Death to Squishies By Bart on May 22, 2025 Behind the Scenes I asked Marcin Cieśla to tell us about his 'Death to Squishies' animation that was featured on BlenderArtists in March. Get ready for the delights and despairs of a one-man animation project which included dancing in front of his phone girl-band style for reference!A stort story about a certain animation. “Death to Squishies” from Ratchet & Clank 3.Ladies and gentlemen. Girls and boys. I rarely write texts like this… but not by choice. Only when my work is done, all set with poise, each detail aligned, no faults or voids. Now and then, when the time employs, it feels like festive days with all their noise. I’m so happy, like a kid with toys! Let’s start the talk - so raise your voice!...and Courtney strikes a daring pose, Perhaps it’s time to end my prose. Alright, enough fooling around. I’m not typing all of this just to waste someone’s time with poor-quality rhymes. So, why are we here? Well, I’d like to tell a story. To write a few words about how I spent almost two years working on a certain project - my biggest one yet. I personally love reading behind-the-scenes stories like this, so I thought someone might find it interesting. And if not, well, too bad - I’ll just write it anyway, and no one can stop me - ha! Look, look, how I just write all of this.Ok man, what’s your point?...you may ask, my dear reader. I will answer brilliantly - I don't know. That's why I think it would be best if I started with a short explanation. In the year of our Lord 2023, I created a small fanart of a character from the Ratchet & Clank series. Specifically, I'm talking about Courtney Gears from Ratchet 3. In the description of this project, when I was finishing it, I mentioned that I might also try to create a 1-minute animation using the character model that I already had at the time. It was quite tempting considering that the goal seemed quite achievable, because in a sense part of the work was already done. At least that's what I thought at the time. After all, I already have a finished character model - why not use it again and create an animation with it? What could go wrong (those familiar with Murphy's law know very well what). Ah, the poor naive author of this text didn’t yet realize what he was signing up for...At the beginning, he created a new project and a scene.The scene, however, was without form, it was a blockout. It is best to start any project like this with a blockout - a kind of 3D “sketch.” You roughly and quickly arrange simple shapes in the scene to get a general idea of where things should be, what size they should have relative to other elements in the environment, and so on. That’s exactly what I did. This stage of work is particularly satisfying because any progress brings immediate, tangible, and easily noticeable results. I drop a character into the file, but there’s nothing around them - just emptiness. So, I create a simple floor and walls. Boom - suddenly, the whole perception of the scene changes completely. It’s a bit dark, so I add a basic lamp. White, colored, spot, or area - whatever it may be, its mere presence makes a huge difference.Although every object in the scene, even in its simple blockout form, had to be manually created, it didn’t take long before the first signs of progress started appearing before my eyes. Those first bursts of dopamine can be incredibly motivating. "Hey, this is actually going pretty smoothly," I thought. And it did. You start a new project and you have only an empty space with a default cube and a camera in front of you. A day or two later, in the same file, you see a whole bunch of colorful, scattered objects. Maybe they are simple, maybe a little sloppy, but it doesn't matter. Compared to what was there at the beginning (an empty 3D file), the progress is huge! You almost feel like patting yourself on the back. And although at this stage it seemed to me that I had already done a lot of work, in reality it was just a false first impression. The real work hadn't even started yet.Lights, action! Oh wait, the camera first.Since the project was supposed to be an animation, I decided that before I went any further, I should roughly outline the camera work. An initial frame layout to see roughly where the close-ups would be, and what the slightly wider shots would look like. Which objects would need more detail, and which could get away with less. It seemed like a reasonable approach - after all, it would be a shame to spend too much time perfecting an object that wouldn’t even be properly visible in the camera.My starting point, of course, was the original animation from Ratchet & Clank. The music video titled "Death to Squishies" contained all the guidelines I needed. In my version, I tried to preserve as much from the original as possible, so initially I simply replicated the camera movements one-to-one. This is where I ran into the first problem. What worked 20 years ago in PlayStation 