90's Anime in Blender - Tutorial

[Music] hey everyone jack from very vague here and in this video i'm going to be taking you through my process for creating this sort of 90s anime aesthetic in blender which a lot of people have been asking me on my digital art instagram how i achieve so i'll start off by giving you an overview of the style and some of my thoughts on it before then going more in depth on some of the scenes i've created what i'll be breaking down is more the compositional modelling and coloring techniques that have helped me achieve a similar look [Music] so what is this 90s anime style i'm referring to well for me it would roughly be the decade beginning from the 1988 release of akira which seemed to give rise to a new distinctly more moody breed of anime spawning other iconic titles such as ghost in the shell and the evangelion series often taking place in dark near futuristic cities this new focus on man-made structures and artificial lighting led to more visually rich and mature images that up until that point we had only really seen in traditional films so you might ask well what happened why did this aesthetic lose its touch or why do we not see as many beautiful masterpieces year in year out like we did in the 90s and perhaps the most obvious place to start in answering that question would be the shift in medium so all of these movies were made using mostly traditional methods of 2d animation which involves hand drawing on celluloid paper or otherwise referred to as cells that are then painted and overlaid on top of larger background cells to form a complete image and this more manual methodology tends to result in small yet distinctly human imperfections that some people will argue is the reason purely digital workflows will never quite achieve the same level of beauty and care as analog formats [Music] now whilst i do tend to agree partially with that sentiment i think there is more to it than just that as a lot of these imperfections we can now replicate using post effects like chromatic aberration and film scratches which i'll go over later in the video rather what i think the missing link here is is actually the shift in focus on the method and purpose of visual storytelling through composition for instance if we take a look here at a frame from the original evangelion series we see the use of clear compositional strategies that utilize the space around the subject to elicit feelings of isolation and melancholy reminiscent of traditional techniques used in figurative painting there seem to be an obvious change in the 2000s with the emergence of digital workflows from being a graphic medium that was economic and stripped back to being overly abundant and at times unnecessarily complicated and i guess for obvious reasons this makes sense as digital allowed for many newly acquired freedoms technically speaking no longer was it necessary for these creators to be constrained to the use of only a select amount of colors or to be strictly governed by a set of line types and thicknesses now the possibilities were endless and directors could be more generous with the amount of visual information they could include in one frame take the 2016 remake of berserkia as an example with the original carrying a lot more presence on screen with its bold controlled use of colours and logical camera transitions that guide the eye between scenes whilst generating mood and suspense then compare this to the remake which seems to have a much flatter washed out color palette with a mix mash of 2d and 3d elements that all look like they've been rendered in different lighting all made harder to focus on by the disorientating camera work and overuse of motion blur now although some of this may sound harsh i'm in no way against 3d as this is very much my preferred tool when it comes to making my art rather what i'm trying to highlight here is just the lack of visual cohesion that can emerge when mixing 2d and 3d together to try and emulate a purely 2d style so that leads us onto the question of how do we overcome this problem of visual inconsistency and how do we try and craft something more akin to the original so for me i use a few techniques in blender to achieve this the first of which being the nature of how i construct my scenes in 3d which is largely influenced by the traditional 2d methods of overlaying foreground elements on larger background elements like watercolors or paintings but now instead of just using solely 2d elements i integrate 3d models into this mix as well [Music] so what i'll start off by doing is identifying these different layers in the piece i'm looking to reference in this case a scene from the anime kite which as you can see here is made up of these three distinct layers [Music] then what i'll do is open up a new project in blender and set up a camera approximating our reference and then begin to construct these different compositional layers we identified so i generally start off with the foreground elements being in this case this ledge here before then moving on to the mid ground which is this row of buildings that i just modeled up using an image reference on the camera and then what we can do to convert our original 2d image to 3d is to use modifiers like the uv project modifier which will map the texture coordinates from this camera onto the actual buildings themselves then what i like to do is go into photoshop and using the stamp tool clean up this original image so it's just the buildings and we aren't getting any unwanted overlaps [Music] and then in this case i also went ahead and removed all the lighting from the base image and converted it to a black and white alpha so that i could then turn it into an actual 3d emissive shader in blender like so [Music] then i just added in a few spotlights to match the ones in the original image and now you can see our mid-ground component is complete and in 3d [Music] i then added in the final compositional layer the background as just a simple 2d plane positioned behind everything [Music] following that i came back and added in a figure along with some approximated lighting to complete the foreground section before then just continuing on and refining the scene until i was happy with it [Music] and now for the end result you can see we end up with a 3d scene that acts much in the same way as those traditional 2d celluloid layers i was talking about in that we can just turn them on and off and isolate them by element like so you can again see this methodology demonstrated in my wicked city blender file here whereby we can identify the different 2d and 3d objects that make up our composition [Music] so for the background again i've just got a 2d plane with a city backdrop texture that i painted and animated in photoshop mapped onto it then we've got the mid ground which is a bunch of barriers and street lights parented to this big circle of road