One of the biggest things that stops a 3D model from looking 2d is how perfectly consistent a 3D mesh looks when animated. If you were to create a 3D model based on each hand drawn frame of a movie or show, you’ll end up with a different or alternate model each time (and especially a model that is optimized to look great on 1 camera angle, but not another). I want to re make different alternate versions of a character model that will change each frame. In 2d, there are human error in redrawing each frame, as humans can’t remake each shape from every angle perfectly. That is the effect I want to re create. All I’ve seen so far is a boil effect on the outlines, but that doesn’t do much as your eye can clearly make out the smooth 3D volume moving underneath, making it look just like a filter. Plus, actual commercial animation do not have this boil effect, instead they have a smooth transition from one shape to another. The first shape may be a square and the last is a circle, but they seamlessly blend between 2 completely different shapes or meshes. To recreate this effect, I thought of creating shape keys, and manually changing every aspect of the mesh to look completely different, and repeating this process for 8 to 12 times. This is crazily time consuming just thinking about it, plus having to do it for every mesh in the scene. I would like to find a faster way to do this. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it probably won’t, which is why I was thinking with whatever method is out there, I can re tweak the final shape with some modeling/sculpting tools before adding it as a shape key. It would also be nice to have a driver that activates when a mesh is animated or when the camera view is animated, so I don’t have to manually animate the warping effect. This would have to work on multiple meshes parent to one another without clipping or going weirdly into one another. Especially on simulated cloth of a character’s outfit after baking the sim. I was thinking the warp of going from inner to outermost meshes. For example the body would warp then the shirt, except the shirt cannot warp inward as to clip onto the body, and this goes for anything on top of the shirt, and so on.
An example of what I wanted in 3D. I made it as wonky as possible so you guys get what I mean, but ideally when animating with the shape key drivers, it would be a smooth transition from wonky mesh shape A to wonky mesh shape B. The boil effect on the cube/rectangle on the left is what I want to avoid.
I know this is a lot, but arguably one of the most important things to making 3D truly look 2d.
By far the simplest way to do this is to draw the character, on every frame, which gives a nice hand-drawn look Seriously, though, once you get this deep down the “3d that looks like 2d” rabbit hole, you rapidly approach the point of negative returns where it would actually be faster and easier to just do it in 2D. In my own experiments with 3d/2d, I can say pretty confidently you’re there with what you want to do
Have you looked at animating on every second frame? Made popular in one of the spiderman movies. I believe the concept comes from making stop motion video.
This would help to tame the boiling…
I thought that came from mimicking animating on twos (For parts of it. Other parts are on ones, and they pushed it even further in the second movie), from traditional animation. AFAIK, stop motion takes a new picture on every frame.
Well, my procress would go like this: I would get the ‘hand drawn look’ of the 3d models, then I would hand animate some extra needed effects like clothing folds moving, some hair shots, tears, some shadows, some vfx and anything extra to give it that 2d look. Unfortunately, when it comes to 2d animation, it is simply not my strong suit in drawing the same thing consistently, that is why im more comfortable with animating ‘extra’ effects by hand and characters in 3d. Plus drawing a frame takes forever for me . Ive had this idea for years, and loved every movie that encorporated 2d into 3d seamlessly like arcane, belle, house no kuni and the spiderverse. They’re good references for studying. But the only thing missing from what I wanted vs what they had is mainly this. Im also going to be working with shape keys based on camera angles, just like house no kuni had.
I already thought of implementing this as well, along with the ‘wobble’ effect. I wonder if I can use displacement/ noise maps on a different scales on a whole character model, with the outfit and extra parts affected, then fix it to make it more eye pleasing before turning it into a shape key. Or having noise maps that take into consideration of a mesh’s geometry. Larger spaces get wider displacement and smaller spaces get narrow displacement.
here’s something to chew on- why do you think is it that massive studios making things like Arcane, Belle, and the Spiderverse movies haven’t implemented this technique you’re looking for?
I have no answer for that. I do know 1 show that does something similar- just not for every frame and it’s house no kuni. Plus the other ones were going for a more hybrid look than full 2d.
Have you looked at Freestyle? I used it before to get a hand sketched look to the lines it draws. Sure it was just strokes on the base render, the underlying mesh render didn’t change. So it just looked like a perfect 3d object that someone sketched over. I did some animations with it, but the files are on an older computer. I’ll try to find them soon and post up something in a day or two, but it’s not 100% what I think you are looking for.
