Isabelle's Dream

A collection of all the vector work. Masks phone BG, the caller ID, Wisps PP stills, and a slightly older version of Wisps sign.

Here's the bubble shape I ended up changing it to. The animation for it was done in AE and exported into Blender.

Nooks monitor. It's a reuse of the last one, but with the popup added. Nothing else was changed really.

This was the first thing lite and rendered. The panning light was actually not how I was originally going to light it.

But I liked the creepy sweeping light look, so I tried it again here and also liked it.

So I doubled down on this spotlight, very directional lighting the whole way through.

The claymation is all 3D animated. I animated it in 6's (every 6th frame) and got a procedural clay shader that I could animate whenever they moved.

Though, since it was animated to look stop motion, I couldn't render with motion blur. Which is important to note for later.

I rigged the roof to be peelable, but also spliced the interior and exterior Hall building for this shot.

ohno

Substance painter was used to re-texture the set. That took...time...

But it was worth it for this. If you notice, there's no window in the BG since she mentions they are gone. I was going to animate them disappearing but thought it would take too long.

"Money shot." Creating this was one of the inspirations for the entire episode.

With this too.

I didn't intend to have a reflection be seen but thought to try. Isabelle is scaled WAY up and moved in front, so it actually appears in the reflection.

Just some blink and miss it pose.

This was interesting because the lights needed to be moved per frame so that both characters could be clearly seen throughout.

The smoke and volumetric were last minute additions to help spice up the composition. There was also going to be lights coming out of the buildings, but it ended up looking to distracting.

But both characters are stop-motion. So Isabelle flys away in a normal FPS, but her actual body is still in 6fps.

"Wow, cool story, Isabelle.”

I'm not a good interior designer. The whole time, I kept screaming, "what would Luna's house look like?"

I don't know for sure, but this was my best guess.

But it needed enough furniture so that the dream transition shot had a lot of stuff to move.

Here's her smiling. Very rare in this video.

She was supposed to say a line here, but I forgot to animate her mouth.

This was rendered twice to doooo-

This background dissolve and distortion

I knew I wanted to do this, but had no idea what it would actually look like. I just kinda slapped together various psychedelic effects until it looked bizarre enough. The rest would be up to sound.

This is where the amount and placement of furniture is important. Everything needs to fly upwards.

And there needs to be enough things moving to make the transition seem more jarring. I also remove her bed because it can't go through her.

But now all the furniture is flouting up out of frame, so the BG looks kinda strange suddenly.

Unless we do a POV to see all of it flying away from her. I was going to make them dissolve, but again, too much work.

And then when we cut back, BIGABELLE'S

MASSIVE BIGABELLE'S that do not move.

The BG smoke was supposed to look like space nebulas, but I couldn't get the look. So I just made it various shades of pink.

And then the biggest Belle has a head portal. I'm not much of a comper. Stick a lens flare on the and move on.

And then animate some bloom for a transition.

So this...place. I had plans of swapping the surrounding cloud clumps with actual volumetric smoke but something stopped me.

I originally was going to model this to look like Luna's in-game dream space, but decided to just use it as reference and make something simlar yet unique.

So the base ground has a wavy pattern that is lite by an under light and then some animated "smoke" was layered overtop for aesthetic.

And more clay?! Yes because I was going to do more of it. But re-texturing everything was so laborious that I stopped here.

I thought this was cute.

Thanks to Bbbn19 for the portal effects and this warbling energy tutorials.

I literally had this face when I came across them, too.

There was going to be a lens flare to cover up that dark centre, but it ended up looking cornier than just not having it. So here ya go!

THIS SHOT. OKAY. So the set is edited into a long tunnel with our char and camera connected to a single object.

It shoots backwards, and I just modelled/textured a long cylinder to be this glowy nonsense. Literally, put trees in just to break up the brightness.

But it was also rendered in 2 parts and comped together because at here, we'd be able to see the cylinder. So it was rendered without it and stitched together to make it "magical"

This is mostly repurposing the town hall interior and exterior cloud clump setup.

She look.

He wait.

He peak.

He hello.

Man Wisp was such a pain in the butt. You'd think because he doesn't have legs, he'd be easier to animate?

