Author: Al Sande

The main idea for this one came together fairly quickly – but it was reworked a few times to add some fine details.  Lots going on in this one, made in Blender (of course!).  If you’re interested in all of the technical details, read on…

I started with the timelapse running in the background, which I had a while back from around a thousand images captured from my lake webcam one day this spring, which I rendered out to a movie file.    I imported this movie file using Blender’s “import image as plane” and bent the image over at roughly the waterline so that the lower is roughly parallel to the water and the mountains/skies rise vertically.  I then added another plane, subdivided a bunch of times so I could use dynamic paint (with the dancer as the brush) to simulate the waves.  I also added a semi-transparent reflective material to this plane which reflected both the dancer and the timelapse image but let the real lake’s surface timelapse show through.

The dancer was made in the MB-Lab add-on in Blender and rigged with Auto-Rig Pro.  This rigging system let me import and add the Motion Capture file of the dance made by Carnegy Mellon University over 15 years ago so I really didn’t have to do any animation (other than slowing it down by half).  I did design a simple rig for the lady’s ponytail so a some movement could be added to it using “wiggle bones”.  I modeled the clothes for the model, just applied a white shiny finish to it and added a cloth simulation to let the cloth move with the dancer.

I also added the fog using the Alt-Tab-Easy Fog 2 addon and animated its density at the beginning and end to make it appear and disappear.

After it was all put together, I added some open source music from Pixabay (the song Eternity by Leva)  https://pixabay.com/users/lemonmusicstudio-14942887/