For my final major project i wanted to branch out and try something new, previously in Term 3, i had used Blender to try and create photorealistic rendering in scenes, as well as the previous terms had focused on creating realism in Maya. With my thesis being focused around cel shading and it’s uses in speed compared to photorealistic rendering, i chose to make my final major project an animation in the cel shaded / toon shaded styling, i had no idea how to do this and had done some surface level research on how to do this and how i could go about doing it and realized it would be possible to do in Blender.
Initially my intention with this project was to make a 1-2 minute animated shortfilm in the style of cel shading, where i had planned out a rough draft of what would happen in the animation and some inspirations behind it. With this project i wanted to build off of the modelling and animation i’d learned with Blender over the last two semesters and use that to both further my portfolio of modelling and animation as well as create something outside of the traditional rendering style i had worked on prior.
Below is a short synopsis of the summary of what the short film would be about
The short film will be a 3 Minute Animation focusing on an Artist’s struggle with a lack of motivation to work. The animation will focus between two characters; the artist and a small rat that lives inside of his wall. The primary bulk of the animation will come from the POV of the rat’s perspective. The animation will go through the story of an artist being given an assignment and throughout the first minute of the animation shown over the course of days through passing time shown through the window and the character being moved to different positions, things go well for the first day however in around the second minute of the animation the artist begins to feel a lot more stressed, becoming visibly distraught and feeling burnt out. Much of the animation will also focus on the rat also living in tandem in it’s own hole, and occasionally viewing the artist working. Towards the point of the artist passing out from exhaustion, the rat will then see this and attempt to make some tea to wake up the artist. The rat will finally succeed in this and then wake up the artist with a noise. The artist then gets back up, finishes the work and seems content. The rat then views this and is happy and goes about his hole.
Throughout the summer i had been experimenting with a very experimental motion capture software for use in animation. My initial plan was to use this motion capture software and record mocap, this mocap software would record movements for every frame, and my plan was to do so and then delete every 3 frames and keep one left, resulting in less fluid but more realistic animation styles.
That experimental program can be found here:
A lot of my initial inspiration for this came from the Disney film ratatouille, the tv show arcane and the tv show love death and robots.
This project frankly was way too ambitious towards the start, as i was both learning to replicate and build upon an art style i had never done before, as well as to Model and texture an entire scene as well as animate, rig and model two characters. Later on in the semester, with the advice of kristos, this project was very heavily scaled back to something that could be achievable in simply creating a room and modelling the objects in it and focusing heavily on perfecting the art style and cel shading that i wanted to go for.
Initially i started off with some very simple modelling of the room and building it out with some very small things, a window, a desk and a small lantern.
Next came some experimentation, i wanted to see how regular models would look if i attempted to texture them the normal way i would texture things and then apply a lot of the cel shading effects that i would implement onto them.
I also was experimenting with using HDRI’s initially and using the cycles engine in blender to render, as previously i had been using a lot of the Eevee engine. This was early on in the summer and i hadn’t actually used Blender in around a month so i just went about getting back into things by building out some simple things, a chair and a bookshelf complete with books made from using an array modifier.
Here’s where i went about starting to do a lot of the tests in shading and how to replicate this cel shading style that i wanted to do. In a lot of Cel shaded animation, when light hits an object it will diffuse onto a surface in a way that only shows one tone of the light, or in some cases two, being highlights, shadows and the initial texture. An example would be these two images:
Sources on the two images:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_shading
http://vodacek.zvb.cz/archiv/750.html
I was initially using the eevee renderer and went about creating the toon shading in the most common way i had seen many others do which involved taking the initial color of the object, making it a texture image, then using a shader to rgb node and using a color ramp to clip any lights that would hit the object and make some very abrupt and jagged shading as opposed to a gradual slope of the shading of an object going from full color when exposed to light to slightly darker where no color was hitting it.
I still continued to experiment with realistic textures and experimented some more regarding the previous method of using a color ramp shader.
Next i also went about importing some of the test mocap that i had done using Fusion Mocap VR, the experimental software still in development that uses VR headsets and controllers to track your movements. If you have two infared base stations as well as three other infared trackers for hips and legs, it can be a very cheap and usable mocap software if you want to do mocap from home.
I started also using a simple whiteboard and writing down small tasks to complete on the project along with a trello board to try to get a bit more organized and also to try and work on getting some environment layouts and rough character designs done.
Next i wanted to add some emissions and some glass to my scene for the window, as well as i wanted to create lines around my objects This was where i made the first big switch of going from rendering in EEvee over to cycles.
Initially in Eevee there were two problems, one being that i couldn’t use any emissions or reflections in any way, as at that reflective objects in blender could not be seen through, as well as i believed emissions also could not be used in Eevee.
Freestyle lines are the lines that can render around the object to give it that cel shading effect, however this is a post processing effect, meaning the image will initially render and then redner the freestyle lines based off of things like the mesh, camera angle and lighting. However this can take a bit longer and at the moment i was using a different way of doing these lines around an object in the way of giving things a solidify modifier and then using some alphas to make the original model display overtop of the solidify modifier.
This initially worked but had many severe limitations. for instance objects would often clip into the ground as the solidify would go through other objects, and every individual object would need to be modified to be an appropriate size on the solidification.
