Gunnerkrigg Fanimation

Nikolardo writes:

Some time ago the notion came to me to recreate this page of Gunnerkrigg Court as an animation.

I modelled everything pretty quickly, using only a couple of assets from blendswap.  It took significantly longer to get the compositing exactly right on everything, but I learned a lot about compositing, use of layers and renderlayers, certain inputs (color, shadow), texture nodes (used in the peeling bits of walls and to make the floor), spotlights for halo and shadow, and texture painting (all textures that are not produced with nodes were painted in blender’s UV editor, excepting one).

I also leared how to usefully keyframe node values, as certain layers that need to appear “on top” should only be visible after a given point, etc – this was only necessary because I really wanted to render this as a single render, instead of as two renders that I could splice together later.
I had initially intended to use Freestyle to do the lines, but I ended up being pretty happy with BI’s edge rendering – it’s really everything else that makes it look as good as it does, and the lack of perfect edges didn’t bother me (and Freestyle would have taken FOREVER).
The blend file has been submitted to blendswap, when it’s up I’ll put the link in the comments.
On youtube and tumblr.
(Also if you watch it in 1080p (900*1080) that’d be pretty cool because I rendered it that big.)