I remade Spirited Away... but in Blender

this is one of the scenes from the gibl movie spilled away but it's actually 3D here's another one also 3D how about this one there are so many YouTube tutorials on how you can create the 2D Studio gibl style in 3D but none of them combine all of them to create a full scene is it too hard does it take too long or is it something you just shouldn't do well while I was creating these three scenes I realized the answer is maybe more complicated than I thought the first scene looks pretty simple an island some clouds and a lot of water looking at the movement it looks like the shot has been painted in three layers the island in the foreground the closest clowns in the midr and the rest of the clowns in the background and that's pretty simple to recreate in 3D as [Music] well the whole shot has a very painly feeling almost like a bob Ros painting there are a few different ways to paint and blender and for this project I decided to use texture painting and unfortunately blender's default paint press looks pretty boring but there are a few settings you can tweak to give it some more character I expected very little from these settings but you can actually customize more than I thought with a custom brush mask texture and pressure sensitivity settings you can create some pretty good looking stuff my favorite setting out of all of them is probably the gradient color this switches between the colors of the gradient based on the pressure you apply to your tablet this makes it super easy to add some subtle color variation to any surface and with my selection of brushes ready it's time to [Music] paint all complex things start very simple laying down the most basic colors first we'll Define the Silhouettes and shapes of the shot and that's all you really need to nail the composition at this point you can already see whether you get close to the original or if you need to make some adjustments I was feeling pretty pretty good about my layout so after a quick class check I went back in and started [Music] refining this is the most fun part of the painting process at least for me now it is time to capture all the intricate details the variations in color and the wellth thought out brush Strokes that make the shot look so beautiful while the big shapes Define the overall mood the details add history to every object it invites you to think about all these stories that have happened here and really helps you immerse yourself into the World by making it feel like life goes on whether you are there or not and after animating the camera as well as the water and repositioning the clouds the first scene is done while I was researching all the tricks and techniques that the studio uses to create their movies I stumbled onto a quote by hay Miyazaki The Man Behind all the gibl movies I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil he's famously known to stay away from from computer generated images as much as possible so my idea of trying to recreate one of his movies with nothing but a computer is probably not something he would like but maybe I can show that there are benefits to these newer Technologies if I was better at painting I think I could have almost perfectly recreated the shot but I'm not sure that this would be much quicker than doing it traditionally so this shot alone probably wouldn't be enough to convince Mia Zaki but of course we're just getting started [Music] more shots ins SP that away are separated into two art styles the static objects that don't move throughout the shot and the dynamic ones and after the first purely static shot it's time to add some D dyamic dynamicism [Music] Dynam traditionally you would have to paint the characters multiple times over multiple frames to create a scene but in 3D you only need to create it once and can then use that model for every necessary scene but the problem with blender is that it is optimized for realism so we basically need to trick the program into a more handdrawn style for that we need three main ingredients and the model itself is the foundation for the other two just like the first scene I started by blocking out her body then refined it by merging all the individual shapes and adjusted them in scope and for her the most basic anatomy was enough since most of it is hidden under cloes anyway while I was cleaning up the geometry by retopologizing the model I learned from a few tutorials that the only thing that really matters in non photo realistic renders is the end result very differently to realistic products the object geometry doesn't really matter which actually gives you a lot more freedom in how to create your project the second ingredient for non photo realistic products is a great example just like most anime or comic Styles spirit that away also has line art to herar nose for example is only really visible because of a few lines these extra lines give the characters more structure and make it easier to distinguish between the shirt and hair for example in Vendor these lines can be automated just add a grease pencil object to your scene and give it the line art modifier now you can select what you want to outline and voila it basically adds a line in front of every sharp edge of the object that is visible to the camera now the goal is to change the model in a way that makes the line art look as good as possible adding geometry to make them smoother smoothing out surfaces to remove unnecessary lines nothing matters except for the final look and after a few more details there's only one more ingredient left most characters consist of two colors the base color and the shadow color no gradient between the two just a straight line and all you really need to create that is a super simple Shader setup and there you go looks pretty good but if you want to go even further you can either adjust the gometry again to create more desirable Shadows or if you really want to optimize the model tweak the normal s of the object normals tell the surface in which direction it's facing which is used to calculate the object's Shadows for example I mainly use that to add some more custom Shadows or to get rid of some that aren't in the original and with 3D to Hero looking like the original it's time for her to move