Demos

New ways to bring ZuzuLand to life - talking 3D friends, toy-movie scenes, Shorts and more. Watch a demo and give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down: your votes decide the style of the next episodes!

Playroom: Rusty & Bibi talk

blender-eevee pixar-look 10 s

A "Toy Story" style playroom shot - Rusty and Bibi talk to each other (lip-synced), hop with squash and stretch, wave and blink, in sunbeams with depth of field and a slow camera move. Blender EEVEE, 1280x720, 10.3 s.

Works - the best "movie look" of the day; plush toy characters in warm light. Limits: simple primitive-built characters (no fingers, no walking) and small mouths in 3/4 view.

Rusty talks

rhubarb-lip-sync blender-eevee 8.6 s

Rusty the fox as a 3D character, talking with automatic lip-sync (Rhubarb Lip Sync mouth shapes driving a Blender EEVEE model), plus blinks, brow lifts, ear twitches, head nods and a wave. 1280x720, 8.6 s.

Works - the mouth clearly follows the speech and the character feels alive; the mouth is a separate "toy" piece rather than a sculpted muzzle (see the shape-key v2 demo).

Rusty sprite talks

rhubarb-lip-sync 2d-jaw-warp 8.2 s

The user's own 2D art of Rusty (the waving sprite) brought to life without any AI model: Rhubarb Lip Sync mouth shapes drive a smooth "jaw warp" that pulls his lower lip and chin up to close the mouth and lets it open again, plus blinks, a gentle head bob/tilt and breathing, over the old-bridge…

Partly - surprisingly lively for a 2D picture: closed mouths show a sweet smile, open vowels show his tongue, and it keeps the exact look of the art.

Rusty thank you chinese

rhubarb-lip-sync blender-eevee 5 s

Rusty the fox waves and says in Mandarin Chinese "谢谢你的画！真漂亮！" (Xièxie nǐ de huà! Zhēn piàoliang! = "Thank you for the drawing! It's beautiful!"), lip-synced, with a Chinese caption and a small English subtitle. 1280x720, exactly 5.0 s.

Works - the same lip-sync pipeline handles Chinese: a child-like Mandarin neural voice, mouth shapes from Rhubarb's language-independent (phonetic) mode, rendered with the standard half-frames + RIFE speed trick in under 5 minutes.

Zuzu new look

blender 4 s

Zuzu in his NEW official outfit as a 3D toy - red jacket over a white tee with a yellow star, olive cargo pants with pockets, red sneakers with white toe caps, navy backpack with gold buckles, big amber eyes and a happy open smile - shown as a still and a 4-second 360-degree turntable.

Partly - the outfit and colours read clearly as the new Zuzu and the front view is cute, but the hair is made of chunky "leaf" locks rather than the soft messy curls of the art, and in side view the big eyes stick out of the head.

Dry vs full mix (playroom)

ffmpeg-sound-design 21 s

Sound-design comparison - the playroom shot plays twice: first "DRY" (only the two voices), then "FULL MIX": soft cosy room tone, birds outside the window (on the window side), our ZuzuLand music bed that automatically dips under the dialogue, a little small-room echo on the voices, and toy foley …

Works - the full mix makes the room feel alive and warm while the voices stay clear; both versions are normalised to the same comfortable loudness (-16 LUFS) so the difference is atmosphere, not volume.

Kids titles star wipe lower thirds (playroom)

pillow-ffmpeg 14 s

13.9 s.

Works - looks like a pre-school TV show package and is fully scripted, so every episode can get the same titles, name tags and transitions automatically (change the text, re-run). Rendering took 77 s on one CPU thread.

Soft bloom sunny grade (playroom)

ffmpeg 10 s

Before/after split screen on the playroom shot - right half has the "Sunny Cartoon" grade plus a soft bloom (bright areas glow gently) and a soft white (not dark) vignette at the corners.

Partly - the glow makes the sunlight feel warm and dreamy, but this shot already has haze and bright sunbeams, so together they look a bit milky/washed out.