Not really. Because now I need to think about how this flouting ball gets around.

His arms are too short to do literally anything. Like they can even slightly reach the keyboard. So I just added typing sounds anyways.

He also kept rendering with these crack-like artifacts on his geo. Some shots I fixed it, others I didn't.

Inside him is a point light, since I wanted him to be a light source. But some shots, I forgot to parent it to him

So he'd move, but forget his light.

So they would need to be re-rendered. But some shots he looked pretty sweet.

I was going to do more with this light effects but didn't have many ideas. So I just reused some energy effects I had from Patapawns (also made by Bbbn19) and put it here.

But this was neat. I wanted the set to build around them but couldn't make it look clay-like with my limited knowledge of Blender. So I opted to go the polygonal route instead.

But this sequence re-uses the dream sequence animations... Which is animated in 6fps.

Look at that dumb little face. His lips are darker because they need direct light on him to look better. But Blender doesn't do Light Linking yet, so that would have been a bigger can of worms just for lip brightness. Screw that.

This re-uses the opening seq shot. And it was designed with the intent to have Isabelle and Wisp see it again like this.

But not this. There was a ton of cheating in the opening for that specific angle. So this was reanimated for this shot. Also in stop-motion.

And that's really important because we see different fps's at play during this. The dream's in 6 but Wisp and Isabelle are in 30. So this shot was rendered twice, with and without motion blur and comped back together.

Specifically, to have a 6fps clay Isabelle fly past/in between a 30fps Wisp and Isabelle.

And that's cool and all until you look at Wisp and go "ew!" because I didn't tone down the dang glow.

Not that big a deal. We'll fix it later.

But I do love me this shot. I had to readjust the opening so that i could re-use it like this here.

THIS SHOT. OMG. Okay, so the file holds the entire shot, but was split and rendered in 5 parts. Each part needed a different lighting setup.

One for this opening fly over. Animated sweeping lights, and lights parented to the camera.

Then we have Tyrone with hero grass and a different lighting for the trees in the BG. Fun fact, his design comes from the ACNH promotional material.

This section with Sasha here, also from promo material, also has a different light set up.

Huh, she looks fmailiar.

And Mask. All 5 parts were stitched back together, with the trees being used as buffalo wipes. But this shot was re-rendered multiple times due to denoising problems.

Then there's these.

I was going to do another reflection thing but ended up not.

I couldn't actually find the in-game soul-fire images, so a good buddy of mine animated some.

IMO, it came out looking really nice.

And we do another dissolve for this reveal.

A reveal that I thought was going to be so heartbreaking to me, I had to make a synth cry noise for his little yell.

But back to our pair.

The transition is the same one used earlier. Just repurposed to work with this set and funiture.

But everything is clay here too. I didn't want to animate the BG characters because I thought them being static was more appropriate.

Isabelle. Strategically placed behind the chair so I don't have to animate her legs. Screw legs.

With medium shots to continue that.

Nothing super special about this, but I liked how it turned out.

So this shot was all in file but cut up into 4's to make editing it easier. We start at the bottom of the "tower" and work our way up.

Each time, passing a "layer" that the viewer is in.

They are motion blurred to heck, but they are literally single frame details.

All to come up here. There was going to be an extra outdoor shot, looking into the window. But It broke the flow, so it was tweaked to how it is here.

And we just go straight back down.

Just to get yelled at? OMG

"I'm outa here!"

Abrupt wake up

Obviously I just reused literally everything from the beginning. Lighting and all.

But I like this shot.

And then the "after credits" sequence. Why is Tom Nook working late with no lights on? Because I wanted his laptop to be the only light source, THAT'S WHY!

Tap tap tap tap. The little voice from his laptop is supposed to say, "you've got mail!"

So he calls.

And he does. The bestest news.

I really wanted to use a fisheye photo of Nook.

Big thank you to all the creators that let me use their footage. I only compiled around 10 clips and just shuffled them around the wall.

I was so worried it'd be SUPER obvious. But it turned out fine. If you're looking for dups, sure, you can see them, but in these close-ups, it's just a blurry mess.

Nook also has this egregious seem on his face that I ended up blurring in post.

And then there's this shot.

There was 100+ photos throughout. Thank you for reading/scrolling.