How a UFO Animation Took Flight… Out of Pure Creative Chaos

After working on a children’s TV show in Ireland, I felt the itch to create something completely for myself. I wanted a project that wasn’t bound by deadlines, client feedback, or the need to be practical—just something where I could dive into my imagination and make something fun, nostalgic, and a little out there.

And that’s how this UFO animation came to be.

A Love Letter to 50s Sci-Fi and a Little Cartoon Absurdity

For some reason, I always find myself drawn back to the charm of 1950s sci-fi. There’s something about the bright colors, campy plots, and those flying saucers that’s both retro and timeless. Maybe it’s the idea that anything—anything—is possible out there in space. And when I had an Alien model sitting in Blender, rigged up but unused, I knew it was time to give this little guy a life of his own.

Originally, I built this alien model for a different project in Blender. This children’s show marked my first time diving into Blender, and I went a little ambitious on character creation. I learned pretty quickly that a simpler robot design would work best for learning the ropes. So, this little green fellow was left in my files, fully modeled but without a purpose. Until now.

The Result? An Absurd Animation Just for the Fun of It

So I decided to turn this model into a quirky short animation sequence. Think of it as a mini homage to Marvin the Martian and all those flying saucers that had us glued to the screen as kids. It’s ridiculous, nostalgic, and completely handcrafted—polygons and all—over a lot of late nights and probably more coffee than was advisable.

This clip is 100% my own creation, and there’s no other agenda here than to share a laugh (or maybe a groan) over a hovering UFO that’s suspiciously cartoonish. If you’re into quirky animation, sci-fi throwbacks, or just need a quick escape from the daily grind, I think you’ll get a kick out of this one.

[Click here to watch it on YouTube!] 🛸 👽

Why I Made This—and Why I Hope You’ll Watch

This is just the start of what I hope will be a collection of personal animation projects, each with its own dash of weirdness. If people seem to enjoy it, who knows? I might expand this into more stories, or bring in new characters from this universe I’m dreaming up.

So take a look, share a laugh, and let me know if this clip made you feel a bit like a kid again—or at least had you questioning if maybe, just maybe, the UFOs we saw on Saturday morning cartoons could be real.

Watch the video below, and let’s chat in the comments. Are you more of a UFO believer or a skeptic?

🚀👾 P.S. Don’t forget to hit “like” and subscribe on YouTube if you enjoyed it—it really helps indie animators like me keep these projects going!

Seriously?

Seriously? is my new short animation. Working in my favorite theme sci-fi it's set on a giant alien spaceship and shows the interaction of two of the inhabitants. There is love in the air....and on the floor and in your face. I asked my daughter for an idea for a short, she gave me nothing for hours saying she was thinking and then came up with a two sentence idea and Seriously? was the result.

My first job was to build a new character, My little green man #1. I wanted to do something cartoony and cute with appeal and simplicity. It took me a couple of tries as my first version was ugly, I like to sculpt my characters with lots of detail but it turned out that less was more. Simple rounded shapes made the character look cuter.

Surface of the model laid out for painting

Maya base model to Zbrush to texture test

Serious pose done in Maya rendered with 3Delight

My next job was to create an animatic. An animatic is a very rough version of the film where you can see the intended actions and camera shots but animation is very basic, just enough to show what happens.



So once you have your animatic it's basically a case of refining until you have your final animation version. You can see that while I was animating I had a placeholder background. I put the final version of the background in after the animation was done. Next I will show you an early version of the animation.



In that version you can see the animation is quite rough, some of the last shots look very different in the final version. There is no sound, the sound was worked on by my good friend Rafa Tomás Velázquez who was my house mate in Dublin. He is a talented guy and you can see more of his work over at Farmode .

Once I had finished the animation the last step was rendering I used 3Delight for the final render but I also tried Mental Ray and Renderman.

Renderman as used by Pixar........not really working for me :(

Mental Ray looked very nice but .....wasn't free :(

3Delight saves the day 

Rendering was a headache, I set up all my lights with and did all my tests with 3Delight, it kept crashing on me but I thought it should be all right when I rendered a full sequence a batch render........it wasn't. This lead me to try the other two, Mental Ray is what I have most experience with but at first it wasn't running. After poking around on the internet I found a solution and got it working and it looked great...........but I didn't realize you had to pay if you want it to batch render. You can render stills but to render a sequence you have to buy it. 