Grade compare kids cartoon (playroom)

ffmpeg-lut3d 10 s

Colour-grade comparison on the playroom shot - Original vs three bright kids'-cartoon looks made as our own 3D LUTs: "Sunny Cartoon" (richer colours, a little more pop), "Warm Storybook" (golden, cosy) and "Soft Pastel" (gentle, lifted shadows, slightly pink). 2x2 split screen.

Works - the differences are deliberately gentle; "Sunny Cartoon" makes the toys and characters pop most and is our pick for daytime scenes, "Warm Storybook" suits bedtime/evening stories, "Soft Pastel" is calm but a bit flat.

540p render to 1080p (playroom)

realesrgan-ncnn-vulkan 10 s

Speed + sharpness test at 1920x1080 - left: our normal 1280x720 render (scaled up); middle: a fast 960x540 render scaled up normally; right: the same fast 960x540 render upscaled 2x by Real-ESRGAN's cartoon/anime video model on the laptop's Intel GPU. Centre crop of the playroom shot.

Works - the AI-upscaled 540p version is the cleanest and sharpest of the three (it also removes render noise), so we get full-HD 1080p for about the same total time as a 720p render (2.66 s render + 2.17 s upscale per frame).

Half frames interpolated (playroom)

rife-ncnn-vulkan 10 s

Speed trick test - left: the playroom shot with all 25 frames per second rendered; right: only every second frame rendered (12.5 fps) and the missing frames invented by RIFE AI frame interpolation on the laptop's Intel GPU. Side by side, centre crop.

Works - the two halves are practically identical in motion, so we can render half the frames and save ~50 % of Blender render time; RIFE itself took only 34-40 s for the whole 10-second shot.

Rusty sculpted muzzle

rhubarb-lip-sync blender-shapekeys 8.6 s

Rusty v2 - the same talking line as the approved demo, but his head is now one smooth sculpted mesh with a real mouth opening in the muzzle; Rhubarb Lip Sync drives three face shape keys (jaw open, mouth wide, lips pucker) so the whole muzzle and chin move as he talks.

Works - clearly more "animated film" than v1: the mouth opens inside the face with fangs and tongue, rounds for "oo" sounds and the soft cream muzzle stretches with the jaw.

Coming soon 5 days

blender-eevee rife shorts-portrait 30 s

A 30-second portrait (9:16) "5 days to go!" teaser for YouTube Shorts/Reels in the 3D playroom style - Rusty pops in ("Psst! Hey friends! Can you keep a secret?"), Bibi hops in ("Something BIG is coming to ZuzuLand!"), five big toy blocks drop in one by one and everyone counts 5-4-3-2-1, Bibi gasps…

Works - a complete kids' Short made entirely on the laptop with the new standard pipeline (half the frames rendered, the rest filled in by RIFE, upscaled to full HD by Real-ESRGAN): about 37 minutes of machine time.

Coming soon 5 days Rusty smile v2

blender-eevee rife shorts-portrait 30 s

The same 30-second portrait "5 days to go!" Short (same lines, voices, timing, music and the fixed 9:16 framing) - only Rusty's mouth is new: a real 3D smiling mouth sculpted into his muzzle with corners turned up, a warm dark-red inside and a clearly visible pink tongue, no teeth.

Works - Rusty now looks like a friendly plush cartoon fox when he talks: the smile is part of the face (the muzzle surface itself dents in and stretches), it reads correctly from the front and from 3/4, opens into a happy rounded "D" on…

Compression test 1

ffmpeg-x264-2pass shorts-portrait 30 s

Compression test 1 - the 30-second "5 days to go!" Short squeezed from 11.6 MB to 8.9 MB (24 % smaller, under the 10 MB goal) with a two-pass H.264 encode tuned for animation, so it uploads and loads faster.

Works - side by side it looks the same as the original (SSIM 0.996, where 1.0 = identical); flat cartoon colours and the count-along numbers stay clean. Took 7 minutes on one CPU core.

Nothing here yet

New Shorts - Landscape are being made - come back soon!