2 graphics doesn't necessarily translate well to modern visuals. Maybe I just couldn't translate it properly - who knows. The fact is, however, that at the end of the day I slightly modified some shots and cuts. Not drastically, but still. A slightly different frame, maybe a cut half a second later, maybe a different camera movement pace. By the way, it’s incredible how much such small adjustments can change.At this stage of the work, another dose of dopamine kicked in. Smaller than before, but still very motivating. "Not only do I already have the initial version of the scene, but now everything is starting to move! I'm moving at lightning speed, and nothing can stop me!"Very nice, but now get to work.It's probably a confrontation with the later stages of the project, after that first wave of naive joy, what we call short-lived enthusiasm. You start something with joy, see the initial huge progress, and it seems like the work is moving at an express pace, with the finish line already appearing on the horizon. However, reality doesn't really care about it and sooner or later it comes to verify the progress. The first such verification hit when I had to model the final version of the first segment of the scene. What had previously been just a simple, rounded cube was now waiting for its true realization. How dense should the details be, and where should they go? What should be fully modeled, and what could simply be painted onto a texture? What resolutions should the textures have? What colors should they be? You can know all the fundamentals of designing such things, and still get lost. For example, I realized that despite having reference material in the form of the original animation, I could really use designs with more detailed elements. Luckily, Insomniac still makes games from this series today, so I managed to find some modern assets from the latest Ratchet & Clank on PS5 on ArtStation. They worked perfectly as references. My confidence, however, was in a bit of a decline.As it quickly turned out, creating just one element of the scene in the final version takes much longer than the total time I worked on the entire project from the beginning up to that point. My example platform first had to be prepared in high-poly - a version with the highest possible level of detail. Then, the same model had to be created again, this time in low-poly - a geometrically simplified version for optimization. After that, details had to be baked from one version onto the other, textures painted, plus several other technical steps. Then the same thing had to be repeated for each element of the environment that was waiting to be prepared. Glass panels, inner platform segments, the outer ring with lamps, speakers, screens, scaffolding, cages, and so on. All of this only to realize later that while individual segments might look fine on their own, they didn’t necessarily work well together as a whole. For this reason, I went back from time to time to slightly modify already existing parts of the scene. And time kept passing.And he saw that it wasn't very good...Paradoxically, what had helped me earlier was now becoming a source of complexes for me. Using the stunning visuals from Rift Apart—the latest Ratchet & Clank installment - was incredibly helpful at first. Over time, however, as more and more of my own objects filled the scene, a wave of self-doubt started creeping in. "This doesn’t even look half as good as the work of the artists at Insomniac Games." "Why am I even doing this?"For a long time, lighting had been bothering me. Light is one of the most important aspects of 3D graphics - period. In fact, the perceived quality of the final image depends more on the lighting than on the quality of the objects being illuminated. Seriously. Lighting is incredibly important. That said, I kept failing with every new attempt at lighting the scene. Too dark, too bright, the color palette came out ugly, sometimes it felt too flat, other times something got overexposed. I can't count how many times I postponed dealing with it, discouraged by yet another failure. To be honest, I’m still not satisfied with the final lighting. I simply had to draw the line somewhere and move on.But it wasn’t all bad. At this stage of the project, I had already modeled almost all the scene elements - that’s something. A certain milestone. Mrs. Dopamine came for a visit again. A small dose of motivation to push further forward. After all, it would be silly to abandon the project now, with so much work behind me, right?Wait, what was I talking about?You're talking so much nonsense here, Mr. Author, and this was supposed to be about animnantion. I'm asking where is aminantion! So where is it? This amimatnion!A fair question. Maybe a little clumsy, but fair. So, where’s the animation? Honestly - still in its early stages. Normally, a project like this would involve multiple people working in parallel. That way, while the 3D artist