like her as well after creating a custom rig and failing to properly add weight painting the first time around she's ready to be animated so with the help of the original I tried to copy the movement as closely as possible to my version until I realized something for arms in the original are way too long the more I try to trace her movements the more I notice how wrong the anatomy actually is and it's not just the arms but obviously without a 3D model to compare it to it doesn't feel wrong the position her arms are in in the original actually makes it feel more intimate I guess if you have to draw all the poses manually you can also change the anatomy a bit to make them more expressive or to just make it look better [Music] visually and like her body the shirt needs a few more adjustments throughout the shot you can see how the folds in her shirt shift and change the easiest way to achieve that in 3D is with shape Keys shape Keys basically allow you to change the shape of an object over time so for her shirt I create the pose in the beginning and whenever it reaches the point where it needs to be adjusted I create a new shape key and adjust it and once that's done for the whole shot it looks like the cloth is actually reacting to her movements the last thing missing is her mouth and this is where the 3D model fell apart the shapes her mouth get into in the original really don't work in 3D on top of that I also just really suck at rigging your face the only thing that saved this from being a train wreck were once again shape keys but even then to make it look somewhat similar to the final camera view I really had to push the model to its limits luckily it worked out somehow and looked somewhat decent in the [Music] end Haku follows basically the same process as Jiro but I found a few tricks that made him look even better for these internal lines for example I added these extra planes that stick out of the main body because of the way the Lite modifier works these will be rendered as simple lines which made creating his fur a lot easier for his green man for example I just placed a simple plane on his head and cut a fur shape into it with the knife tool another pretty subtle but effective trick is the displacement modifier with this setup at a simple clown texture applyed to it the model wobbles around a tiny bit which means that the characters are never perfectly the same between frames this subtle imperfection happens in every traditional film so it's important to add that in 3D as well the animation is almost done all that's left now is the last final touch since the grease pencil outlines are created automatically we can now apply them to the animation and adjust the manually this is also the last moment where any big issues can still be fixed the automatic lines for example aren't perf perfect so I cleaned them up a bit her mouth still looked a little rough but that can be fixed as [Music] well and the biggest issue of all the Shadows which still look a little weird in some moments I even used this opportunity to add some more details into Hero's hair and hack with fur which in the end looked like [Music] this [Music] the good thing is that you only have to create each character once which saves a lot of time but it also has that distinct 3D Perfection that you have to fight against to create something that looks more handmade I guess you could say the 3D version takes less time and is more accurate but it lacks a bit of Freedom when it comes to how you can express emotions and movement I think for this one it's pretty clear which one Miyazaki would prefer but I have one more technique I want to try [Music] this scene is kind of a hybrid between the first two it has the paintly static environment but this time the characters actually interact with it to combine both of them we first need the environment without any Dynamic elements and now we can turn this train into a 3D environment step one separate the image into a foreground mid-ground and background step two model the environment very roughly in 3D space and step three project the original image onto the 3D environment and there you go the environment is already done and looks just like the original well because it is the rings that swing from left to right are also pretty simple first I need the ring model itself which isn't that hard to create then I need an extra rail that I can attach the Rings to placing a cylinder in the same position and projecting the texture onto that basically did the trick and now I can wrap the rings around it duplicate them and rotate them around the pole since I have already created she hero before I can just use her in this scene as well all she's missing right now or her her shoes and [Music] shorts I adjusted the pose a bit so that it looks good in camera view and place an extra lamp in the scene to bring out her lighter colors and now the last thing missing to really Place her in the scene is her Shadow since the environment itself isn't affected by any lights in the scene I just model a shadow manually which is basically just a transparent black plane lastly jro's companion no face wasn't really a challenge either I just want to take [Music] AEP and all that's missing now is the animation first I slightly move the camera from left to right to bring movement into the foreground then I bend the midr a bit to add this slight parallx effect you can see through the door there are definitely benefits to using 3D for your 2D animation work and you can definitely do it better than what I have created in this project but I think there's always a certain amount of authenticity and expressiveness that you will make miss out on no matter how good you make it so I might not be able to convince Miyazaki to change his opinion but maybe that wasn't the best way to approach it anyway I guess the best use of Any Given tool is not to try to recreate the style of a different tool but rather to utilize its strengths to create a look that is inspired by other ways of creating imitation can only really get you so far the best St you can create is still your own style

Channel: Noggi

Views: 482,318

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Id: 6ggBcfWhikA

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 19 2023