I animated Berserk… but in Blender

this is a shot from the manga series berserk bought in 3D but this shot is only a small part of a much bigger project where I wanted to animate a scene from the manga using my favorite 3D program blender there are amazing examples of awesome looking 2D animations that utilize 3D but there are also just as many not so greatl looking ones things can go wrong very quickly which I unfortunately had to learn myself during this project and to truly understand why let's go back to our friend guts [Music] I've already played around with creating a 2d animation in 3D a couple of times most recently I remade a few shots from Spirited way but this time I wanted to create a full scene with multiple shots that flow into each other which means that our friend guts over here had to be much more versatile than anything I've created before he had to succeed in three important aspects for this project to go anywhere other than the trash you had to capture the likeness of the original be able to be add animated in the most extreme poses from the manga and most importantly of course look 2D to capture his likeness I had to make sure that the proportions of my 3D model matched with the original illustrations the problem with this is that his proportions aren't always the same sometimes the facial features are more pronounced to achieve a certain effect other times the perspectives are so extreme that it's basically impossible to draw in perfectly proportional over a series of shots so I collected a bunch of references and combine them all together to hopefully match most shots as closely as possible for a manga character he looks pretty realistic except maybe for his eyes so creating his body wasn't all that challenging I started with a human base mesh and replace the head with a custom one that I sculpted based on the references I [Music] had my love so I really hope you love me to I really hope you love me the biggest challenge during this process was to keep everything in mind the model needed to be able to do at every step of the process right from the beginning for example I had to make sure that his face works with the line art that I'm going to add once I start animating on top of that the geometry in his face needed to be able to deform into those extreme Expressions you can see in the manga the problem with that is since I can't animate them yet I can't test whether what I think will work actually works but at least he's starting to look like the original and once I fine-tuned the Shadows on his face to look more stylized I was finally able to add a rig to him rigging has always been one of my weak points which became really obvious during my Spirited Away project to create something remotely decent for this project I needed to step up my game which brought me back to an old enemy rigi when it was still new to 3D I tried using rigify a couple of times but because I just didn't understand how the proper setup process process and all the different bone collections work I accidentally ruined some of my projects back then and swore to never use it again until now this time I came prepared I watched every video in the rig anything with rigify playlist by CG dive on YouTube and after a couple of hours it turns out that rifi is actually pretty simple the biggest problem in my Spirited Away project was the face rifi does most of that basically for you and look at that the geometry works pretty well even for more extreme Expressions so with the head basically finished the body was [Music] next moding armor is very boring so you don't have to suffer through that with me so once everything was done and rigged guts already hits two of his three requirements now onto the the third and probably most important one to make a 3D object look 2D you want to imitate as many 2D style characteristics as possible while trying to keep it as 3D as possible and in my experience most of the 2D characteristics you want to imitate are the human aspects if you are a traditional anime animator for example you would have to draw up to 12 individual frames for each second of your animation so to save some time you simplify the shading to one maybe two light and dark colors and when you're drawing those Shadows your mind can simulate them as well as a computer can so they're maybe a bit smoother and simpler than what they would look like in real life now since you only have a limited amount of Shades the way you can add more details to any surface is with extra lines and the further you go with this process the closer you get to a 2d look and at this point guts looked pretty good but I was curious how far I could push his 2D look so I picked an original illustration from the manga and tried to recreate it as closely as possible possible and this is the end result the shot you saw at the start and with guts finished and ready to be animated it was time to get into the actual animation but this will not just be a simple animation of a random scene I wanted to make it a bit more difficult the scene I wanted to recreate is the second fight between guts and Zod one of his more prominent enemies and the reason I chose this scene is because it had already been animated before this scene is feur in the Berserk Anime adaptation from 2016 by most fans it's considered to be a pretty bad anime overall but not because of the story the creators decided to heavily utilize 3D to animate it and that just did not work out for them so now I wanted to see if I can do it better I think this comes pretty close to the original but doing this also showed me where the limits of this 3D 2D style are the extra lines and blood that I've added to his face look great in a single frame but once you want to animate it it looks 3D again I would have to draw multiple of these line textures just to animate his mouth so to not spend hundreds of hours more on this project I'll stick to the more simple style which I think matches the traditional 2D anime style better anyway I also manually added some sketch lines around the existing line art which definitely helps with the 2D look as well first things first let's create gut's opponent [Music] zy [Music] for Zod I basically follow the same workow that I did for guns but I had one more idea to make him look even better I texture painted some small custom Shadows it actually added a lot more depth to his body this doesn't work for all scenes but for most it looks pretty good and with both characters ready let's start with the first shot the scenes starts with guts slamming his giant sword down and Zod blocking it which felt like the perfect opportunity to create one of these it's basically a drawn out shot showing the impact and power of an attack the first thing I needed is the environment basically just a few snowy mountains with trees in the background and one main mountain as the battlefield to make the scene easier to compute I actually rendered the background scene as a 360° image so that I can add it back in as a Skybox around the main Hill that's a pretty common technique for video games as well speaking of the main Hill this is where things get a bit get a bit more complicated in most anime every shot is separated into Dynamic elements and static elements and both have their