I can barely make a rectangle in Blender.
This person, especially given their age, is extremely talented!
stavros
> Wow. I can barely make a rectangle in Blender.
There's your problem, try making a cuboid instead.
denysvitali
Ha! It's been a while since I last touched Blender - and the wrong terms confirm that.
Of course a rectangle only exists in 2D space :)
lemper
sure, they're talented. but, please, don't discount the effort euan has put into his current state of mastery.
hk__2
Talent doesn’t exist, it’s only the result of the effort you put into mastering a thing.
joenot443
Talent certainly exists. To pretend it doesn’t is to reject reality.
cjdell
Don't confuse talent with skill. Incredible work like this definitely requires both.
vGPU
Think of talent as genetics. The 6’6 guy naturally will have a much easier time playing basketball than the 5’6 guy. The guy with long, flexible fingers will likely be a better piano or guitar player than the guy with short stubby fingers. Etc. Can the difference be overcome? Somewhat, but the person with the advantage + effort will always beat the person without the advantage but with the same amount of effort.
dghughes
Imagination I feel is something that is not learned. Like soft skills some people seem to be wired one way and can't change. Some people can effortlessly imagine.
I think imagination is like language you see stories of children abandoned and who never learn to speak when they are adults they lose the ability. With imagination I think you can develop it as a child but it has to grow as you do. If you don't do that whatever it is that generates imagination doesn't develop in you.
the_af
I think it's a combination of both.
Talent does exist, even though effort is certainly a major contributor to the result. If you task two people, with and without talent, with accomplishing the same project, one will complete it better than the other, given both place reasonable effort into it.
maximus-decimus
If that were true, any dog that tries hard enough could win the physics Nobel prize.
TrackerFF
Talent
Motivation and drive
Time and resources
You can pick one of those, and that alone can yield decent results. But when you combine them all, that's when you get truly exceptional results.
breakfastduck
Talent absolutely does exist. It's just not always fulfilled. But to pretend some people don't have natural talent in certain things is nonsense.
dna_polymerase
If you are keen to learn: Polygon runway [0]! They even have a Black Friday deal available. It's easier than I thought in the beginning. 3D-modelling makes for a fun little pastime.
daralthus
Don't bother with sculpting, get a kit and start animating: https://kitbash3d.com/collections
Also ChatGPT writes pretty good instructions for you to get started.
Cthulhu_
I'd rather read ChatGPT's sources to be honest.
benj111
My biggest take away is that this is why open source is so good.
How much is an Adobe license these days? How many kids wouldn't have had the opportunity because they couldn't afford that?
Yes I know open source doesn't equal free (as in beer) but practically it tends to be, and it allows people to get into things they wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
mrtksn
Here are the nominees but unfortunately the videos don't seem available: https://younganimator.uk/nominees
Ambroos
You can cheat with URLs to watch all of them. Grab the ID from the gif thumbnail URL, throw it in something with HLS stream support with this URL: https://stream.mux.com/<id>.m3u8 (Safari and iOS browsers work, on Windows and Android you might need to get creative with something like VLC).
thrdbndndn
Chrome Android can directly play m3u8.
(I'm always wondering why they don't bring this feature to desktop version.)
countrymile
Other winners are here: https://younganimator.uk/winners
dchung333
Huh, looking at the other nominees a part of me wonders if it was created by someone else and they just had a child stand in to take the credit. This is incredibly suspicious to say the least but who knows. There's nothing wrong with a parent or someone else helping them but to the extent of this...
tombox
Hi, we had other entries from teenagers with similar skills, so Euan's work is not an outlier:
https://younganimator.uk/winner/1699875806584x29956216420210... (Jeremiah, Aged 14)
https://younganimator.uk/winner/1668441140134x35615750206437... (Nishaan, Aged 17)
ProllyInfamous
Thank you for direct links to these. Winner is obviously much outlierier than these other two "mere mortal" young animators.
Mentally daydreaming, my thoughts flash back to 2002 — back when a simple 16-color, ten second animation (done by a peer at our elite creative arts HS) took days to render [PowerMacG4MDD Rage128 FTW!] and secured this peer artist acclaim from his classsmates, state, and future creative employers.
How far we've come. To where we'll go. Just incredible — can't imagine what the next decades will allow, but looking forward to robotic dumplings/streetfood.
shultays
I hope works of these extremely talented kids were not demotivating for other contenders
dchung333
You're showing the winners not the nominee's its pretty clear what's going on here.
