A little background to the making of this animation

Sometimes I'll start these self initiated projects with the spark of an idea. In this case I was experimenting with the xparticles mtfractal tools and whilst I was OK with the result, I wanted to build a longer sequence. I decided to use a copy of the scene file to keep the same staging objects and lighting setup to build a longer animated sequence that all matched in terms of colour and lighting.

Next up was using the superb Insydium Taiao system to generate a tree in the shape of a duck (why not?). After wrangling all the parameters, I got the look I was after.

Tea cups were next. This was fairly challenging in that I discovered a bug in the Redshift renderer. Basically, when I had motion blur on with a reasonable number of passes, it appeared that some polygons were incorrectly being textured from a material that was adjacent to it. A few conversations with Redshift support ensued but sadly I don't think it was even acknowledged as a bug and it still exists. Work around was to apply a small amount of motion blur in post (aAfter Effects)

Next up. Blobs appearing from holes in the ground. A simple scene making using of the new cloth simulation system and the balloon feature.

Second last scene is simply making use of field noise to move around particles that have objects assigned to them, fairly simple but effective

Lastly, back to using cloth and the balloon feature. I manually created a bunch of blobbly shapes and gave them all the cloth tag. In order to inflate them in an organic way, I applied a vertex map to the objects, ticked "use fields", dropped the vertex map into the map field of the balloon and created a spherical field that was subsequently animated. When the field covers a blob shape, it then inflates.

Finally, all the sequences were pulled together in After Effects and rendered to a video file in Adobe Media Encoder.