How To Animate an 80s Anime Ship

hello there it's me Paul octa King Johnson if you've been watching Japanese animation for a while you've probably noticed that spaceships cars planes etc all that background stuff it's all pretty much CGI nowadays some people love it some people hate it and think that it looks really jarring and out of place and some people are totally indifferent but some people like me old people some people miss the good old days when spaceships and cars and planes were hand-drawn by hand they had a real charm to them and it was really impressive to look at because you knew that the artists had slaved away for weeks drawing all the individual details and engines and pipes and all the metal plates and nuts and bolts but if 3d looks too out of place and hand-drawn stuff takes way too long to do then what's the solution is there a middle ground I think that just might be if you look at some of my animations you can see that I've been trying to kind of bridge the gap between the two I've been trying to style out and trying to get the style down I've spent the last week doing this clip here this one that you can see here and recording the whole process from start to finish so if you fancy sticking around for about 10 minutes I'll show you exactly what I did step by step so we're doing a big spaceship scene and the first step for me was to do the crappiest sketch that I could here it is is an absolute masterpiece as you can see I then opened up cinema 4d which is what I used for 3d modeling it really doesn't matter what software you use then using the sketch as a reference I did a really really really basic 3d model [Music] now for the important bits so listen up cinema 4d has a filter called sketch and tune which you can find here Effects sketch and tune and what this does is render out your 3d object as black and white lines tune shaders are pretty standard so your 3d programs should have a similar plugin for cinema 4d you just need to open up sketch in tune and then there are only two settings you need to change you have to turn anti-aliasing to good or best then you have to set shading to background that's all you have to do then when you press render you get this black and white lines a quick important aside this model is very very simple as you can see the ships that I made for my R type film were very simple too and also the ships that I made for my Thai fighter film the reason I make them simple is because I'm going to be detailing them by hand if you make a really detailed model like for instance this Star Destroyer here look at that beautifully detailed beautifully detailed as soon as you hit the sketch in tune filter the 3d program will render out all of those tiny details all of those thousands of little details out as lines you'll end up with a massive dense black lines that are absolutely no use to anyone as you can see here that's why I make my models really simple you can always draw more detail in if you need it but erasing this amount of unwanted lines imagine and raising this I would not wish that on my worst enemy anyway next step I moved the camera to get a nice dynamic fly past shot of the spaceship like this then I hit the render button and rendered this entire animation out as black and white lines once it was rendered I saved the result as a mob file and simply dragged it over into my animation software I use TV paint but again it shouldn't really matter too much what animation software you're using as long as you're able to get a 3d model out of your 3d program as lines and in your 2d software that's all you need it looks okay as you can see so it's time to color it I'm gonna be shading it a tee style with four tones of shading basically this kind of thing here that you can see but first start we need to get the base color in to do that I just made a new layer underneath my lines I filled it with my base color and then I erased the bits outside the ship that I didn't need using the fill tool set to erase before I started shading I wanted to get the background in there so I painted a huge space scene in Photoshop I wanted to match the background movement to the camera movement so I made a skybox making a skybox in cinema 4d is really easy and here's how drag the background space image in go to light object menu click sky and it'll make a skybox for you up there then you just drag your image into the skybox now whenever you move a ship or a camera or whatever around the sky will always be in the right position as you can see here when we Pan the ship around so now I want to get my sky into a TV paint so I turned off the ship I rendered out the sky only and then dragged it into TV paint just like before then I moved it down so it's underneath all my other layers and there you go it matches next up I had to just fill in all the black areas of the ship that's like spaces between engines etc and with that out of the way I can then start shading in here's the palette that I use to take a look we already have the base color and so now I had to slap the shade on as you can see I'm just drawing lines carefully and then filling in areas with the fill tool this took hours to do so I've sped the process up for you after that as you can see I'm just filling in areas where there are spotlights or thrusters bits that are gonna have glows on Later now for the extra shade this is just how I did the normal shading just drawing lines and then filling in areas with the fill bucket tool his work gets kind of interesting you know how I said that my models were really simple and I would hand detail them well here we go and detailing them now I'm just drawing in those little vents and panel lines and nuts and bolts and things and once I