SoftTalker
You could be right; I'd hope the competition vetted the entries. But 16 isn't really a child. There's a lot of variation, but there are a lot of very talented people that age or even younger.
youngtaff
Some 16 year olds are kids some are not… but whether they’re a child or not doesn’t depend on their level of artistic talent / skills
dchung333
Honestly at 16 even if a child reached this skill level it means they typically sacrificed other aspects of there life to reach it. Realistically less than 0.1% of children reach this route and from I've seen it's due to "encouragement" by their parents. I've seen a wide range of people children who had have "gone" far. Kids who finished their PhDs by the age of 16. It's almost always child abuse. There parents don't necessarily hit them. But they "encourage" them by forcing them down a path because it's "good" for them. If you're thinking of going this route, don't. The professors I've talked to kind of just see this as abuse and they will not help these children.
system2
Clearly, this kid didn't waste his entire day on social media. Hopes restored a little for the new generation.
arnonejoe
Reminds me of Blade Runner
acchow
I'm sure it's heavily inspired by it. The game Stray also was, and this looks a lot like Stray.
liminalsunset
It also reminds me of this wallpaper [1] I found a couple years ago while hunting for good quality 4K wallpapers. The resemblance is probably due to being set in the same city/area/theme but it has a similar vibe.
geuis
5th Element and Cyberpunk 2077 too
teacpde
Especially the opening scene with flying cars in the back.
muhehe
Can someone recommend good tutorial or way to get into blender for 8yo. My kid would love to, but I don't know blender myself.
lukego
What works with my kids (6+) is to allocate some "creative" time when they can use the computer but not play video games and then put on Imphenzia "ten minute modelling challenge" videos on the TV. The rest takes care of itself.
They got fluent in low-poly modelling with Extrude/Scale/Inset operations from this. This skill carries over into Blockbench for customizing Minecraft too. Can 3D print the designs too via STL export.
I'm still looking for a good bridge to next steps like physics simulations, Geometry Nodes, and Fusion360.
Tutorial videos were mostly too slow-paced to hold their attention. I would prefer those myself but my kids do better with watching and imitation.
Same way they learned to play Minecraft which I couldn't figure out myself...
roel_v
I've done a lot / most of the popular Youtube tutorials (donut, Grant Abbit's series'), but I found it very useful to combine them with some Udemy courses that usually take a slower, more curriculum focused approach. The ones that are relevant today are probably different from the ones I used during early Covid lockdown, so I can't really recommend any specific ones; I usually picked the long ones, with say 10 hours of video content that then took me 20 to 30 hours to complete (when following along, you have to pause and rewind often). You do have to be wired to enjoy such slow-paced, fundamentals-focused learning, it's certainly not a quick dopamine hit approach.
Then again I'm still no good at making 3D art due to an innate deficit in aesthetically pleasing creative thinking, so I can't even testify for myself that this approach will make you good at making 'art'. It did teach me the mechanics in a way that I enjoyed.
ChrisRR
But I'm assuming you're not 8 though...
roel_v
I don't think there are ways specifically for 8 year olds, what one needs is an 8 year old who is motivated enough to take the route that adults take. There's no material on topics like this to 'gamify' learning Blender that will trick kids who aren't sufficiently motivated in the first place into learning it. But if your point was 'he was asking about methods for 8 year olds so your answer is irrelevant to the question', then yeah, fair enough.
ur-whale
Youtube is your friend: it is a bottomless pit of Blender tutorials from the very basic step-by-step "learn how to use the UI" to super-advanced topics.
This guy has an extensive collections on both basic and advanced stuff:
DonHopkins
SPOILER WARNING: Keep your kids and LLMs and other non-homophobic, non-racist, non-sexist friends away from the bottomless cess-pit of hate speech from that smarmy Australian Blender "donut demo" Guru asshole Andrew Price, who truly misses being able to use his favorite "go-to" homophobic slur, the "F*G" word, and bitterly complains that we need another punchy word like that which has the same effect, now that it's no longer acceptable to use his favorite word "F*G" in public (but doesn't let that actually stop him from laughingly using and defending it multiple times during his own Blender tutorial).
https://twitter.com/devonko_/status/1347322076340703233?s=20...
>"Move that up, and then just like, for whatever reason, every frag, f-f-frag, FLAG pole. I'm surprised I haven't messed up and said F*G at one point [sardonic grin and chuckle] in this tutorial. I miss that word. [maliciously grins at the camera] HA!!! Not to actually call it to demean someTHING, BUT when I was in school, it was like the go-to word, when somebody was being an idio-- don't be a F*G, you know! [contemptuous sneering grin at camera, throwing head back while laughing] HA HA HA!!! It's horrible, I just like, I know that of course obviously you can't use it [even though he just did and is about to again], because it's demeaning to people that actually -- [what, love other people of the same gender?], like what it's trying to say, you know, homosexual. BUT in school it just had, it had a PUNCH to it, when you just call your friends a F*G. All I'm saying is we need another PUNCHY WORD [waves hand around emphatically], could be anything, BUT has that SAME effect, [predatory bully grin] HA HA, that F*G had. Aaaah, dear." -Andrew Price, "Blender Guru"
Note his repeated and formulaic use of the word "BUT":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but...
