This was the first Alembic I did for the demon and one of the most important. I started with a human silhouette climbing over the windowsill because I wanted people to see what used to be the father before any recognisable humanity disappears. The silhouette gets swallowed by a blob of volume-meshed geometry. It eats him, fully consumes him, and spits him back out as something unrecognisable.
The gelatinous splines between his hands and the blob came from a very instinctive place. I was thinking about The Thing and that sticky, stringy moment where flesh stretches and refuses to behave like flesh. I wanted everything to feel slowed down and viscous, like gravity had thickened.
Then I gave him an animalistic face. This was before I knew I would turn him into a spider, but I already knew I needed the girl’s first real encounter with him to have nothing human left in it. The demon tries to imitate her father with her name, but by the time she actually sees him, he is fully gone. The face needed to show that.
For the deformation, I pushed the displacer noise from top to bottom and then back up. I already knew tendrils would burst out of his head later, so animating the deformation in this direction let me turn that moment into something that felt natural inside the chaos.
The tendrils themselves were meant to feel like puppeteer strings. Not veins, not webbing, but something between the two. I was thinking about bolas spiders, the ones that throw sticky balls to catch prey. It made sense for a demon pretending to be a spider without actually being one.
When he finally metamorphosises into the spider form, it’s not meant to be a perfect spider. I added extra cylinder legs to bulk it out and bridge the gap between the rig and the floor. It’s not a spider. It’s only appearing as one. The messiness helps.
The whole transformation was designed to feel like curiosity, disgust, dread and spectacle all happening at once. The moment the audience realises he is too far gone.
This shot mirrors one of the earliest shots of the father in his human form, so I used an overhead angle to show his vulnerability in both moments. Last time he was sitting normally. Now he sits in his possessed form, with the leftover strand from his transformation still wrapped around the rafter.
That strand symbolises entrapment and instinctive bracing. It’s like when someone holds onto the handle in a car before turbulence. He is anchoring himself without understanding that he’s doing it. And the strand coming toward the camera feels like the last shred of him reaching out and holding on.
The Alembic itself was a nightmare. The strand needed to wrap perfectly around the rafter, but importing the room into Cinema 4D and exporting the Alembic back into Blender kept breaking the alignment. After nearly two hours of pointless trial and error, I split the Alembic in half and used a Boolean to hide the impossible part off-screen. This let me stitch the two halves together and pretend it was all one continuous motion.
This one is simple. It’s just a blender with red liquid sloshing around in it, but the reason it works is because it foreshadows the red substance pumped through the pipes at the end. I didn’t use Liquid Dynamics because I was near the end of production and I didn’t want to spend two or three hours waiting for Blender’s fluid solver to calm down.
The film is painterly and blobby. The liquid didn’t need to be simulated. It just needed to move. So I faked it with spheres, turbulence, spin, and strain, then meshed it together in the volume builder. From far away, the audience reads “liquid in a blender” immediately. That’s enough.
This is the sphere Lina hides in near the end. I made it using a helix that I spherified so I could animate it like fabric being pulled and torn. The tearing is symbolic. The world is falling apart. The canvas has been burning. Everything is splitting open.
I used a Boolean to make a chunk of the sphere tear away, and I doubled the threads. One thick, one thin. That visual contrast makes the tear readable even when the shot is chaotic. If both threads were the same size, the tearing would look like random noise rather than a deliberate visual moment.
This was one of the earliest rough animation ideas for the final attack. I used tall cylinders dropping in rhythmic beats to help me figure out timing. They hit different areas at precise moments, and it genuinely worked for composition, but narratively it wasn’t right. The demon needed to attack the center consistently. These were zeroing in on the perimeter.
I kept the timing and rebuilt the whole idea using splines in Cinema 4D. Same motion, same rhythm, but the strikes all converge toward the center. I also added twist deformers so the attacks feel like the world is spiraling inward.
This is when the burlap doll collapses and its spirit escapes. I used three light spots behind it because three feels good in the frame and mirrors the three colors behind the character. It also quietly rhymes with the “see no evil hear no evil speak no evil” structure of the flashbacks even though the viewer won’t consciously notice it.
The white wisps were originally supposed to come out of the eyes and the back of the head. I ended up swapping the head mesh and simplifying it. The important thing was the feeling. It needed to feel like a deep exhale. Relief. Release. The moment something trapped finally escapes.
For the moment where the boy protects Lina, I used a knot of helixes, deformers, fields, and spherified splines to get that painterly ribbon motion. I wanted the strike to feel defensive, not aggressive, so the movement stays fluid instead of sharp. The motion reads like an instinctive barrier rather than an attack.
The sphere passing through the center pulls all the shapes together and the squash and stretch on top of it helps the movement feel alive even under the painterly look.
This came from a dancing FBX animation I imported, then smothered in a volume mesher. It turns into this blobby, amorphous figure that still moves with believable weight because the original mocap drives it.
I couldn’t constrain anything to its mesh because Alembics move every polygon every frame, so I had to manually track the eyes when I brought it into Blender. It was annoying, but the painterly blur hides the imperfections.
The grinder originally had particles clipping through the mesh. I used spheres again and used dynamics to stick em to the wall of the machine. In a painterly world, physics only matter when the story needs them. The blobby deformation fits the style anyway. A bit of stickiness and some dynamic smoothing made it feel like paint being forced through a shape rather than literal particles.
This is when the soot plume bursts outward after the girl comes out of the tunnel. I animated it using deformers and volume blobs so the movement feels dirty, grimy, and heavy. I originally wanted the new house to feel filthier and more diseased than the rest initially, and then be revealed to be completely different from the original location, and this effect helps tie the corruption to the environment.
