gif of a deerlike amalgamation, rising shakily. Then it screams.

brame animal.

June 2026

Back in 2023, I cobbled together this bizarro frankendeer and called it brame, from an album I was looping at the time. More recently I thought it’d make for some neat 3D practice. Its design has only ever been envisioned in solid #000000 black—so whereas last model was meant to be flat but ended up shiny, I ignored shadows and other 3D sensibilities on this one from the getgo.

This turned out to be… interesting, considering how busy the design is with all the limbs. Oh well. I could probably futz with that by manually adjusting the colors of each object, maybe varying it by camera distance, but this mostly ended up being an experiment in the compositor and (to a lesser extent) animation workflow.

obligatory blender linkspam haul

changing the viewport background
batch renaming bones
[YouTube] using & rendering view layers (used to force the eye overlap)
various methods for rendering pixelated graphics (I used Film > Filter Size)
adding jitter to an animation (exemplified with the camera but can be used for anything; I slapped it on the legs. and also the camera)
[YouTube] animation layers with the NLA editor

time taken: ~14 hours 43 minutes, for the model & animation shown above. GIF corrections made in ezgif. A turnaround and idle animation (combination thereof) were attemped and went… poorly. Things to revisit another time.

The animation shown above, but in Blender. Shows the solid black silhouette as rendered (no background); a slightly shifted angle with separate parts outlined and no camera zoom; and a Noise modifier in the animation graph editor. — Here’s the thing with & without camera movement. The gif colors glitched out for some reason, but I kinda dig it.

3/4ths view with viewport shading — Various process shots, ft. what happens if I hide the head object.

side view — Various process shots, ft. what happens if I hide the head object.

Frame from the scrapped idle-turnaround, highlighting some details that aren’t clear in the render: the array of jaw-hair-teeth, the upper teeth (only one row, to make the rendered area clearer), and the split bones in the forelimbs. Ignore the gratuitous clipping here and elsewhere; as long as the silhouette works, idgaf about whether it makes 3D sense.

[I was going to put sketch-concepts here and then actually made the page and went. hey y’know what this is fine as-is. so those will happen on a separate page, and for now this footnote is here instead. anyway]