is modeling the scene, the animator can already start working on the animation on simplified models, because he doesn't need detailed ones. That alone would cut the work time in half (!). But since I was the only one working on the whole thing, I had a new, another big task in the form of animation. "Well, now it’s finally all downhill from here", I thought. "Hehe, the fool hasn't learned anything", fate probably thought. I think it did. I don’t know - I didn’t ask.The first attempt came together pretty quickly. I wouldn’t say it went well, but at least it went fast. That’s something. I decided to start working on Courtney first. After all, she’s the main character of the entire clip, and the focus is primarily on her. The first shot - when she steps down from the stage. The second - when she… um… dances with her back to the camera. Then the third, fourth, and in one go I did the entire first half. Alright, time to share my progress online and get some feedback from people.And what were the opinions? "Overall, it’s not bad, but…"—which, in short, means "Dude, it’s actually really bad, but I’m trying to be nice." And yeah, it really was bad. The first version of the animation was slow, uninteresting, and just plain awful. It hurts a bit when you realize you’ve done a poor job. But pride doesn’t finish projects. What didn’t work had to go in the trash, and I had to start animating all over again from scratch. This time, slightly humbled by the mediocre feedback, I decided to take things more seriously. What did that mean? Well, when working on animation, it’s always a good idea to record some references first. How do you do that? Very simple: grab your phone and place it on a shelf or desk with recording turned on goof around carefully play in front of the camera the scene you are going to animate live with the hope that no one will ever, ever see this recording ._. With this type of reference, things went a bit better. The second attempt was still far from expectations, but at least it was an improvement over the first one. Thanks to the references, I managed to improve the pace, but also the overall choreography of the shots. Then there was the third attempt, and I stopped there.It's still not over yet?!Although Courtney’s animation was more or less done, the dancers were still waiting. And unfortunately, I don’t mean beautiful women dancing in celebration of the project’s completion. Not at all! There was still a long way to go, and to be honest, at this point, I felt like I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And it was starting to show - this time in the dancers’ animation. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as Courtney’s first animation attempt, but it definitely wasn’t good. And no amount of goofing around in front of my phone for reference could fix it.How to put it... a bearded dude with all his appeal is not the best reference point for graceful, agile dancing ladies on stage. So, instead of wasting even more time, I decided to spend some of it searching for dance references online. And wow, maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about, but I really didn't know that there were so many terrible dances on the internet. I swear, a good chunk of what I watched were girls either rolling around the floor aimlessly or shaking chaotically, as if they had no idea what they were trying to achieve. And these are things proudly published by dance schools (!). At some point, however, I came across Asian girl bands…Alright, alright - let me explain. Well, you see… oh c’mon, I'm not going to explain myself! What can I say - you can like them or not, but it’s a completely different level. „Western” dance groups aren’t even close to the discipline and precision you see in Asian ones. These dances finally looked like something someone had really thought through. They just made sense! So, finally I had my reference.At this point no one reads this anyway.Since I’ve already scared off whoever I might have scared with my mention of girl bands, I can now openly admit that I really did use them as references. Am I embarrassed about it? Duuude, I was embarrassed when I tried dancing in front of my phone and then watched that pitiful sight. Now, I was just happy to finally push the work forward. And indeed, with the new references, things went a bit smoother. One attempt, then another - I honestly don’t remember how many there were. What I do remember is that this stage of the work was a bit of a relief. The dancers didn't require as much attention as Courtney, I had better references for them, but the fact that the project as a whole was already in "some" state also helped a lot. Maybe it’s silly, but working on something where you can actually see the results, rather than just imagining them vaguely, makes a big difference.Thanks to this, my mood was a bit more positive. The worst was already done, so confidence peeked its sad little eyes out from the depths of