Renderman to the rescue! Pixar use it it must be amazing!...........WADDAYA MEAN IT TAKES 10 MINUTES TO RENDER A FRAME!!! Erm....yeah so seems my laptop is not Pixar ready, I could only get very ugly results with my background in Renderman. Back to the drawing board. Luckily in picking through my scene so many times to set it up for the different rendering programs I discovered my camera was corrupt. This was what was causing 3Delight to crash and after that everything went smoothly.

It would be great if people could share this post and the film, I would love Seriously? to get a big audience.

Be seeing you!

Alien Invader How to strip the rigg

I've been asked how to strip the rigg from the Alien Invader model and thought I might as well share it here.
If you need to strip the rigg from the Alien Invader model in order to create a fresh rigg or assign motion capture to the model using something like motion builder, here is how you do it. If you have the Cyber Punk, Cyborg or Space Soldier you can use the same process, the only difference will be the node prefix. For the Cyber punk the prefix will be CyberPunk, for Cyborg the prefix is Cyborg and for the Space Soldier the prefix is SpaceTrooper. You can find these and many other of my character models here for download on Turbosquid.

A character for animation has three components:

mesh
skeleton
controllers

In order to create a new rigg or new set of controllers you need to strip out the old controllers including IK, control handles and constraints leaving you with just the skeleton and mesh(s). This model also has duplicate skeletons for the arms which are part of the IK/FK switching set up which makes them controls. They are also removed in the steps below.

Step one separate mesh and skeleton from controllers.

Go to frame zero (this is the bind pose). Open the hypergraph find and select node AlienJntAss middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release. Find and select node AlienMesh middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release. Find and select node AlienLP33LaserRifle middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release.

When you middle mouse drag out a node like this in the hypergraph what you're actually doing is pulling the node and it's children out of the hierarchy and creating a new hierarchy tree. Pulling out the wrong node can really mess up a character model.

Step two delete controllers

Select nodes under node AlienLP33LaserRifle delete. Select node AlienMaster, delete. Find and select node AlienBrainConrtol, delete. Find and select node AlienJntBrain, set rotate Z to Zero.

Step three delete animation

Stripping the rig breaks the animation. You need to remove the broken animation to have a clean model for re rigging. Select every node in the skeleton make sure you have every node. A quick way to do this is to marquee select the skeleton hierarchy in the hypergraph (make sure all joint nodes are visible in the hypergraph before doing this). Now open the graph editor zoom out and make sure all keys are visible select all keys from frame 6 onwards, delete.

Step four optional clean up

You have now stripped the controllers. There are some handles which are left over, if you want to remove these too the cross handles are a display option. Select the node with a cross handle, open the attribute editor, in the display options set display handle to off. For the remaining nurbs handles in the hypergraph right click in empty space >option>display>shape nodes. You will now see that the joints have the nurbs handles assigned to them as shape nodes, you can delete them. They have generic names like CTRL_circle6Shape or curveShape3. An animator would not normally have access to these shape nodes which is why they are not labeled.

Hide the shape nodes through the display options once you have finished editing. You do not want the shape nodes visible for normal use of the hypergraph as it doubles the number of visible nodes.

Note the skeleton joints are named so you should get an idea of what the joint does straight away. You are left with just the character mesh, rifle and skeleton. The model is now ready for a new rigg.

For rigging tips and best practice I recommend Jason Schleifer. I will be back with more from the Flame Troll shortly.

Deranged Alien Invasion

Look out the aliens are invading Deranged Scratchings, these extraterrestrial fiends have been running the show round here for all of 2013, I may have managed to finally kick them out the door. I was unable to stop them multiplying and changing colour, they also drank all the beer and ate all the pizza.You can now get your very own invader from out of space. He is happy running around any 3d game and comes with his very own set of games animations, for more details click this Alien Invader Rigged & Animated link

Wub wub wub!

Red- "You're funny looking"                     Blue- "But were on the same side"               

I am happy with the way the colour variants worked out, I think I like the blue one best. I always seem to leave sorting out the team colours till last. It's a pretty easy and rewarding job, all the work goes into the base texture which was green for this character as green is the time honoured colour for men from outer space. Once the base colour is in place and looking good I separate out the elements which will remain the same on all versions, like scratches mud and also the bare metal details on this model. The next step is basically a colour tweak in Photoshop.

This is a longer than usual post so I added a jump break. To watch this alien eat his laser rifle and burp it back out again and to see the other animation you need to hit the read more button.