Blender has proved its self to be the best software for any 3d artists over and over, yes there better applications out there like houdini, maya, cinema 4d that are industry standard but the problem with those applications is that they are not meant to be a one size fits all like blender, forexample when using cinema 4d, you are expected to use zbrush for sculpting and not cinema 4d, though cinema 4d has some sculpting functionality its not to the same level as blender, Houdini is also at simulations but its going to be turf to create a full movie with it, you can still do it but blender offers better tools for animations.

Blender may not be the best for simulation, animation or texturing but atleast you can start a project and finish it without ever living, so how can blender be used to make your first movie.

to keep this video to a reasonable length i will not be explaining the different stages of production but i will be showing you what blender tool you can use at specific stages of production, for example script writing.

while blender comes with a script editor this is not meant for writing scripts, actually it is meant for writing scripts but not movie scripts, its meant for writing python scripts used for creating new functionality in blender like new operators or addons, though if you are brave enough you can still use it as a script editor as well for writing movie scripts.

when you have a script the next stage of production is usually story boarding and blender has the best story boarding workspace among all other 3d applications and am sure soon it may become the industry standard, here am talking of glease pencil, in this workspace you can turn blender into a complete 2d animation suit with brushes, layers and everything you can ever want, you can make the entire movie right here like many others have done, using glease pencil which has become a popular tool for 3d artists.

from this stage you can start creating some concept art, these can be detailed sketches of key stages in your story, its the look development stage, capturing the nature and atmosphere of your story and setting the visual mood of your story, most artists use applications like photoshop at this stage to create 2d drawings but lately alot of artists have started using 3d applications as a starting point for there concept art, here are some youtube channels that specialize in this type of art.

At the concept art stage you can start gathering reference images a good application for this is puref, it makes collecting images really easy and fast, if you want to stay inside blender there is an addon called blendref that basically functions like puref but inside blender, if you dont want to use addons you can also just drag your references directly in to a different 3d viewer with overlays and extras turned off to make it less clattered i usually have this set off far way from my scene to make it easy to navigate to.

blender is in my opinion the best modeling tool for making characters and other models where it struggles abit is in making hardsurface models, most 3d applications are not off the shelf good at hardsurface modeling they all rely on 3rd party tools like addons and plugins, if you plan on making alot of hardsurface models you can get something like hardops boxcutter a non destructive tool for hardsurface modeling that adds new tools, modifiers and presets for hardsurface modeling.

As a blender artists you are likely a one man army with a small budget or no budget at all, so you have to be careful how you approach your movie, your movie pipeline can’t be similar to how large movies work since they have access to resources that you may not have, so thats why this is not a guide on how to make hollywood movies but a guide on how to make your movie look like a hollywood or large studio movie by taking all the shortcuts that are possible to take.

like making characters the traditional way would take days if not weeks that we dont have, but using something like blocksurfaces to easily block out the silhoute of you character will make it supper fast for you, with something like blocksurfaces you can even start posing and animating your characters before adding detail that way you can test if the character design works or not before spending too much time.

a comparable tool to blocksurfaces but for non organic objects like metals is projection modeling, you can use it to model objects that are too complicated to model by hand or by skulpting, you just traceout the objects shape using curves from different direction and the addon does its magic to piece them together. while this are great tools for modeling i cant guarantee the topology of the mesh you will get or whether this is acceptable for modeling standards, but what i can say is they will get the job done.

As a solo artist or small team creating a movie, its going to be alot hard to create every model, every asset, or prop needed in your movie you can either hire an extra hand to help or try out Ai model generators like the blender Ai library Pro this is an addon for blender that you can use to generate models you want, they come out already textured, and you can also use the addon to generate pbr textures or use its image to 3d generator, if you are not comfortable with Ai there alot of other tools that can help you create assets you need really fast like the Procedural Building Generator 2 which can convert any mesh into a building in different styles, this is one of the reasons why blender is becoming the most favoured 3d application in the industry, not because it has the best tools but because everything you want to do, someone in the community has thought of away to do it faster and easier, say you want to have an explosion in your scene, setting it up can take you quite sometime but an addon like Khaos has can set everything up for you in a matter of seconds and all you have to do is simulate. And if you have a potato PC, basically a computer that is not powerful enough to simulate or takes too long, the vdb collections of explosions, clouds from True-Vdb Explosions Pack and other creators like lazyVFx these simulations take hours if not days to setup and bake so you can cut some of that time by just getting a pack like this.