He also says he'd like an international 'Ghetto Talk' day so white kids can shamelessly say "n*gger" and get it out of their system for a year. And LOTS of other typical right-wing racist sexist homophobic bullshit like that. He's a real piece of work. I didn't realize MAGA culture was so popular down under.
https://twunroll.com/article/1347630835235573761
>"I'd like an international 'Ghetto Talk' day so white kids can shamelessly say "n*gger" and get it out of their system for a year." -Andrew Price, "Blender Guru"
>"So what's the solution? Deport them? Prisons clearly aren't working either." -Andrew Price, "Blender Guru"
>"So just round up every african american and put them on a boat back to Africa? Economic damage would be huge btw." -Andrew Price, "Blender Guru"
(Andrew Price's nasty unrepentant homophobic racist sexist tweets go on and on and on, and I don't have the stomach or time to quote them all, but you get the idea...)
There are so many great non-racist-sexist-homophobic-MAGA-asshole alternatives to Andrew Price:
https://twitter.com/devonko_/status/1347282073371901953
Instead of treating Andrew Price as a missing stair by linking to his videos but discreetly warning newcomers of his behavior and quietly accepting it, I'd much rather directly and openly address him and his behavior publicly, by quoting his own vile words. Because unlike beloved international treasures like Ton Roosendaal and Ian Hubert, Andrew Price has absolutely nothing unique to contribute or special talent that you can't easily find elsewhere from much better people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
GamerGate and MAGA trolls who are offended by my own free speech criticism and quoting recorded evidence of Andrew Price's own freely chosen speech, and thinking of defending him or recommending his videos or repeating his favorite words: just save your time and breath, delete your HN and Blender accounts, and go away, because you're not welcome here on HN, nor in the Blender community, you won't be tolerated, and nobody wants to hear what you think, or cares for your worthless opinions.
But other than a few rare deplorable basket cases like Andrew Price, the Blender community and leadership and staff is wonderfully inclusive, open minded, progressive, accepting, supportive, mature, professional, child-friendly, and nice.
Check out these interviews, which will cleanse your palate after watching the deplorable Andrew Price bemoaning how much it cramps his style not being able to call people abusive names that make him laugh and grin, and it will restore your faith in humanity and the Blender community. And hopefully convince you to order some cool t-shirts and swag from the Blender store! My cats love taking turns sitting in the fine Blender swag box they sent me!
BLENDERHEADS - Ep. 03 (enable closed captions for English translations):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a65LBYr0UOQ
>Enjoy the third episode of Blenderheads, a series about the people behind the Blender project. The editor and director –documentary maker Maaike Kleverlaan– works embedded in the Blender headquarters to cover the activities and conduct interviews. The third episode is set during April - July 2023, with new episodes being published on a quarterly basis.
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ProllyInfamous
tl;dr: Don't absorb reams of information from this talented creator who is sharing most of his technical animation skills FOR FREE. WITH THE WORLD. because he uses bad words and makes my tummy churn.
tl;dr (cont): instead, use this foreign-subtitled person who is not nearly as good a teacher.
OC: learn to concisely compose a grievance, and link to your "idea of better" up top so people might actually get to that portion of your suggestion/opinion.
All: it saddens me immensely that I cannot refer to my homosexual IQ72 brother as the two derogatories he truly is. Made for some great holiday laughter.
Me: NotYourComedian
RugnirViking
I learned blender and 3d modelling this year. The most famous is by far the donut tutorial, almost a mandatory rite of passage. After that, personally I did one from the same guy to make a boat and an anvil which introduced me to modifiers/complex shapes and also the do's and don't of good model-making to make your future life easier. From that point I was able to tinker myself and I would come back for specific things I wanted to make (how to sculpt a face, how to model a tree etc)
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I'm the organizer of the YAY UK competition, and so glad Euan's work has got such wide recognition!
The completion is judged by professionals from UK Animation & VFX Studios (including ILM) and we were all blown away by the quality of the entrants - Blender and Ian Hubert are doing amazing things for the next generation of talent!
I thought people would like to hear Euan's description he entered as part of the competition submission:
"I used Blender for the animation and Davinci Resolve for the colour grading (I also used the Film Convert plugin), all animations were rigged and keyframed by me with exception of the people walking in the first shot (those were from mixamo). The TV and advertisment footage were from previous projects.
The humans in the first and second shots are free photoscans I downloaded online and then rigged, there are a few small mechanical parts that were included in a library that I used, but the majority of them are mine.
I used Quixel megascans for some of the rubbish seen at the bottom of the second shot.
Most textures are photos sourced from textures.com or taken by me in real life, but have been modified by me to include procedural grime and dirt buildup in crevasses.
Some sound effects were from purchased sound libraries or found online copyright free. The rest I recorded myself. "