which has a 360 degree rotation keyframe so that it endlessly loops around and gives the illusion of the car moving from the camera's perspective [Music] then lastly for the foreground element we of course have our car which is just a static element with a nice little drop shadow added to it and then once we tie all that together through the perspective of our camera we can now see we're getting these all reading again as one single 2d style composition so the main benefits i find with this technique is it really allows for the best of both worlds in the if i'm painting backgrounds i can still use 2d programs like photoshop here to come in and change it to something completely different if i wanted to and then all i'd have to do is change the texture and blender without having to completely remodel an entirely new scene in 3d which would take a very long time and definitely wouldn't end up looking as stylized as i'd like it to and then on the flip side we can still use all the typical advantages of 3d for our foreground and mid-ground elements to rapidly experiment with our composition and play around with materials and so on so probably the only real setback you'll find with this technique is that you're relatively locked into the positioning of your camera once you choose a view from which to start painting and projecting from but you can still get a decent result within a certain proximity and this actually lends itself quite well to the 90s anime aesthetic as you'll notice another hallmark of these movies and series is their static establishing shots and emphasis on still landscapes as opposed to moving or tracking shots and just for the sake of argument i wanted to explore this static burst moving camera idea a bit further so i ran a little test on another piece to see if adding in a camera move would have much of a benefit on how the composition reads overall the result as i expected didn't really achieve much other than detracting away from my original intention for the piece which was to create something that felt transient and sort of like you were looking at the front window of a car endlessly so ultimately i think all this orbiting perspective does is kind of break that illusion but my point here isn't necessarily that camera moves are bad i guess it's just to be mindful about what the purpose of the camera is in your work as i think it can sometimes be an easy trap to just throw in a 3d camera move and assume this will somehow make the scene more visually appealing which as we saw in the remakes previously is not always the case and there are also smarter more subtle ways to generate movement in our scenes that still retain an overall 2d look the most notable being the effect of parallax which is seen in just about every classic ghibli film or really any 2d animation ever made for that matter due to its simple yet effective nature so the basic mechanics of how it works relies upon having an image made up of the foreground mid-ground and background layers we've been discussing so far these are then simply moved from side to side at varying speeds depending on their distance from the camera so in this case the fence at the bottom being the layer closest to the camera moving the fastest whilst the stormy clouds in the background moves the slowest [Music] so this technique also works in 3d and will work best if you set up your scenes like i've been showing as now we can just start adding motion to our different compositional layers and it will generate this parallax effect so in the case of this scene here once i had set up my perspective view from inside of this static carriage which is acting as the central foreground element all i had to do for the background was then keyframe this from side to side and immediately it created a feeling of the train moving then for the mid ground which is mostly comprised of 3d elements i added in a more literal parallax effect by just physically moving these all as a collection instance so they would look like they were rushing past the train and to give you more of an idea of how collection instances work is they basically just create packaged single object versions of an entire collection which can come in super useful when we're looking to create repeating loops for large amounts of objects at the same time so in this case i have a collection called houses that we can see here that basically acts as a container for all of my mid-ground objects then i've set up this other separate collection called midground where we can add our instances into by coming up here to our ad rollout and selecting the option collection instance before then choosing the desired collection you wish to create an instance of and then now you'll see we get this single object from which we can now easily move around and place anywhere in our scene in my case i went ahead and created two of these so that the houses would just continue in a seamless loop when parented to this empty object which i keyframed so that at 900 frames the next collection instance would sync perfectly with the starting position of the first and another great thing about working with these instances is it means that we can make updates to our original collection as we go and all the objects in our loop will update along with it [Music] so as i said the collection itself is mostly made up of 3d objects like these low poly houses and power lines but i also like to make use of 2d cutouts as well like these anime people here which i add custom mesh edges to so that will still get tune or freestyle functionality in our final render [Music] and these 2d cutouts or shapes are something that i like to make use of across my projects as they can a lot of times be much more practical than 3d versions especially when we're working with static views as it's just a matter of orientating them facing the camera [Music] and if you're interested in using any of these both 2d and 3d assets that i've created i've made an anime blender pack that i'll link to below that's available now on my gumroad or art station so this pack includes over 50 plus total assets of all the classic objects you might need when creating a scene whether it be people cars trees buildings and so on as well as some great procedural and customizable textures that can be applied for a range of different applications [Music] alright so moving on i wanted to show you another scene i've made which again was set up in much the same way as the previous ones but the reason i wanted to show you this project was because i think it demonstrates another important technique that is critical to attaining a similar visual language of these originals which is making an effective use of color and lime weights so again i set my aspirations high here setting out to make something that would hopefully come close to this other iconic driving loop from wicked city and the only place i could think of