Youtubers vs Realistic Monsters

This project was a lot of fun on the tech side, there’s a nice split of stuff to do both in Minecraft and Blender.

But how did we do it?#

On Minecraft we had to use ReplayMod to capture gameplay with depth data on a sequence of .exr files, and also camera movement data. As for Blender we had to import the Minecraft world into it, I’ve used MineWays which sadly doesn’t support importing meshes from installed mods, it required me to manually add placeholders for the animation pass to work with.

It Doesn’t matter if the meshes have texture or not, since the whole environment is just a mask for the huggy model and a base for the animator we can get away with it. The player is also a model in this since we are interacting with it, like so.

My work on this project was to prep the files for the animation and rendering to go smoothly. So I’ve imported the Minecraft world, added placeholder meshes where necessary, and set up the files properly for the animator. I’ve also rendered the replay files as proxy videos Blender viewport to guide the animator, and the full quality .exr sequences to render the monster directly on the gameplay footage.