Quest for 3D Painterly Backgrounds on the Cheap
Many of you are familiar with my “tradigital inbetweening” technique, Which was featured by colleague and friend Chris Georgenes in his Book, How to Cheat at Flash. The technique enables one to create highly complex (traditional looking) character animation using Flash in a relatively easy and straight forward approach, without all that techy, clicky-dicky crap.
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This is a technique that I continue to work with and evolve, and although the creation of such animation in Flash has become rather easy to accomplish, the creation of the background elements and three dimensional environments to match the fluidity of the animation has continued to prove to be a bit of a pain in the ass, since in order to generate those beautiful feature film worthy backgrounds is still something that requires either high end (often proprietary) tools, or extraordinary amounts of time and attention to detail, which most of us simply don’t have.
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For this film, Tshak Kaan, I continue on my quest for a cheap and believable 3d solution for “painterly” 3D backgrounds. It is my mission to put together a work flow that dramatically speeds up the creation of feature film animation and a tools set that anyone can afford, preferably under $2000.
It really pisses me off that so far not a single company has developed a real “toon” shader for 3d that is actually usable within a low budget 2d production environment. No, don’t give me that crap about cel shading. were not talking about cel shading here. Were talking about shading environments with a traditional animation look and feel.
Traditional animation does not use cel shaded backgrounds.. in traditional animation cel shading is often strictly reserved for the characters. In traditional animation the background used other media whether its acrylic paint, crayon, watercolor doesn’t mater, it was always painted.
Yes Disney, Dreamworks, MGM, etc has done it in their films like Tarzan and Spirit Stallion of the Cimarron. But they have the multimillion dollar budgets that allow them that type of luxury. I don’t. At least not on projects that i do for myself where i have no money coming in and anything that goes into it comes out directly out of my pocket.
So my quest continues, this week I am playing with Vue 7 which is a 3D environment generator that was use to create some of the jungles you saw in the new Indiana Jones film. Vue is a $1500 program so if it works out my production budget will have increased by $1500. Vue 7 doe not seem to allow me the ability to create “no-photo-realistic” environments and lighting but it does seem to have the ability to let me tweak the lighting, maybe if i can figure out how to paint texturfes by had i can paint my textures by hand and i will have something that works… it also has an easy way of exporting skyboxes which would really come in handy for com positig with 2d in side some other app. But i don’t have any samples of Vue rendere at this time as the program is proving to be a real pain in the ass to work with. I will keep on messing with.
Snap! Am playing with that this weekend as well! I am also wondering if Google SketchUp could be helpful, it seems really basic but you can take photos and then apply them to the models you create. I am wondering what would happen if you first painted over those photos using a program like Painter… :0) I am very excited about Vue7, have yet to work out a flyover shot. I managed to animate some clouds by merely drawing a path so it is looking like it could be good!