Blender animation

Solothesis support piececolor-coded to the regulation strategy

A short 3D animation visualizing how music can quietly steal attention from the task at hand. Built end-to-end in Blender — modelled, sculpted, rigged, lit, and animated — as a visual argument for one of my thesis claims: design should let us turn down the salience of stimuli on demand.

  • Blender
  • Modelling
  • Sculpting
  • Rigging
  • Animation
  • Lighting
  • Cycles

Sketch and storyboard

Layout sketch — the rough composition before any modelling started.
Storyboard — sequence of actions, used to discuss timing with peers.
Plan list — everything that needed to be built or rigged.
The final layout — every asset bundled into its own collection alongside its lights.

Sculpting and rigging

Ear — sculpted from a sphere in the Sculpting workspace.
Arm rig — a parent bone at the wrist makes the whole hand rotate as a group.
Arm rig in use — joint axes line up with what the real arm can do.

Eye rig — eyeball plus two lid semispheres, handles for everyday rotation.

Hand animation — keyframes tuned for natural timing and interpolation.

Composition and lighting

Preliminary composition before the table and lighting were built out.
Final composition — camera angle and lighting locked in.
Computer collection — keyboard, screen, and their dedicated lights.
Detail pass on the computer assembly.

Why this exists

The piece is a visual support for a thesis claim: we should have ways to reduce the salience of stimuli to facilitate mono-tasking. Music — especially with lyrics — quietly captures attention even when it is meant to be background.

The lighting is color-coded to the emotional-regulation strategy at play: yellow for "attention deployment" (drawing the eye somewhere on purpose), blue for "situation modification" (changing the environment itself). The story is told in light first, motion second.

Process — sketch to scene

The pipeline ran through Blender's Layout, Modelling, Sculpting, Shading, Animating, and Rigging workspaces. Each asset lived in its own collection so lighting and rigs could be iterated in isolation, then composed into the master scene.

  • The ear was sculpted from a sphere. The brain was pulled from Thingiverse, polygon-reduced, and smoothed in Sculpting.
  • The arm rig drives the elbow, wrist, and finger joints with a parent bone at the wrist for whole-hand rotation.
  • The eye is three parts — eyeball plus two semispheres for the lids — with custom handle shapes to keep day-to-day rotation legible.

Animating the eye

When the eye changes its point of fixation, the human eye jumps in saccades — unless it is tracking, in which case it follows smoothly. To suggest reading, I approximated a series of small saccades with a smooth motion; to suggest jumping to a new line, sudden discrete movements.

When the speaker in the back pulses (the distraction), the eye breaks fixation abruptly, the lids snap open, then settle back down. The timing and the lighting are both doing the same job: showing that attention has been pulled away.