really to start was to dissect the original and really try to interrogate what made it such a strong image and what i ultimately put it down to i guess was like all the other pieces that inspire me from this era is it's their really bold yet restricted use of colour so not necessarily just the colours themselves but how they are actually placed and shaded in relation to one another because when you actually look at this image you realize about 80 of the frame is just pure black but it's actually the arrangement and transition of these vibrant blues from that black i think is what gives it such a distinct mood and boldness so how do we go about achieving this same boldness in blender well i found the key is to keep it simple so using basic one-tone shaders to render most of these materials as you'll see here for the poles i literally just have the raw color i want them to be plugged straight into the output node and the reason i do this is when we use more complex shaders like say a principled bsdf here for example we'll end up with much more of this color blending action happening because it's taking into account the actual lights in the scene and physical reflective qualities of the material which works great for achieving photorealism but not in our case we're trying to contrast and simplify our colors more [Music] and in some cases like for this barrier here where maybe i do want a tiny bit of transition in color tone what i'll do is set up this custom emission input for the principled bsdf which will just allow me to control the intensity versus shadow here for this turquoise blue i did this for a lot of the signs too just to give them a bit more vibrancy and not to be as blown out by the spotlights and then for things like the trees where i want them to still be influenced by the lights in the scene but in a much more simplistic way we can use a toon bsdf shader to control how large these splotches of dark green being cast from our street lights are and if we're using eevee as our native renderer we can also make use of the shader to rgb node which will do the same thing but in real time so jumping back to this tunnel scene i had this set up for all my cars like so just a diffuse bsdf that feeds directly into a shader to rgb node which then uses a color ramp to control the values so we have complete control over the color and position of the shadowed versus brightly lit parts of our object then another more stylistic method i use which can come in useful when trying to shade things in more of a gradient fashion like the original is to again use a color ramp but this time set the input as the z depth from our camera like so this will then just convert the bottom color node here to be the part of the road closest to the camera with this second one controlling the part further away and you can see here if i was to minimize the effect of the gradient that suddenly our overall composition becomes much flatter so i think this shader is really important when we're looking to generate more depth in our image but still want to retain that graphical style so now moving on to the line work and the outlines we're going to want to draw in on our final image so for these i use the freestyle function native to blender which i still find produces the most reliable and clean and i'll typically set my lime weight to somewhere between 0.3 to 0.7 depending on the overall scale of the scene as generally i find anything above 1.0 usually ends up looking pretty chunky but again here it totally comes down to personal preference and what sort of style you're going for [Music] then for the line settings themselves i just ensure the silhouette border and crease options are checked as i find this gives me the best result for achieving a look that draws 3d models similar to if they were to be drawn in 2d then for the finishing touches i'll come over into the compositor to apply some additional post effects so first and foremost i like to make use of the glare node which i find goes a long way in making our image more reminiscent of the heavy light bleeding and bloom of the as originals see here especially in a lot of mamura oshi's work that a lot of the artificial lighting in the scenes is emphasized through this technique so to get an effect that's most similar to this we'll want to set the glare type to fog glow to get a nice even light blur one thing you will want to make sure of though is that your line work is applied before you apply the glare node otherwise you can end up with an ugly result like this where the lines are sitting on top of the glow next i like to add in a bit of lens distortion and now unless you want this to look like you've just dropped some molly you'll want to set this to something really low like 0.02 then i like to add in a filter node and set this to sharpen just to make our edges a bit crispier and then lastly what i sometimes like to do to replicate some of the small minor imperfections we might have seen on the old school versions is to add in a film dust and scratches texture so to overlay this on our image we'll add in a mix node and set it to screen [Music] and now you see we get these little scratches come up on our image like so and you can really do this to simulate a whole bunch of different effects so i'll link below some free vhs and film pack overlays you can play around with and then that's pretty much it now you'll see i've ended up with a result hopefully getting somewhere even close to the original but one obvious difference that you perhaps will notice between the two is their frame rate and this is another important factor to consider as the pace and motion are integral to how we want our final piece to be read so for mine i chose 30 frames per second as i wanted the final result to be relatively smooth but typically most of the originals were animated at 12 frames per second or doubled up at 24 frames per second largely due to the technical constraints as you can imagine the higher the frame rate the more drawings had to be produced [Music] so i'll even sometimes go as high as 60 fps in the case of this train crossing piece where i found the addition of extra frames allowed for an easier reading of the speed of the train and the passengers within it but you can make up your own mind here on which one of these you prefer so thanks for watching guys i hope this video has given you some insight or at least provided you a good place to start if you're interested in creating art that's inspired from this amazing era and if you did please make sure to smash that like button and if you're a whale make sure to buy my nfts [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: veryveig

Views: 3,886

Keywords: anime, lofi, aesthetic, 3d, 2d, course, tutorial, how to, render, drawing, digital art, painting, studio ghibli, cyberpunk

Id: ZsvZsVPhTVs

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021