Worlds Apart: BEHIND THE SCENES (Minecraft Animation)

Hey everyone Sam here with the behind the scenes my newest animation worlds apart so this animation has been in the works for quite a few months now I started brainstorming ideas with RB and Dan about five or so months ago I think after I finished the new house

Animation in December I played a lot of half-life and half-life 2 and those two big inspirations for this story the drogue who were the alien species in this animation were inspired by the combine from half-life I’ve been wanting to do a sci-fi animation for some time now and explore things like parallel

Universes alternate realities or time-travel anything kind of science II has always been interesting story wise I want you to do things with different species and different characters things like Mass Effect have always been a big inspiration for the kind of route I want to go down in terms of what the stories

I want to do since we designed the new bps office we kind of had a discussion about wanting to keep things within the the same universe as things feel a bit consistent so things like the dark hero has Skyfall star at the office and go

Off and do his own thing in worlds apart I start at the office and then the derp comes and gets me and we head off we go through the portal and yeah and don’t spoil the animation sci-fi always has really interesting visuals and visual effects so I tried to get out across

With the weapons and the technology and even the lighting from time to time in terms of characters we have Krista who was the female protagonist that my character meets when he goes through the portal Krista was designed by you not-not-not you their name is you he put

Together a design for her and did three different hair colors and we ended up going with the blue because it looked quite nice with the rest of her clothing I wanted her to have two weapons so she could use different weapons in different situations I did want to avoid sword

Fights as much as possible even though the ending did have a sword fight because I would much prefer to do projectiles blasters guns that kind of thing originally the blasters were meant to have the light light up whenever they fired at is ended up being too much key framing so instead the light

How much ammo or how much energy is in something Varrick was the antagonist of the animation he was the one with the orange eyes and the big cannon he was meant to be someone who was higher up in the drogue kind of hierarchy his cannon was based off the gravity gun from

Half-life 2 and his skin I think I got from a fantasy skins minecraft website and then modified and added a few different elements from other skins to make it this more robotic skin both Christa and Varrick did have kind of fiery flame e energy swords originally I was gonna be using actual fire

Simulation in blender it wasn’t until the last kind of week or two weeks before release that we decided to just change the design completely when we were rendering the fire it was taking so long because fire has something called adaptive domain which was intersecting with the the characters and causing

These weird black lines to appear on their skin as well as having blurring issues when the sword was moving so I turn the adaptive domain off but then the render times were insane they were looking at about 12 minutes of frame as opposed to a minute and a half that we

Are used to doing so the week before release I just said okay no let’s let’s not do the fire anymore we need to come up with a different design so I’ll be offered to design something with materials and he put together a fairly simple kind of energy on the blade plus

This material energy that’s just outside of the blade which creates the illusion of fire but it’s just a noise texture being animated with some transparency when looking for maps I spent so long trying to find maps that had nice huge landscapes and big villages medieval villages and I came across this cool

Castle village type 1 by Ragnar LaRouche I also used one called unspoken paths by Ganon dragged me for when I come across the portal in our reality some of these maps definitely were the largest I’ve ever used some of them were just as soon as you turn that layer on blend it would

Just stop working but I needed to make sure that it actually felt like a real place like it was just this huge wasteland of Venis now the maps don’t actually look that green when put into the animation i took all the textures of green i delete

All the trees i got rid of all the grass all the flowers or the plants and just replaced it with dirt and gravel and stone to make it seem like the world has just completely died out and there’s just no life anywhere anymore but as you

Saw in the memory scene where she was remembering being a child it used to be quite nice designing the drug fortress was such a colossal investment i found a bunch of references I found minecraft maps that kind of had the same design but they were just so complicated and

Huge and blend it wouldn’t run it and I kept putting off the idea of designing one myself and getting people on and building it but eventually I just did it I used their songs of war world of all things and had a few songs of war builders I had RB Kalam’s Guardian

Justin clock Lord of logs looks Mikkel piano puppy and Tori all helped put together this fortress it took a couple of weekends but I was really happy with the result they all did a great job I replaced all the textures with darker black and gray materials to make it seem

