The Process and Challenges

To work toward my goal of developing a complete character animation pipeline in Blender, I created a short 10-second animation featuring Pablo, an original character I designed entirely from scratch. Pablo is a small, round bird-like figure with thick cartoon eyebrows, a geometric beak, a moustache, and a grumpy, deadpan expression. The concept was simple but specific: Pablo walks through a dark brick alleyway, turns to the camera, and shoots it. The camera shatters, and the screen breaks with it.

Every part of that result I built myself. I modelled Pablo, textured him, rigged him, animated him, set up the scene with lighting and environment, created the glass shattering effect using a particle system in Blender, and then took the rendered footage into After Effects where I colour graded it and added a VHS overlay to give it a grainy, analog horror feeling. For a first complete pipeline that was a lot of unknowns to navigate at once.

The part that gave me the most trouble was UV unwrapping and texturing. Getting the seams in the right places, laying out the islands cleanly, and making sure the texture actually looked right on the model took far longer than I expected and required help. Classmates Sijb and Marijn were useful here, both for pointing me in the right direction technically with the unwrapping process and for bouncing ideas around when I was stuck creatively. The rigging itself, which I had been most nervous about, turned out to be more manageable than I expected.

The moment things really clicked was after I finished the rig and started posing Pablo for the first time. Suddenly the model had weight and attitude. He felt like a character rather than a mesh. That shift from object to personality was the moment I understood what rigging actually does, not just technically but creatively.

The After Effects stage was where the animation found its tone. The VHS grain, the chromatic aberration, the dim colour grade, all of it pushed Pablo from an exercise into something with a genuine mood and identity. It made me realise how much the editing and post-production phase contributes to what an animation actually feels like.

What I Learned

This project taught me that the hardest parts of a pipeline are rarely the ones you expect. I went in worried about rigging and came out having spent most of my problem-solving time on UV unwrapping. I also learned that finishing something, even a 10-second piece, teaches you more than any tutorial. Every decision had a consequence I had to deal with, and that forced a kind of learning that watching videos simply does not replicate.

I also learned something about my own taste. Pablo ended up with a specific visual identity, gritty, slightly menacing, analog, that I did not plan from the start but grew naturally out of the choices I made. That process of discovering a style through making is something I want to keep following.

Next Steps

The 30-second animation I am working toward next is a fight scene between Pablo and Spider-Man. Spider-Man is a high-poly pre-rigged model I am using specifically to practice animating a complex professional rig, while the low-poly character on the other side will be fully built by me. The key difference from the Pablo test is that I want to push the exaggeration much further. Bigger anticipations, more squash and stretch, timing that is deliberately over the top. Where the Pablo animation was about proving I could complete the pipeline, this next piece is about developing an actual animation voice.