had a whole frame of those drawn in I would then go back and forward through the frames just animating them basically many many hours later I'd drawn in quite a few details but they kind of get lost in the shadow of the ship so I decided to stick some highlights on but the line tool comes in very very very useful for this but yeah those highlights really bring out the areas of detail many hundreds of years later and I was highlighting the ship using the highlight color from my palette here exactly the same as shading you know just draw the lines and then fill in the bits with the highlight color at this point we've pretty much got our color on and our shading and our highlights as well so it's time to put in any extra colors we need there were some yellow bits on the ship so here you can see me filling those in now for quite a tricky bit which is putting on all the running lights the spotlights all those like tiny little you know pin lights that go on the ship you may have noticed that this bit takes quite a while so yeah it's all looking pretty good at this point and so I had to get some clothes on those engines normally I would just stick a blue glow on there but if you have a look at this shot from Makris you can see that they're going one further and they've actually got blue glow and then they've got a yellow glow inside so I thought I'd try something similar yeah since I was doing glows at this point I went to the areas where we have our little red lights on at the front of the ship and just added a red glow around us so it is coming along nicely at this point and I needed to get those spotlights going on the front of the ship I could have done this by hand but instead I thought I'd try something so I stuck a few 3d cones on the ship in cinema 4d rendered just those cones out as lines and then just filled them with yellow turn the opacity down a bit and there you go spotlights spotlights turned out okay in the end at this point I'm just adding some highlights onto any of the yellow bits on the ship like this little little mining vehicle that's parked on top at this point I decided to draw in some more details so I made a new layer and really roughly drew in some aerials and pylons and things as the process is exactly the same as animating anything else except you have to be extra careful to try and match what you're drawing to the 3d model obviously when I was happy with that I inked over it like so then I colored and shaded it the exact same way I did the rest of the ship next I wanted to draw a lens flare like this one in Aquila here to go on one of the floodlights on the front of the ship so I sketched that out roughly in blue and then went over in yellow adding detail and cleaning it up [Music] then finally I just slapped a glow on it now I wanted to get some dust and rocks going past so I went back over to photoshop and painted three separate things a dust cloud some rocks and then some more rocks on top of those I brought those over into TV paint and used to feature it has called the multi-plane camera to stack the three on top of each other and then move sounds a bit complicated you can actually forget this step and composite extra things like dust rocks clouds etc in whatever video editing software you're using like for instance Sony Vegas after that I animated some tiny little moving pebbles to go on top of the dust cloud pretty traditional animation here for this [Music] then I dropped some color into them then I did the same thing again for the rocks at the back of the ship flying towards the camera and that's it here's the finished result the whole thing took about a week to do so that's roughly 70 hours I think which is obviously a really long time but animating an entire shot like this completely by hand would have taken the four times that long I think so the 3d does help a lot I'm not gonna lie it does still look quite faked and digital if you know what I mean everything looks super sharp so in the future I think I'm maybe gonna experiment with some kind of filters to simulate dust and scratches on old school cells if I can figure that kind of thing out basically I want to get my shifts looking like the 1984 Makris movie essentially that's the final end goal but for now you can judge for yourself whether or not it was worth the time I do hope it helped if your animating stuff yourself or at least entertained you if you're just watching out of interest give me a comment below and let me know your thoughts I'm Paul Johnson and I'll see you next time have a good night everyone

Channel: OtaKing77077

Views: 198,792

Keywords: animation, anime, tutorial, 80s, sakuga, macross, process, time lapse, unicron, shading, how-to, 2d, 3d, manga

Id: MMUcafde5A4

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/CopyPasteRepeat]

Serious dedication... and this is described as a quick way compared to the traditional 80s approach. Amazing.

[u/DevinPatches]

As a noob animator, this is inspiring. Great techniques!

[u/tallgeese333]

One thing I don’t think he mentioned is it may take 70 hours, but once that model is built you can use it as many time as you want. Especially if it’s a sci-fi where you may be using shots of many ships throughout a 20-45 minute episode for several episodes/seasons or 90-120 minute movie that could save thousands of man hours. You’d also be set up for future content which makes sequels a more viable option.

I think maybe observing how camera angles and shots are animated in retro anime would maybe knock down the digitized feel. If the camera moves through the space too freely it makes it seem more fake.

[u/pargupta]

Fantastic.

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[u/xcmk]

Absolutely incredible