I've been doing this for a few years now and never have I got stuck that much as I did now.
First of all, hello everyone. It took me a while but I got to finally figure out a set up an animation. At first, I tried to make a halloween animation but the environment I had was utterly broken and unusable for an animation. There were 156 candles with light (that adds a lot to render times), but the light source is not the issue (I can deal with this), the issue was the textures because whoever made it had a lot of time on their hands and made 156 different candles. Not even 1 was the same as another. I mean really who in their right mind would make 156 candles and be ok after completing them. We usually make 5-10 and use array to copy them without adding to render times.
Short lesson (or something like that, I ain't a good teacher)Array is a method to copy an item:
e.g. cube copied to cube-1. The cube-1 takes the geometry and textures from cube.
Drawback: If I make a change to cube in geometry or textures, it will apply for cube-1.
Positive: When rendering it will have to compile only the geometry and textures of the cube one time and the position of the items (x,y,z) of cube and cube-1 and aplly the textures to them.
Anyway, after my vision of this animation was shuttered, I got stuck with just an open blender file and starring at it for hours, trying to compose a scene. Then it came to me I had some old scenes with low textures and low poly terrain. I fixed them a bit and here's the result.
In the time I was trying to figure what to do, I re-watched some lessons I had for animating and tried some techniques on this. Also this animation will be a 20sec, more or less, loop animation with squirting and dripping creamp*e. So the ending will be an never ending cycle. That's because of the techniques I used. The movements are smoother but really hard to not make them a loop, not impossible but I'd have to work for a bit of time so I don't want to waste a week or more to have a different ending. Also this position is a bit difficult because at POV you see nothing. The method I used is mainly for looped animations in video games like idle, combat moves, running, everything that is looped.
Also I tried to experiment with geometry nodes so I could make this squish effect that you see on D.Va's face and chest. It was somewhat simple but took me a while to figure it out. It's not that I'm experienced with geomtry nodes or that I could find a tutorial for this.
For now, I got a few textures to fix and some sculpting to do with D.Va but I believe I'll be ready to render by the end of the week. The render time is fast and with only 4 views plus an into one, I believe it'll take, more or less a day to render.
I hope I'll get a good final result with this one, otherwise I'll be sulking for a day or two. 😅