Camera Mapping - 3D Cameras for 2D Animation

hello everyone welcome back to another video if you're new to this channel then i make animated films and i share my process here with you guys i'm currently working on a film about climbing and the methods i use to make it are predominantly 2d animation focused where i paint my backgrounds and my characters but here and there i like to infuse it with a bit of a 3d workflow and take my painted looking backgrounds into a three-dimensional world without completely changing the style of the images i want things to feel like they share the same style but that they sometimes expand on that flat painted environment of 2d i've shown examples of this in previous videos but thought a dedicated video for it might be interesting first off you can achieve stylized looks in 3d in many ways this is absolutely not the only way to go but it's the one i have found worked for me what we will take a look at here is camera mapping and what's also called projection mapping what it does is to project an image from where the camera is looking onto a 3d geometry very much like what a real film projector would do onto a wall for example when looking at that result from a different angle through a different camera view we can see that it's just a flat image on a wall by replacing the wall with a geometry that somewhat represents the subject in the image we can start to get some really interesting results the difference by doing this to simply just creating the entire shot in 3d and rendering it out from there is that by using a 2d image which we have painted we can easily control the level of stylization it all here relies on the artistry of the painting really rather than trying to replicate artistically painted results by using shaders or textures within that 3d pipeline though a shader kind of approach could also look really good for backgrounds i find that purely painting them gives me the results that i am after camera mapping comes with a few technical disadvantages and limitations that a pure 3d workflow where one would texture every object individually for the whole scene does not have as we're projecting an image with only information from one camera angle we are relying on a bit of an illusion by looking too far around the objects that illusion is quickly broken we basically have a limited field of view for us to move our camera within though by separating the original painting into a few layers and filling in some of the originally hidden information we can project these separately back onto the geometry and get more purchase in terms of camera movement anything here that stands out vertically from the ground plane in this case would be separated and then it onto that specific geometry i have full tutorials showing the process of setting up a scene like this on my patreon page which you can find a link to below as i said earlier projection mapping allows me to move a 3d camera within that stylized environment it's not 100 accurate in terms of lighting like a 3d render would treat it as this is a lighting scenario that has been visualized and created by me in this case for realistic renders in 3d you can use renderers like octane redshift cycles or arnold here i'm just using my good old head as a renderer sometimes i do use a 3d renderer as a starting point to get a good idea of how a lighting scenario might play out i render it out and then i add my stylized touch on top with a layer of painting that can be a very time efficient way of working for some shots adding this small perspective change that camera mapping allows for can add a lot of complexity to the creation of the shot and might not always be worth it sometimes a slide zoom or a pan on the flat background might be equally effective and save you a lot of work but having a few shots with this type of camera moves can allow for some interesting cinematic filmmaking choices a shot like this one lends itself really well for camera mapping as we're looking down onto a ground plane with some separated elements in this scenario it's rocks by looking down on the ground plane we have the option to move quite a lot with our camera without things starting to stretch and look distorted on a shot like this though we have way less room to move as we're looking into quite a deep space or a deep perspective here all these elements are sitting on different depths which makes the projection a bit trickier the ground plane is not facing us like in the top down example meaning if we look down on the ground we get some serious stretching going on for this specific shot i wanted to follow my characters carrying their boulder mats through the woods i thought having a slight camera move following them would add a nice touch to the shot this in the end meant a lot more work as each tree here had to be painted on separate layers so that they could be parallax between them and so that things could overlap each other as we move into the shot so to sum things up i like using this method since it allows me to move a little bit within my painted images without leaving that look and fully bringing it into a 3d world i would say nature scenes are particularly effective with this method i think stylized foliage can be quite hard to nail with other 3d workflows whereas if i would make a full interior or a cityscape or something featuring only man-made objects then maybe i would take a slightly different approach as everything then it would be quite geometrical it lends itself better for a 3d pipeline and the stylization is easier to apply at that stage hope you enjoyed this little breakdown about my take on camera mapping feel free to like and subscribe and check out my patreon page for more content we have a discord server set up there now where we can share our work and chat about anything animation related we'd love to have you on board so do check out the link below hope you're having a good day and i'll see you guys in the next one bye you

Channel: Olof Storm

Views: 92,315

Keywords: animation, illustration, filmmaking, tutorial, painting, camera mapping, 2d animation, backgrounds

Id: v0U28HxbzmQ

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021