Hello all!
I recreated “Made in Abyss” intro in blender.
Why? The main goal of this project was to gain knowledge of stylized 3D styles, with a focus on achieving a actual 2D anime look. I also wanted to develop tools and create a production pipeline that allows for fast and flexible work in different “2D styles”.
Yes this doesnt look as good, and there are a lot of errors and inconsistencies across scenes because I focused mainly on the technical side of things. I needed a live “organism” for testing purposes, so all the scenes use different tools, shaders, settings, and so on. Originally, I didn’t plan to fully finish this project, but I had put so much work into it that I decided to polish a few things in post(mostly using glow and blur to hide issues lol) and release it.
I chose the “Made in Abyss” intro because it has a very sketchy, hand-drawn look that’s hard to recreate in 3D. I spent a couple of months diving into various technical details and stuff, and what I’ve found is that achieving a conventional anime look in 3D requires a completely new approach for each component. This includes modeling to account for line art, custom rigs for “mesh distortion” and procedural shadow control, creating scenes with a “2D multiple layers system” (where some layers affect others and some don’t) while still allowing for 3D objects with correct perspective, exporting custom passes (using AOVs and some python scripting), and many other tweaks.
Btw: Post-production was made in affter effecs and for lineart i used Psoft Pencil+