This scene was an exercise in producing a “cinematic reveal”. I used Eevee, which allowed me to preview the fully rendered animation in real-time while working on it. A lot of lights were required to simulate global illumination effects!

Here’s the completed animation sequence:

A few interesting points about the character model:

• I used Blender’s Rigify add-on to generate an armature for the character and pose her.
• The eye blink animation is done with shape keys.
• For the steam rising from her coffee mug, I created a volume shader, animating a noise texture.

Here is a close up, unshaded and with materials / lighting:

The steam shader setup: