NPR Animation

Artwork Animations
1

Hi all,
Here’s a project a couple of friends and myself had been working on over the past year. It was mainly a learning process to explore how well Blender could be used for 2D cartoons.

To focus on just the creation process, we didn’t want to have to write a unique script for it so we based it off an existing TVC that aired here in Nigeria a couple of years back.

It was a challenging but extemely fun project and we learnt a lot since we tried to find new ways of doing things ourselves.

Our greatest challenge was actually settling with a style to use as the we realized that we weren’t restricted by Blender at all; the possibilities of what we could achieve were enendless. Amidst the tons of reference we used, we loved and were inspired by the backround style in Tekkonkinkreet, colors in Dreamworks’ Eldorado and the flat shading style in Disney’s Mulan though we did experiment beyond them.

For lipsyncing, we used Papagayo and because we wanted the lip movement to look more convincing as 2D, we set the interpolation mode to ‘constant’.

The backgrounds used mainly procedural texturing with stencils and lots of compositor work.

Freestyle lines were basic and very easy to set up.

Finally, we got so much help from the guys over at Blender NPR facebook group https://facebook.com/groups/303656779657432?refid=27 (Thanks guys!)

Here’s ~30 seconds of the video…
https://vimeo.com/117887718

And here’s the original video…

Cheers!

2

Seen it!! Nice 2D!!!

3

Very nice, I like it a lot.

In the first 2 shots the lips are not moving at all though.

4

Nice work!
The design is great and I like the look you achieved.
The animation still needs some attention, but all up this is a promising start.

5

Thanks everyone!

6

I like the style of the models. The only thing with Papagyo is that it doesn’t allow smooth transitions to the other phonemes. It’s good to use in a 2d setting, but for 3d, not so much.

7

Thanks!

Actually, we didn’t create the characters with the ability to speak because the original Ad had 4 different versions, each with a different audio.

We found out how ugly it looked later and we’ll correct them in the final version.

8

You’re very correct.

We found that out as well. Do you know of any alternatives?

9

Thanks a lot!