Artist Cesar Corzo’s latest Blender piece is a small thing with a lot of pipeline behind it: a cheerful skeleton, dancing inside thin, sheer fabric that stays visible enough to reveal the silhouette moving underneath. 80 Level’s writeup of the project (published November 3) traces the full workflow, which doubles as a useful snapshot of where free and open tools now sit in a character-animation pipeline that’s traditionally been paid-software-heavy.
Building the motion
Corzo rigged the skeleton with AccuRIG, then blended dance moves pulled from three separate motion libraries — Mixamo, ActorCore, and Action Forge — using Blender’s Action Mixer. Rather than keeping that as a live blend, he baked the combined animation to keyframes and removed the underlying bones, locking the performance in before moving to simulation.
The cloth: free, open, and doing real work
The fabric is where the project gets technically interesting. Corzo used ZOZO’s Contact Solver, a free, open-source cloth solver, applied to a highly subdivided triangle mesh with a sheer-fabric physics preset stored in .toml format. That’s a meaningfully different tool choice than reaching for Blender’s built-in cloth system or a paid plugin — Contact Solver is positioned specifically around accurate contact handling, which matters for a sheer costume that needs to drape convincingly around a moving figure without clipping or collapsing unnaturally.
The simulation wasn’t cheap in compute terms: Corzo reports it took almost two hours to bake on an AMD 9950X with 64GB RAM.
Look and render
A procedural sheer shader from BlenderKit gave the fabric its translucent look, lit with an HDRI and an area light, and rendered in Cycles at 100 samples — taking another 30 to 40 minutes on an RTX 5070 Ti.
Why the pipeline is the actual story
No single step here is novel on its own — mocap blending, baking to keyframes, and cloth simulation are all established techniques. What’s worth noting is how much of the pipeline now runs on free or open tooling (AccuRIG, Contact Solver, BlenderKit) stitched together inside Blender, rather than requiring a fully paid toolchain end to end.