Patreon Peeks 35: The Springtrap Shift Scene (Patreon)

Hello! I have quite a few animated shots from my recent What I Love video about Five Nights at Freddy's sequels that I'm excited to break down for you. Let's start with one that picked up a bit of attention for looking seemingly like an illustration before coming to life as a 3D animation: a shot of the decrepit animatronic Springtrap, noticing a sound and peering around at it. You can see it at around 6:20 here: https://youtu.be/rMkkE0AIuMo

To create this scene, I knew Springtrap looks too complicated to animate in this way without spending days on the shot (there were already other shots that were going to take a few days!), so I opted to animate a 3D model instead. Fortunately, one is available on the Models Resource, extracted from Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted. Thanks to uploader Ziella for that.

The model itself is huge. Many more polygons than I expected, but it is from a VR game, so I suppose they need to account for the player getting relatively close to the model. It imported into Blender and retained its animation rig, so I could create this animation from scratch:

I animated a lot of moving parts to bounce or lazily list a little, as if they were broken. The result is pretty zombefied, which is what I was going for. Next, I needed to create a custom shader that could match the style of my usual videos:

This is a relatively new feature of Blender on the left: Shader to RGB. It can take the input of that diffuse shader, and convert it into just raw color. I put that raw color data through a color ramp to make it just pure black or pure white, and then map that onto an emission shader. So, the shader is emitting light based on where a light source is coming from, giving me a great deal of control over this stylized look. I also added a Fresnel effect to it, through the same kind of color ramp. That adds a little white fringe to all the oblique angles of this model, honestly it's a pretty expressionist design.

I finished up the look by adding Freestyle, Blender's optional extra layer of outlines around models in a scene. That created some thicker white lines that added detail where the shader didn't. The two complement each other, since Freestyle can be finicky with rotating models.

And finally, the last step was: only rendering every third frame. Rendering a solid 30 frames per second would make this look too much like a clean, polished 3D model, in my opinion. So I opted for 10 frames per second instead, and I think the result looks a fair bit rawer and more illustrated, while getting that complex movement across. I'm really thinking of employing this sort of style to future 3D models I use!