If you’ve followed the project, you know I’ve been using Blender in two ways, blockouts and overpainting. Both hand a Blender render to a video model. A blockout is crude, and only guides the layout and motion. An overpaint starts from detailed 3D models, and the model is told to repaint them in the film’s animation style. I had hoped overpainting would give me real control over the output. It didn’t, so I’ve been trying something else:

The test is shot 65.a, the ark under tow. The ark started as a rough illustration, went through an image model for a cleaner version, and then through Tripo3D to become a 3D model. The vacbeast was much harder: none of the image or 3D models could make sense of it, so Claude ended up building it directly in Blender.

Rough sketch of the ark, a long curved tube bound with frayed rope bands, with a wooden door in its open mouth

Wireframe render of a vacbeast on its tow-line, with the ark’s mouth behind it

Scale matters a lot in this shot. The ark is 800 meters long, a vacbeast is around 25 meters, and the riders are under 2 meters. Video models definitely have trouble with that. My first overpaint tests went reasonably well, but then the takes started inventing things: a second ark, vacbeasts the size of horses, a close-up nobody asked for. I also ran it through the new Kling 4.0, and it put the rider on backwards.

Every take costs money, and I wasn’t happy with where the overpaints were going, so I decided to see whether the large-scale scenes, especially in space, could be done entirely in Blender. Claude helped me retexture the 3D models and add a background that moves with the camera. No video model touches these frames.

The ark and its fifteen vacbeasts against a painted Dust backdrop, rendered in Blender

Closer on the ark’s gate with vent plumes drifting past the vacbeasts, rendered in Blender

So far it’s very promising. The ark fits the animation style, though the vacbeasts still look a little CGI.