CG veteran Pierrick Picaut, who currently heads up the character department at French indie game studio Atypique, released this fabulous two-minute animated rampage to rally interest in his latest Blender rigging course.

Pierrick Picaut: “The film’s scenario has the Gorilla named Kibali taking the knowledge of rigging back from the machines. I was definitely looking for a stylized animation style, mixing influences from anime, Arcane, SpiderVerse, and the TMNT Mutant Mayhem movie.

“The characters were already modeled and rigged since I used them in the course – I started this film in January and had it done in seven weeks. The course production itself took a year and a half.
 

“I was definitely looking for a stylized animation style, mixing influences from anime, Arcane, the SpiderVerse, and the TMNT Mutant Mayhem movie.

 
“I storyboarded everything using the 3D models and Blender’s camera and made an animatic out of it. This allowed me to quickly have a first edit, then I focused on animation using simple block out for the envirnonment.

“I also used a lot of little tricks were I would animate the environment but not the camera. For example during the free fall, the camera is not moving much, just spinning, and the cliffs in the background are actually moving up.

“Once most of the shots were animated, I created the environment using kit bashing and some sculpting, trying to make it as re-usable as possible. All shots were lit and rendered in Blender using the alpha version of EEVEE Next. The final step was to create hand drawn VFX using Adobe Animate and Harmony Toon Boom. I then comped everything in After Effects.”

More about Picaut’s The Art of Effective Rigging 2 here.
 
 

 
Director/animator: Pierrick Picaut
Additional animation: Luciano Munoz
Additional VFX: Thomas Bernardet

Music/sound design: Gabriel Dalmasso