own art style the dynamic objects are more simplified because they have to be drawn much more often whereas the static elements like the ground for example are much more paintly and detailed so I kind just use the same material for the ground that I've used for my characters I had to hand paint a custom ground texture unfortunately blender's texture painting tools are very basic all you really have is a simple round brush which is exactly why I've created my own collection of custom texture paint brushes it's supposed to be a Grassy Mountain covered in snow so first I painted the grass layer this oval brush added some nice simple variation but looked Maybe a bit too simple so I used the sprinkle brush to add some more brown spots to represent the dirt underneath now to give it some more depth I wanted to see what it would look like if I used the leaves and clover brushes to add a lighter shade of green it looked okay but maybe more realistic than paintly so I had another idea I changed this dry brush uh brush from paint mode to smudge mode and mixed everything together and that actually looked pretty good now for the snow on top I added a second texture layer used a a square marker brush to paint in footsteps with the main Battlefield is and made it look like nice fluffy snow using this Cloud brush and after a few more finishing touches and some more models to decorate the scene it is done if you want to get this collection of 50 texture paint brushes for yourself check out the first link in the description I've designed it to make texture painting and blender as fun and efficient as possible often times for these kind of shots the characters don't really move only peripheral stuff like the hair and clothes are flowing in the wind caused by the impact so once guts and Z are in the right position I gave zod's skirt a looping wiggle animation and now we can get to the fun stuff the VFX first we need a shock wave or maybe even two they're basically just spheres that scale outwards with a procedural Shader applied to them then we need some Sparks where the swords are clashing together next up clouds of snow caused by the initial impact and last but not least this ball of Thunder to really highlight the power of the impact and this is what it looks like I'm actually really happy with how this one turned out but there's one thing that I've kind of glos over in this scene that made quite a big impact on this whole project to make my life a whole lot easier and save a ton of time in the future I credit most of the effects throughout this animation procedurally meaning I can adjust various aspects of them on the Fly and most importantly reuse them for future projects which was kind of a blessing and a URS at the same time the effects look much better than what I could create manually but they also took a long time to create which meant I had less time to work on other shots for the final animation I've used this Shockwave debris system for example for the big chunks of snow after the impact as well as the swords that are being flung into the air it looks really cool but also took a day and a half to figure out I know that's just the drawback of creating reusable systems like this but it feels like I'm wasting time every time I'm creating one of these but that wasn't even the biggest time sync of this whole [Music] project to really sell the rage and energy of the impact scene I wanted to try and imitate the impact frames from the newer one Piece episodes they just look so cool and intense one thing that I saw in the comments under my Spirited Away video was that some of you mention mentioned how 3D animators often bend and break the basic shape of the characters to create more expressive poses I really wanted to try that so all I really cared about while animating guts for this scene was what he looks like from the cameras perspective it looks really weird from anywhere else which I had to get used to at first but it made creating very Dynamic and expressive poses a lot easier the last thing to bring this to the next level and transition us to the second part of the shot our manual line art lines using the grease pencil this technique really elevated the emotion and rawness here even more and is also what I've used to create the one piece style impact frames in case you didn't know creating something like this takes a long time but I kind of underestimated how long this would actually take in my case it took 4 days of nothing but drawing to finish this [Music] scene and the worst part is I'm not even that happy with it but if I ever decide to do this again for some reason I'll have a much better idea for how to do it next time since there are too many scenes to cover them all in one video I wanted to focus on one more in this one Zod lunges forward to attack guts I thought this was a great opportunity to create another Super Dynamic [Music] pose the first poses were pretty simple just some windup poses to create anticipation for the jump and then within four frames he jumps and is so close he can't even fit into the frame anymore it looked fine like this but then I started stretching and bending again and everything just looked 10 times better I also used another one of my procedural V effects to create this Zoom lines effect to really create this feeling of speed and surprise and to once again go back to the original style test just like how I painted a custom texture to add more of these lines to guts's face this time I used a custom texture to add more Shadows to zon's face to make him look even more intimidating and really highlight his glowing eyes overall it's a pretty simple scene to create but it's probably one of my favorite ones just because of how it turned [Music] out when I started this project I was really confident that I could improve on the original 2016 anime May after finishing it I'm definitely happy with my results but I can understand how this adaptation might have turned out the way it did I came into this project with a lot of ideas and Inspirations from different sources but not really a Clear Vision for the overall style which means that some of these scenes stylistically don't work as well together as they could have some of the decisions I've made also cost a lot of time that I could have spent working on something more impactful for the overall animation I guess sometimes you just have to experience the same situation to really understand something or someone there are so many small tips and insight that I learned during these projects that I can't all include in these videos so recently what I decided to do is start a newsletter where I can cover all of them in more detail if you want to get more detailed insights into my projects and the techniques and resources I discover while working on them feel free to sign up and you'll get them straight to your inbox and even if you don't want to sign up you can still read all of my posts on my newsletter homepage I've already published a couple so you can you can check them out right after this video with the second link in the [Music] description [Music] yeah

Channel: Noggi

Views: 636,213

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Id: XENvy0JYSos

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2024