Final Thoughts on Alembics
These Alembics were messy. None of them behaved the way I expected on the first try. But the chaos worked in my favour. It fed into the painterly aesthetic, where things aren’t supposed to be perfect or physically accurate. They’re supposed to feel alive, impressionistic, and uncomfortable.
Cinema 4D let me break things apart and rebuild them in ways that Blender couldn’t. Blender is incredible, but once you start using volume builders, strain, spherify, and twist fields all at once, Cinema 4D breaks open in a way that encourages experimentation.
The Alembics gave the demon its identity, and without them the final act would feel empty. These were some of the hardest and most time consuming parts of the film, but they built the world in a way that keyframes never could.
Research Points
Body-horror deformation and The Thing as reference
The moment where the father’s silhouette gets swallowed and stretched directly ties into the body-horror lineage I was looking at. I was specifically thinking about John Carpenter’s The Thing, where flesh behaves like something halfway between rubber and glue. Research into practical effects from that film shows how slow deformation and stringing tissue were used to create dread through viscosity instead of speed. My Alembic deformation mirrors that logic.
Uncanny imitation and failed mimicry
The demon trying to imitate the father’s voice while looking nothing like him connects to research around “failed mimicry” in horror. Creatures that almost act human but fail in one crucial area generate stronger unease than creatures that never try. I leaned into that idea heavily. It’s not a spider, not a man, not anything recognisable. It’s an organism trying to imitate multiple identities and failing at all of them.
Transformation directionality as visual logic
Pushing the displacer noise from top to bottom wasn’t arbitrary. Research on creature transformation emphasises directional deformation as a way to guide viewer comprehension. When transformations follow a clear axis, the audience subconsciously understands the change even if the visuals are chaotic. This helped me justify the later tendril eruption.
Tendrils as puppetry instead of anatomy
The tendrils weren’t veins or webbing. I built them as puppeteer strings because horror studies often highlight “externalised control” as a disturbing visual motif. The audience reads strings and threads as something being manipulated. It also links to spiders like the bolas species that lure and trap prey with sticky threads, which added a psychological layer to the demon’s behaviour.
Imperfect creature design as intentional discomfort
The spider form being anatomically wrong wasn’t an accident. Research in creature design suggests that “near recognisability” is more unsettling than accurate biology. Adding extra cylinder legs and bulking it out gave the transformation an amateurish, wrong quality that supports the horror. It’s pretending to be a spider, not evolving into one.
Mirroring shots and visual callbacks
The way this transformation shot mirrors the early overhead shot of the father ties into visual storytelling research about “shot rhyming”. When two distant moments share a composition, the viewer senses connection even without being told. Reusing the overhead angle lets the audience subconsciously compare who he was and what he has become.
Alembic pipelines and failure as part of the workflow
Alembics breaking alignment when moving between Blender and Cinema 4D is a known issue in 3D production pipelines. Research on cross-software workflows emphasises that Alembics store baked transforms frame by frame, which makes them powerful but also easy to break during import. My choice to split the Alembic and stitch it with Booleans mirrors real industry solutions where artists literally hide the broken part offscreen.
Simulated liquid without simulating
The blender full of red liquid ties into a long history of horror using fake fluids instead of simulated ones. In practical effects, people used dyed syrups and gels to mimic blood because realism doesn’t matter as much as recognisability. I followed the same principle. Spheres, turbulence, spin, volume meshing. No fluid sim needed. It still reads as liquid because the audience only needs the motion cue.
Symbolic tearing and fabric metaphors
The sphere Lina hides in is built from a spherified helix, and the tearing is deliberate. Research on fabric symbolism ties tearing to both vulnerability and revelation. Since the world itself is painterly and canvas-like, ripping fabric becomes a literal metaphor for the world splitting open. Doubling the threads (thick and thin) follows visual readability principles so the audience can read the tear even in a chaotic painterly shot.
Rhythmic attacks and compositional timing
The tall cylinders dropping in beats were basically a compositional timing test. Animation timing research always emphasises rhythm before detail. Once the timing was right, I rebuilt the attack using splines instead of cylinders. The twist deformers link to visual rhythm, creating a spiralling inward motion that supports the idea that the world is collapsing around her.
Three-point lighting as emotional subtext
The three lights behind the collapsing burlap doll aren’t just aesthetic. Research into symbolic triads in visual storytelling shows how groups of three create harmony or imply spiritual structure. It also quietly ties back to my see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil flashbacks. The viewer doesn’t consciously notice it, but the brain does.
Painterly ribbons and defensive motion
The helix and spline bundle that protects Lina was built around the idea that defensive motion is softer than offensive motion. Animation theory calls this “intent-driven deformation”. Defensive shapes fold, wrap, and curl. Attacking shapes stab, jab, and snap. The ribbon-like motion sells the idea of protection without needing literal realism.
Volume-meshed mocap and uncanny weight
The dancing-FBX-turned-blobby-monster works because the mocap gives it believable weight. There’s academic writing about how weight cues activate body empathy in viewers. Even when the creature is amorphous and painterly, the weight reads correctly. That’s why the figure stays unsettling instead of turning comedic.
Visual pollution as environmental storytelling
The soot plume became part of my worldbuilding research around “visual pollution” in horror. Environments that exhale dust, ash, or grime imply contamination and decay. The plume marks the new location as corrupted before the story reveals its full meaning.
Cinema 4D as an experimental laboratory
Most of my breakthroughs came from using Cinema 4D’s deformers and volume meshing in ways that aren’t possible in Blender. Research on hybrid pipelines notes that C4D is uniquely suited for destructive experimentation because of its procedural fields. That’s exactly why these Alembics exist at all. C4D let me break things and rebuild them until they felt alive.