Gift of Nature - Animated Short Film

I proudly present you my short animated film Gift of Nature:

I've been working on this film for 1.5 years in total including creating the script, but the 95% of it was made in the last 6 months. I've finished it just roughtly 2 weeks ago.

This project was made as an art diploma and now I can officially call myself a Master of Arts

I've been using plants models from the GRASWALD addon. Everything else was made by me :) (characters, animation, lighting, rendering, etc)

Everything about this film (except for logo, sounds and editing), was made using blender (I found VSE too slow and buggy to work with)

The most difficult part was rendering as I had ZERO budget for a renderfarm and it took me around 1.5 months of computing time. Several shots were rendered multiple times. I was rendering with RTX 2060 (Optix) and it took on average 10 minutes to render one frame. You can still see some flickering in the video which is caused by denoising with low samples number. I wouldn't be able to increase the render time even more.

All the mist and godrays were created in the compositor editor as rendering volumetrics would make the render time 5 times longer. I've discovered this way, that with fake godrays i had more artistic control over it. The tricky part was to make it work in the first shot where camera flies between trees.

here is a link to blenderartists with the very same video description, but you can see some screenshots there.