This article is also available in: Français
The Blender team unveils a new short film: Charge.
This short film is directed by Hjalti Hjálmarsson, who was also the director of other shorts created using Blender such as Sprite Fight or Agent 327 : Operation Barbershop. Andy Goralczyk is the artistic director, and Rik Schutte is the lead animator.
Don’t miss the end credits, as is features some making-of pictures. It will give you a glimpse of the work that went into producing Charge.
In an energy-scarce dystopia, an old destitute man breaks into a battery factory but soon finds himself confronted by a deadly security droid and no way out.
Charge was created by Blender Studio, the creative arm of the Blender headquarters. Their goal is to work on creative projets and animated shorts, with a team of artists and developpers. This way, they can push Blender forward by using it as a production tool, and improve existing functions or develop new ones.
This goal also explains why the short films created by Blender Studio have various visual styles: this way, the team can focus on various parts of Blender, for example Grease Pencil, FX, 3D animation tools, and so on.
Charge is the 14th short created by Blender Studio. The team explains that they wanted to create a film that would be “inspired by the game cinematics and realtime demos formats”. They add that they “pursued realism and pushed Blender’s capabilities in the interactive PBR workflow”.
As usual, you can download production files, assets, making-of videos on the official Blender Studio website (a subscription is required). Free content is also available, such as a hair grooming file, a curve stitching tool, an animation progression video and shading tests.