An animated short built in Blender by a team of four — and a remake of a live-action film we had shot ourselves the year before, rebuilt from nothing in a cartoony 3D style. I adapted the narrative into the screenplay and modelled most of the props and the building exterior.
A student runs late to a night class, finds the school empty, kills time at the teacher’s desk, and then the door locks behind him.
The set is a real building. The story takes place in our own school, so instead of inventing a space we filmed and photographed the actual corridors and rooms and modelled from that. Floor and wall textures were made from those photographs, converted to normal maps in Photoshop — which is why the corridor reads as a specific place rather than a generic one.
I modelled the objects that make the room a classroom: desk, chair, whiteboard, card reader, door and window frames, room signs, coat hook, fire extinguisher, printer, waste bin, and the exterior structure. Most had no usable reference online — a card reader on a specific wall in a specific school does not exist as a stock model — so each one was built from our own photographs, using boolean subtraction for the openings, loop cuts and subdivision surfaces for the rounded edges, and material properties tuned through roughness, specular and transmission rather than through textures.
Modelling for render time, not for detail. The project was rendered in Eevee at 128 samples on a single machine. Late in the build, subdivisions were stripped out of objects and replaced with bevels plus shade smooth, and a decimate modifier was run over nearly everything. The visible surface stays the same; the vertex count that has to be carried through every frame does not.