More drug-like for the engines I put Harvey’s fake volumetric material on there and just made it Orange and really really fast animated so it looked like these be pulsing engines pumping out energy to keep the fortress in the air the drug designs were fairly interesting I always liked the idea of having black

And orange that always seems very menacing so I tried to keep things very dark and just used the orange to highlight certain areas the energy was just – noise textures animated and added on top of each other the drug ships that fly around with the turrets on took a

Care of a while because I didn’t really know what I wanted I downloaded a bunch of sci-fi spaceships and modified them a bit but I wasn’t really getting anywhere so I just kind of put something together fairly quickly but I think they turned out ok it was a bunch of miscellaneous

Stuff as well like little antennas radio transmission towers and mining wells and drills to take the energy out of the ground for them to fuel their machines I wish I put a bit more of that in the animation there wasn’t much downtime – to show what they were really doing in the

Portal was made up of particles and noise textures I had a particle system that was using a vortex and a harmonic field to keep it spinning and also in into a ring I would control the values of them to have it shrink or grow as necessary the noise texture behind it faded

Between the noise and black so it had a bit of depth to it looked like it was actually a hole that you could go through the blaster projectiles were just simply tiny spheres that had really emissive materials originally they were just going to be the same energy material but it was creating weird

Colors and textures so I ended up just creating a solid color cranking the emission value up and he created nice vector blur lines as they were moving across the screen the varix cannon projectile was a bunch of shapes with different materials on them that kind of represented fiery noise textures almost

It was made up of about four different shapes some for the tail and the hotter smaller ones for the head the explosions were made up of the smoke elements that we made for the TNT explosions but I also created a simple particle simulation that had the energy go

Outwards and then it kind of sucked back in at the last second almost like it was about to implode as well the minigun laser things on the side of the drone ships were done just with a particle system and then I had a an object of a

Kind of look like a pill and it was a missive and that was used as the projectile to fire out in quick succession making the vector blur do the rest of the work to create the nice lines on either side of them if you notice the Varick has a shield when

Crista tries to shoot him with her blaster it hits a force field in front of his armor that was made by using a very very squashed sphere and then adding a noise texture and having the noise move outwards and then fade away after the bullet is hit then the one for

When she gets the sword onto his arm and it goes through the shield I cranked those values up to really make it go faster and faster and faster and then as his arm gets cut off that’s when it fades away so blasters can’t penetrate his shield

Sword clearly ken I knew the drug had to be unique and sound unique so I had Dan after infinity put together a bunch of sound design for this he ended up actually doing pretty much all of the sound design for this animation I wanted them to sound very industrial and dark

And gritty the sword sounded very fire like the punch is always felt very impactful this was the first animation that I went shot by shot I think I really wanted the wallpaper shots when the fortress was coming through the clouds that shot was great because I

Used render layers I put the fortress on a different render layer and then altered the transparency of it so it almost looked like it was coming through the clouds but it was actually just fading into the sky HDRI but it ended up Korean this really cool effect there

Weren’t too many thumbnail ideas for this one it was kind of last minute because I had to save time to get the sponsorship done the thumbnail we ended up with I was really happy with it had the same kind of composition as survival island it had a nice big fortress in the

Background oh what’s that and I had the two characters standing there armed and ready I’ve always tried to avoid fights but I ended up being fairly satisfied with what I came up with whenever there was action set piece I would go into paint of course and

Design a bunch of oh okay this character goes here and then they kill that person then this character goes over him and whatnot so for every fight it had a little sketch for what was to happen overall I’m pretty happy with how this animation turned out I always wanted to

Do sci-fi and I’m finally glad I get to do it the animation took longer than expected but I hope it was worth the time and effort I put into it this is a story I care about and I do have a lot of plans for the way the story goes if

People want to see more I definitely couldn’t have done this animation without Dan’s help with a sound and arby’s help with the bloopers he did all the bloopers many designed Krista and Varrick swords so I’m really grateful for everyone’s contribution to this I hope people enjoy this because I’m

Really excited to continue this story there’s a lot of interesting things yet to have and that’s about it thank you all for watching and thank you for supporting us I’ll see you in the next video