I kinda like this idea, but I think you’re not looking at it from the right view. Create 3 shapekeys, one scales the mesh on the y-axis, one on the x-axis, and one on the z-axis. Drive all three shapekeys with noise modifiers. That should give you an infinitely changing mesh shape. I would think how you create the shapekeys would help to give variance to this…
Maybe combine Freestyle with the shapekeys.
A - because no one wants that look/style or thinks it’s needed.
B - because it would be hard to implement into the software.
I had a couple of other thoughts, but this post is long enough.
This is an excellent idea- or, the beginnings of an excellent idea. The main difficulty is that randomized variance like this doesn’t actually look good in practice. The beauty of hand-drawn frames is that they’re deliberate, so even a random variance on a 3D mesh will never have the same effect. The method doesn’t really matter; you can also animate a displacement texture or distort the 3D mesh shape using masking in the compositor, but it still looks random and lacks the artistic touch that makes this effect look good.
Bingo! I’ve researched this quite thoroughly myself and your A option is definitely not it; I’ve read dozens of blog posts and white papers from 3D animators bemoaning the lack of this feature, and not for lack of trying. It comes back again to artistic intent, which is nearly impossible to do here
There’s a famous interview with a texturer on Arcane where they were asked “how did you get the handpainted look on your textures?” The answer: “we hand painted them!”
Some things you just can’t mathematically generate, and even if you can, they don’t look good
Would you elaborate on this process please? I think this would work great for simple meshes, especially inanimate/rigid ones. I do think there would have to be some nuance and tweaking to make this more visually organic on a more complex mesh like a character. But this method can potential reduce making custom shape keys for a huge or majority of a scene, and reduce the work by 60 to 70 percent.
You are right in this, which is why I wanted to find a method to start these randomized shape keys. I already know that to make appealing and deliberate, you’ll have to tweak it, but this reduces the process by a lot.
I am planning on implementing a lot of 2d elements in the animations, especially for the set, and the set design. I have made 2d art basically all of my life (especially realism, and stylized recently) so this is strong suit I plan on using. Its just 2d animation , yeah, that, I am not good at.
I’ve found something similar to what you just described on reddit a while back. This is completely procedural. But you can see the 3d volume like I just mentioned.
I wouldn’t say the slightly randomness of hand drawn lines in animation was deliberate. I think it’s errors that creep into the process and not enough refinement. If I were to hand draw a 3d cube rotating around, my first set of sketches would be pretty rough, I would imagine. Redrawing a new set of sketches using the first ones as guides would allow me to improve the quality, I would think. Maybe a 3rd pass thru the sketches and the quality would be good enough. (Of course, these are all assumptions. I have never hand animated anything other than simple ‘flipbooks’ - You know, the corner of your notebook while in history class )
I think Disney spent more time refining than say Warner Bros. did. Both time and money budgets would affect how refined the animation is.
I created 3 shapekeys, one for scaling on each axis. Then, I was wrong, don’t use drivers on the values of the shapekeys. Insert keyframes for the values instead and in the f-curve editor, add noise modifiers to each animation curve. Playback the animation and you’ll see the problem with that. All the vertical lines are straight, and all the horizontal lines are straight (the edges of the cube). To be honest, I never tried this before, now I see the problems. So it won’t work for
Because it needs
So maybe use
Would help break up the straightness of the lines/edge. I don’t know, like I said, never tried for this sort of thing.
Thinking this thru some, I think at the end of the day you will find this to be true
But maybe it will be good enough for you.
I have some other thoughts, but this post is too long now…
Its ok, any help that I can get, trust me on this. I am interested in this effect, because this of all the art styles never done before, but now possible with this? 3d animation always had a certain look, and 2d animation always had to be ‘simple’ to make it practical for animation. Because of this, many art styles is left unexplored in animation, and I would love to find a workaround and that’s where blender comes in. Finding a way to bring my illustrations to life without breaking my fingers 2d animating it, is a dream.
Seriously, though, once you get this deep down the “3d that looks like 2d” rabbit hole, you rapidly approach the point of negative returns where it would actually be faster and easier to just do it in 2D. In my own experiments with 3d/2d, I can say pretty confidently you’re there with what you want to do
. Ive had this idea for years, and loved every movie that encorporated 2d into 3d seamlessly like arcane, belle, house no kuni and the spiderverse. They’re good references for studying. But the only thing missing from what I wanted vs what they had is mainly this. Im also going to be working with shape keys based on camera angles, just like house no kuni had.
, yeah, that, I am not good at.
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