for the motion blur effect too, I actually rendered it in-scene. Simply tick the motion blur option in the camera settings, keyframe the intended location of your models (in my case, the 6th frame), and move them around. Render on the 6th frame and you'll have some nice, realistic motion blur

Bonus behind the scenes pic. Things only have to look good for the camera lol

Even just a little edge wear can make a texture feel that much more fitting

One thing that should not be skimped on when bringing a scene together is the *grime.* It makes everything just that more realistic. Dust, dirt, texture variations on the walls

And naturally, here's some wips as the scene came together

Thanks. Seeing everything behind the scenes was a huge help for me starting out and helped me pick up a lot of little tips and tricks. I also just love seeing how scenes come together in general, so I try to show as much as I can in the off chance someone else enjoys this stuff too aha

I try to use depth maps when I can too. They help a lot with making an image feel less flat. Maybe obvious, but this little thing took me way too long to figure out lol

And finally the audio. Probably the most fun part of it all. People tend to underestimate how much some simple audio can make your animation feel a lot more real. I use adobe premiere (legally acquired, of course) and a lot of sounds from various games personally

Fluid physics was quite the adventure too. I use flip fluids, an improved version of Blender's built-in fluid physics that give much better results. It took a few days of actually learning it and a few days after that to tweak the settings into something I was happy with.

The background is actually a still image, with the animation laid on top in post (and a tiny, tiny bit of animated grain to make it blend in better). I'm quite happy with it despite how little you actually see!

So I ended up spending a bit of time on the background for this one. A little tip I found with speeding up render time significantly was rendering the animation and the background separately

(fun fact, you can get away with using the same character model for every character if you just change their clothes and hair lol)

This is an old piece but I figured I may as well upload it. I've been sitting on it for a while. And of course, some wips, because I love wips