Sometimes I like taking work from other mediums and recreating it in Blender. This morning I saw this post on Mastodon, and though it might be a good warm-up.
It took a bit longer than I expect, but I'm happy with it. And it doesn't tread too hard on the original, in my opinion, which is good when I'm pulling inspiration from other people's work.
This was the final version of my cereal shuffling machine animation, where tons of cereal gets dropped into the scene, and then slowly churned away.
I had to add some special, hidden physics blocks to keep all the cereal contained as it was disposed of, but you can't really tell from the limited view. I also adjusted the background to be a little warmer for this one. I was getting tired of the colder blue/purple fade.
It took a long time to render this one - 2,290 frames, each taking 6-10 seconds to finish.
I didn't release this one on other social media, but this was an intermediate step towards my ultimate goal: adding tons of cereal pieces! 😆
After a bit of tinkering, I finally got the physics to cooperate and properly dispose of all the cereal pieces, make the animation loop seamlessly. There's always room for improvement, however!
Almost got it with this one. Timing is off, though!
I took a break from modeling more cereal pieces to play around with physics some more. I came up with this weird cereal shuffling machine that emerges from the floor to clear out the fallen pieces... it doesn't quite work, though! 😅
I modeled and created materials for a few more cereal pieces... I kinda want to have about 10 different types, and then mix them all together. Some of these materials look simple in real life, but are quite hard to replicate, even without shooting for complete realism, in Blender.
I swapped out the lighting on this scene for an HDRI, for a little more realism. It doesn't need to look 100% real, but I like the change.
Oh, and I added a spoon, too.
This milk is looking thiiick. 🤤
Here's another cereal render. I adjusted the colors a bit here so they are more true to what you might see in a real cereal like this.