I wanted to try making something more stylized than I'm used to. Also, since I've mostly just worked in film, I wanted to make something more tailored for a game, although ultimately I decided to render using Blender. I learned a lot about texture painting and how to more efficiently create UV maps with this project.
Made in Blender using the recently released simulation nodes.
It works by drawing curves with a start point and end point at a random coordinate at the top and bottom of a cube. Noise is applied to the curve, then the radius is increased to be visible.
In the future, I'd like to make it a bit more realistic, like adding branches before the final strike.
This went through about a dozen iterations before I finally settled on a method that worked.
Part of an environment piece I'm working on. For some reason I keep leaning towards hand-painted things lately.
Based on the concept by Gian Andri Bezzola
I made these for Halloween 2021 and 2022
Rigged and animated in Blender. I exported the render to OBS where I applied some post processing, like flicker, and set a schedule for when they sing.
I tried to emulate the same sort of effect as the singing busts from the Haunted Mansion, so naturally I went with the same song choice. The next year I added "Banana Boat (Day-O)," but sadly I've lost the footage. I'll have to take another video next Halloween.