80/20 Gallery

The “80/20 Gallery” is a system I made for animated render studies, designed to minimize my time spent (20%) and maximize learning/output/growth (80%).

This series helps me learn/practice/grow, in Quill and Blender, when life gets crazy busy. It's also a celebration of the Quill community's amazing discoveries. Whenever a new technique pops up I will return to this workflow and add studies. During 2021 I created 40+ rendered studies on/off over a 4 month period.

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Project Overview

Problem: 

Sometimes my free time gets reduced to very short, uneven burst. During these times I need to plan and prioritize my creative/learning time so I can continue growing.


Goals: 

  1. Learn and practice new Quill animation techniques/discoveries from the community. Specifically from the Virtual Animation Discord classes by Jari, Daniel Martin Peixe, and Goro Fujita (links to their tutorials below).

  2. Explore Blender lighting and material scenarios with different Quill mesh animations. 

  3. Design a variety of architectural scenarios for a cube volume.

  4. Supercharge my creative time with new workflows and templates.


Strategy:

Create a systematic learning vehicle for generating different scenarios, by building templates and workflows, to maximize my time spend/output. These include Quill templates for new animation workflows and Blender templates for materials, environments, and lighting scenarios. Planning and ideation happen away from my PC. This is the most important part of the workflow. It ensures my time spent at my PC is as efficient as possible. Tools for planning include Trello mobile, sticky notes, and meditation (design in my head) while doing chores. 

Bottom line: By building templates my mind is free to focus on learning/exploration. I also strategically work on different parts of the workflow given how much time I have and the context I’m in. This helps me avoid blockers and keeps things moving.


Workflow:

  1. Plan: Concept scenarios and things to learn. Prioritize and map out in Trello.

  2. Study: New Quill techniques discovered by the community. New blender tools and things I don’t know.

  3. Practice: New Quill techniques for 15-30 min.

  4. Design: concepts and pick one. Massage variables in Blender.

  5. Render: 6 sec clip at 30fps, slow clip down half speed, send thru Flowframes to get frame rate back up to 30fps. 

  6. Name: Find a fitting title and research more about it to understand the concept on a deeper level.

  7. Edit: Sound design and video.

  8. Share: Gather feedback on what resonates for fast 2D consumption.


Design Variables:

  • Animation technique

  • Overall look (dark or light?)

  • Animation material

  • Composition

  • Environment/volume design 

  • Lighting scenario

  • Audio

  • Narrative


Statistics:

  • 4 Month duration, during 2021, working on/off

  • 40+ animated render studies

  • 2 Quill Theater/Oculus TV uploads

  • 7 tools (Quill, Blender, Flowframes, Davinci Resolve, Envanto Elements, Vimeo, Trello) 

  • 14 animation techniques (some mixed)

  • Most used technique: Daniel’s “Wind FX”

  • Most influential creator: Jari


Quill Animation Techniques:


Learnings:

  • Overall:

    • Tweaking one variable is not enough to differentiate one rendered study from another at a glance.

    • The series evolved over time. It started as an attempt at minimalism but naturally feel back into my comfort zone of complexity. 

    • Keeping the workflow on one machine improved speed greatly. For example I moved all video editing from Mac Adobe to Davinci Resolve on PC.

    • I was generating concepts way faster than I could output the rendered studies. Cycles X helped bridge this gap a bit but volumetric rendering was not yet released so those studies took longer. The dream of eliminating the “concept to finished render” gap is getting very close tho.

  • Theme:

    • “Layers on layers.” Everything was supercharged by stacking techniques, workflows, tools, etc.

  • Video Collaging:

    • For the full Collage I wanted a 6x6 square 2k resolution video running at 60fps. I ran into performance issues putting the full collage together making it impossible to work with in Davinci Resolve. I mean its 36 60fps HD videos running at once. So I subdivided the full collage into four separate 3x3 square videos. Then collaged those subdivided videos together to get the full 6x6.

    • I also had to set Davinci Resolve to pull from my GPU. It was set to CPU by default. That made a huge difference in performance and I wished I would have realized this sooner.

  • Quill:

    • Goro Multiple step redo. Just alt + redo (UI video when he does the honeycomb shapes)

    • Jari “Circular Deformation” Technique

    • Jari “Draw-in” Effect

    • Jari colorize anim by duplicating while colorizing at the same time.

    • Jari bake empty frames to quickly get long frame by frame loop

    • Jari “Infinite Loop” Technique

    • Jari “Golden Angle” and torus technique

    • Daniel “Wind FX” Technique

  • New Tools:

    • Flowframes

    • Davinci Resolve

    • Vimeo

  • Blender:

    • Cycles X

    • HDRI lighting 

    • Mesh to clouds

    • What VBDs are

    • Good black concrete material

    • How to fix missing textures

    • How to use ocean modifier 

    • How to tilt on z to maintain verticals on low camera eye level

    • Boolean anim + how to fix artifacts

    • Use quill vertex anim to drive emissive values 

    • Rock essentials pack

    • Iridescent and stylized glass material

    • Shading with transparency 

    • Surface imperfection maps

    • Displacement maps

    • Unity style movement for cameras

    • How to better control transmission and alpha settings