its at this stage where most people start giving up, after realizing how many assets they need and what time it takes to make them, take an example of the number of trees in this small forest, generated by the forest generator, in a space of a few square meters you have several tree species, grass, rocks, all textured with high resolution maps, making a scene like this would take you atleast a month if you tried to make it all from scratch.

there are several plant libraries and addons that work a bit different like botaniq which is one of the most updated and most popular addon for blender with several features used to scatter plants and vegetations, these trees are usually quite high poly and really detailed which is great but that usually comes at a cost of additional render time. the makers of botaniq also have an addon called MemSaver for optimizing meshes reducing texture sizes and optimizing meshes to reduce render times.

While it would have been easier to just list the steps you need to make a movie its also important for you to know what issues you may run into and how to solve them, yes creating a realistic forest with high detailed trees will look cinematic but what would be the point if your computer can’t render it, so if you want a dense large forest or something equivalent you have to know the right tools to use, in this case botaniq trees or the forest generator may not be the solution as these are meant for closeup shots mostly if you want to create large dense forests you will need something like Alpha Trees, this addon does not use actual tree geometry but it fakes the look by using a tree texture on a plane, while something simple like this may not look that great at closeup, if you are rendering a large scene with hundreds or millions of trees it looks perfect and might be your only option.

After modeling you likely need to create materials and textures for your scene, this is the look development stage, you decide how weathered your walls will be, how dirty or clean everything will be, making this is not hard to setup, what is hard is creating all the materials and collecting all the necessary textures needed for creating those materials, for example a single object can have over 5 textures layered on top of the pbr material, a texture for dirt, another for scratches, another to breakup texture tiling, another to add decals and more, a realistic material can be complicated to make, thats why alot of artists opt for material libraries like sanctus material library that has procedural materials, decals, dirt layers, scratches and more so that they dont have to think of that stuff, if you just want decals to make your scene look more detailed and interesting you can try using decal master to add decals.

Materials are not the only thing you need for look development, lighting is also a key part of it, lighting can be broken into three categories, subject lighting this is the object in focus or taking up most of the screen, background lighting and environment lighting, most times when lighting you always want to have separation between the subject and background, this means the use of rim lights on the characters, if you straggle with this light setup and addon like Light Wrangler . the background should not be brighter than the subject and to make it look more interesting you can use light gobos to add interest shadow detail in the background so that everything does not look flat. you also have the environment in general, this is generally also works as fill light for your scene and this is lighting for the sky bouncing around your scene tool light up unlit areas, so its important to have an environment lighting setup that looks interesting blender comes with the sky texture but since we are looking for something interesting i propose something like pure-sky pro this comes with everything you need, from moving clouds, atmosphere, a day and night cycle and more.

So you have modeled everything you need, setup the materials and lighting, at this stage you should be ready for animation, some make animations before creating materials and lighting but most prefer after so that you can see the key poses in the final materials and lighting, before you animate you need to rig your models, blender comes with rigify for rigging characters but the addon auto rig pro seems to be favored among professional animations, there is also the auto rig pro library that comes with 25 different rigs from dinosaurs, bears, birds, dogs and more, if you want to rig vehicles you may Car-Rig Pro  is the most used among the blender community.

After animation you want to add extra effects to make the animation look more grounded like particle effects, these effects could be dust like when a character is running or falls, birds and insects, leaves and more again like most things we have looked at blender has the tools and systems to set these up your self without any addons but if you are in a rush, for something like this the particle library is a great option.

Another effect that adds realism to your animations is cloth animation, what sets realistic animations from cartoonish renders is how detailed the cloth simulations are and you can always see this in cartoons, games and movies, when they want true realism they go all in on the cloth simulation, while most studios use marvelous designer blender artists have divine cut which produces comparable results.

at this stage you have afew more steps before you render, like creating the environment, this is going to be the place where most of your story is going to take place, you can sculpt it or generate it using tools like true terrain to do most of the work for you, after that you can do some compositing to make sure the colors are correct and balanced and then render

Obviously this is an over simplification of a very complicated process, but it can also be one of the most fun you will ever have, seeing your vision take shape, pixel by pixel, frame by frame, so go at it, make your first movie, blender has all the necessary tools and what we have looked at is just have of it