despair (pff, look at him, suddenly trying to be a poet). Once I managed to finish animating the dancers after a few attempts, the last thing still waiting for me was the lighting - the task I had been postponing to "hopefully never."Dude, but I don't see anything here.This moment had to come eventually, and now - it had arrived. My eternal nemesis. My weakness. The thing that had haunted me from the very start of this project. Ladies and gentlemen - lighting. (Here, we imagine the sound of a terrified and shocked crowd.)Somewhere in the previous stages of my work, when things weren’t going well, I experimented with lighting. As I’ve mentioned before, I was never satisfied with this aspect of my work. But at least I had some general direction now. A direction that didn’t make me feel "Yes, this is it," but also didn’t scream "Dude, this is a total disaster." So I had a direction that was neutral. Neutral - meaning acceptable. I knew I probably wouldn’t come up with anything better. So, I stuck with relatively simple, uniform blue lighting for the scene. That was supposed to be the background - my foundation for further work. The monotonous, solid color was interrupted by pink screens (with slight variations) and occasional yellow lamps. Nothing spectacular, but I assumed that if it doesn't hurt the eyes, then it's already good enough.While this lighting more or less worked for the scene as a whole, it didn’t quite handle characters in different, dynamic shots. That’s why the final, secret ingredient was character lighting. I experimented with it quite a bit, but in the end, I stuck with the standard three-point lighting setup. The main lamp - to pull the character out of the background, the fill lamp - to eliminate unwanted shadows, and in some shots a contour lamp - to add a bit of drama by lighting the character from behind. This simple set of lights just needed to be placed properly in each shot and voilà - the lighting was done.We go to sleep and the work will do itself.Wait, it’s still not over? How much more…The last thing left to do was rendering. Everything done so far existed only as a 3D project file I had been working on. Now, it was time to turn the fruits of months of effort into a video file. But that’s not as simple as it seems. I mean - it is. But also, it isn’t. It both is and isn’t.On one hand, rendering is simple, since it’s basically a process handled almost entirely by the computer rather than the person. On the other hand, rendering isn’t simple - because of that almost part. It can be a real pain. Theoretically, all that’s left to do is press the "render" button and sit back with a beer in hand, admiring the frames being drawn on the screen, accompanied by the gentle hum of the PC fans under the desk. And, for the most part, that’s true (though I wouldn’t recommend keeping beer too close to the keyboard). The problem, however, is that rendering needs supervision. Especially when the whole process is set to take four months (!). Seriously. That’s a lot of beer cans, but also plenty of time for things to go terribly wrong - and something almost certainly will. Maybe the software closes unexpectedly. Maybe the graphics card runs out of memory. Maybe an unforeseen error pops up. Or, maybe - after 120 rendered frames - the brilliant author of this text realizes that he forgot to enable or hide an object in the first shot (what a silly guy, pff). Since I needed my computer during the day for work, rendering took place at night. And if something went wrong two hours in, well… in the morning, I was greeted by a beautiful error report that had been sitting there for six hours. No problem, that's cool. At least after such a night the electricity bill was unnecessarily a bit higher…Sooner or later, it was finally done. I had all the frames rendered on my disk. In their raw, still-unprocessed state, the entire thing took up (and still does, I need a new disk ._. ) a staggering 1.2TB. Then, I pieced everything together. A bit of post-processing, a pinch of color correction, a handful of final tweaks. And at last - my exhausted eyes beheld it. A file with the friendly name "0100-1800.mp4." Or, in other words - the finished animation. The result of months of my work. I hope it was worth it.Get up, I think he finally finished yapping!Meow, meow, meow - you've talked so much here, man, and honestly, what’s the point of it all? As I eloquently pointed out at the beginning - I don’t know. I don’t know why I wrote this text about my project. If someone actually read it - great, that makes me really happy. Greetings to all three people who did it. I hope it was worth spending some time in my little world of 3D graphics. I know this project means much more to me than it ever will to anyone reading this. And that’s fine. But if reading this wasn’t a waste of time for you, dear reader - that’s something. And with that positive note, I’ll wrap this up. Lights off, time for bed.Until next time!