One of the most fun projects I've created to date, Miracles was created for Kalos Church in the fall of 2019. We had gone thru a few different revisions for style and tone but nothing seemed to be working. With only a week before the series launched, one of the the pastors at Kalos, Pastor Pradeepan, asked if we could do it in the style of Stranger Things. Miracles went thru the month of October and he wanted something mysterious that reflected the show - something with a spooky or mysterious and dark feel to it.
Since the series would focus on the many different miracles that Jesus performed, I narrowed it down to a select few vignettes - Healing the crippled hand, turning water into wine, casting the demons into pigs, and feeding of the 5,000. It was important to keep everything simple with the deadline a few days away, but I wanted each of the scenes to include an element (3d technique) that was fairly new to me.
I didn't have a whole lot of experience with the fracture object before this and I thought it would be the perfect way to represent a broken hand. First I put the entire hand into the fracture object for some basic large shatters. From there I put the finger tips into another fracture object to create more detail. After that, I placed effectors on the different elements and animated them with Greyscale Gorilla's Signal plugin.
Continued below
Software Used
- Cinema 4d
- Substance Designer
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe After Effects
- Cycles 4d
The fluid dynamics were a real challenge to make with X-Particles. While the system is fairly intuitive to use, getting the right settings to match reference videos wasn't as easy as I initially thought. However, subtly spinning the glass gave the particles a bit of direction to create a dynamic splash. It's still far from perfect but I'm happy with how it came out in a days work.
The pigs are probably my favorite part of the video. The scene overall was fun to create and rigging up the pigs proved to be a lot of fun. I developed a technique of using selections on the mesh, then applying the weight from the joint onto that selection. Once the entire pig is weighted, I smooth out all the weights. This method has its downfalls with elements not being weighted properly in some cases, but it's a quick way to start the rigging process.
I had bought Redshift a couple months prior to this video, but I wasn't familiar enough with it to render with Redshift. Instead, I used Cycles 4d for all the scenes. Each day that week I created and finished a scene so that I could render it overnight. Thankfully everything went smoothly and I was able to finish in time.
