Blender can take a project from 3D modelling through physics simulation and final animation. This short film explores a cave-and-crystal setting, combining an outdoor green-screen performance with a textured plane placed in a 3D environment.
Crystal Materials
Several crystal materials were developed and tested to give the cave its colour, translucency, and reflective detail.
Building the Cave and Waterfall
The cave uses a textured video plane from green-screen footage, composited into a 3D environment. Volumetric lighting around the cave entrance responds to the actor’s movement and helps integrate the plane into the scene.
A fluid simulation runs in front of the moving character to create a fast-moving waterfall. This scene was time-consuming to render, even on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU.
Smoke Effects
EmberGen was used to create the smoke effects. The tool can generate a wide range of smoke and fire animations.
Crystal Cave
The final cave consists of a large number of crystals:
3D-Printed Crystal Light
Because the crystal models were available in Blender, their geometry could be exported to a 3D-printing format such as STL. PrusaSlicer can then generate printing instructions.
One crystal object was integrated into a flat cube. A height modifier was used to adjust the vertical profile, similar to a displacement map. This mimics the shape of a real rock with an attached crystal.
A glow-in-the-dark PLA filament was selected and added to a custom printed box with a powerful 12 V DC LED light. Switching on the LED charges the material.
The light is decorative even when unpowered. After the LED is switched off and the room is dark, the charged PLA continues to glow:
The duration of the glow-in-the-dark effect varies with the amount of light exposure.
Rather than exposing the LED directly, the glow-in-the-dark PLA diffuses its light into a softer, dimmer glow.