Been awhile since I added something to my portfolio, but I just spent the past two months working on this so boom.
Here’s an abbreviated TLDR version of the proceeding breakdown if that’s more your style: https://youtu.be/6RO4DLxsIOc
Animation:
With days to spare on my Maya free trial, I thought to give animation a shot with these Kiel Figgins rigs then out came this in two weeks. I ended up referencing a lot of martial arts videos if you care for those. I must say, my workflow did not change drastically between programs. Anyways, I exported to USD and everything else was done in Blender.
----------Rendering Stuff
Brushstrokes Add-on: I started here to see what the new 4.3 paint tools had in store. Every few frames I would redraw the “flow” curves so the brush curves kept a nice shape on the characters and weapons. Additionally, each turtle their own style- some more wispy, some more grungy.
I definitely had to brute force this lol, having multiple animated brush stroke objects caused many crashes. Ultimately, I find the add-on helped with catching rim lights.
Lighting:
Each character got their own lighting per shot (colors matching their personality/attire) but for the more dynamic shots I animated the lights with empties or directly.
For the opening shot, I used light linking to keep the lights from reflecting on the floor.
Environment:
All the skyscrapers are vaguely box modelled after new york buildings and the other image planes come from online. All materials on the 3d objects are procedural and some make use of the object info node for color variation. The windows use the object index value to choose which colors go on what building (the color ramp has values over 1, which is why it looks fully white).
The world material is also procedural, but the node tree is TOO large to fit in a screenshot. I can share it elsewhere if you’d like.
VFX:
Smears: I was hoping to use Goo’s Mesh Trail add-on to get free smears but, due to the mesh being cached in USD, I couldn’t find a way to track a curve to the mesh. Instead, I animated all the curves manually with the AnimAll add-on. The materials all follow a similar node set-up shown below just with different textures. The driven value is just a -#frame/25 to animate the texture trailing backwards from the start of the curve.
Particles: For Leonardo’s shot I had simple particle sims to launch out some low-poly shapes to make sparks. The material of the shards uses the same object info trick as the windows to randomize the colors blue to green.
Grease Pencil: For the more subtle effects I did some 2D animation. This part was fun since I haven’t really done anything like it before. I placed the grease pencil object slightly in front of the camera, parented the gp to the camera, then just drew in the camera view for the whole anim. The dust effects are animated on twos while some smears and other things are on ones.
Compositing:
I adjusted the node set-up as I was adding more and more things, so there’s no real process to it. Certain effects, like ao, kuwahara, and mist, I just had to split between render layers. Eventually I ended up with this
One detail that kinda got destroyed by youtube’s compression is Kuwahara. It’s used over the sky, effects, and background to smooth everything together.
The only trouble it caused me was I couldn’t figure out how to layer it without messing up the alpha channel of the final result. For example, when the edges of buildings get distorted, it leaves some gaps which just get filled it with black when exported with no alpha. Just wasn’t sure how to combat that so you’ll see some dark edges around certain objects.
I’ve reached the point where I wish I could do more on this but am also very tired of working on it, so I think that means it’s time to move on. If you wanted see the full full process i have a playlist of related livestreams but mind you they’re scuffed.
Either way, thanks for reading this. Hope everything made sense. If it didn’t or you want to know more lmk :)))
Credits:
TMNT Maya Character Rigs:
- Concept - Nicola Saviori
- Modelling - Keny Bigny
- Rigging - Kiel Figgins
Skyline Images - CoverMeDesigns + Wannapik Studio
Smackdown! Here Comes the Pain OST: BGM001 ~ BGM042
Sound Effects: Pixabay, Naruto Shippuden: Clash of Ninja 2, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Jet Set Radio