I ended up switching over to cycles but this posed two initial problems. The shader to RGB ramps don’t work in Cycles, meaning the toon shading inner texturing would need to be done another way, the render would take longer, howver i gained the ability to have all lines generate relatively, which looked a lot better, and i also gained the ability to use emissions again.
I also went about building some more small things to the room, a lava lamp and basic bed as well as sculpting some small pillows to test how freestyle lines would affect more diverse heavy objects.
I built some very basic humanoid figures and a rat figure out of blocks to then prepare for more heavy modelling and animation later on.as well as designing and using the sculpting tool to create some clothes that i could use in the scene.
I started doing a lot more heavy duty texturing in this portion, and i found that the toon shader available in cycles could somewhat replicate a lot of what i wanted from the cel shading art style, however it didn’t completely get what i would want and i would need to continue more experimentation later.
I went about building a lot more to the outside to be able to see through the window, as it wouldn’t need to be super detailed but i still wanted it to be visible, i also built some small cacti by using a cylander and making hair particles replicate a spike i made and using vertex groups to only come from certain parts of the cacti. I also experimented with making a color ramp for the trees that i could generate using the sapling tree gen plugin from blender, however it made more sense to make it one single color to fit the simpler art style. I built a small road with gates and posts using some arrays and some buildings int he background that would have some assigned texture emissions on lit up windows.
Things were starting to come along, however the constant technical problems and swapping back and forth between cycles and evee was becoming a problem as i really just couldnt get the art style i wanted by using either one of them.
Around this time i met with Kristos and he reeled my project back hard, which was frankly much needed. i was trying to do way too much in such a short time and the project was already bogged down with a plethora of issues. it was settled that what i would primarily work on was the art style of the scene, while doing modelling and texturing and decorating the room to show off this art style being the main focus as opposed to a large animation on top of experimenting with a new art style.
One of the main issues i started to encounter with this project was the issue of simplicity. Everything i was doing felt too simple, the shading looked like one to two colors so it looked off to me, or the models seemed too simple so it was an issue. This was due to the toon shading art style being simplistic in nature, and everything i’d done prior in the program being very highly detailed in modelling and texturing.
I went about then finally making the bed look a little better, by using some lower poly pillows and then sculpting them, then subdividing i was able to get some decent looking pillows that were smooth enough that they wouldn’t have messy freestyle lines but still giving some definition, as well as creating a blanket by using an assortment of objects under the blanket and giving it cloth / collision physics and then freezing the result. The blanket especially was definitely giving that diffused toon shading i was looking for with light hitting it.
I also managed to update the small laptop i had been working on the desk on and give it a proper keyboard with extrusions and a keyboard texture with some photoshop work, as well as giving it some small emissions.
I decided to make a couple more things to build the room out involving some fake vines to hang across the ceiling similar to some modern bedrooms using a spline curve that i couold then give depth and use a particle emitter on to distribute some leaves that i would make and texture paint on to.
I had started making larger strides with making many other smaller objects like potted plants that i would use a displacement map on for the soil terrain and arrays to build, as well as making items like a tablet, a monitor, hard drives and a very messy cable structure to attempt to be true to every artist’s desk layout in real life.
I also went about adding on some small details to some more clothes that i could have strewn about the room to give some added environment building and realism, including my old college’s hoodie as that is what i had on at the time of modelling.
Afterwards i decided to make some very small things like balls of paper to be strewn around as well as trying to work out some issues regarding objects not appearing to have freestyle lines behind windows. This was due to freestyle rendering whatever was in front of it. If anything obscures the viewport, it wont render anything behind it, including reflective surfaces.
My solution at this point was to fully remove the glass from the window after some debate with others, as really glass doesn’t fit the art style nor is it really toon shaded and is more in line with photorealistic rendering. I also kept truing to get the proper shading detail on objects but was still unable to get it to get the detail i really wanted.
At this point i ended up switching back over to eevee as i wasn’t quite getting the results i wanted, and started experimenting with using eevee again, this time getting the freestyle line generator to work in eevee. I started trying to use things like bloom instead of emission and caching light casting data using a reflection cubemap I also tried to experiment with making highlights directly from light sources and making their angle at 0.1 to get some very hard shadows on lights.
I also wanted to reuse the man and rat model somehow and decided to try and turn them into plushies to put on the bed, however remeshing these models proved to be detremental to blender.
Here are some of the bloom experiments. I realized if i wanted this to look good at all i would need to make the bloom extraordinary light.
I stopped focusing on some of the issues i was having between eevee and cycles and decided to work on making some small things and texturing instead. I Purchased a cel shading photoshop action pack to save some time when creating certain textures like the computer screens and making them a little more in line with the overall art theme. Around this time i made the switch to finally go back to Cycles and make it work no matter what, and to stop switching between render engines.
I started making a lot more smaller objects and UVing them if they were meant to have a proper non single cel shaded color on them like a mousepad and mouse.
I built out my scene a bit more focusing on filling out small things like adding more cups, fixing small issues and adding some plants and more cables. At the behest of kristos i decided to do my camera angles and then build around those camera angles to give some more focus to my scene. I wanted to explore using depth of field in these scenes and seeing how that could help my scene, as well as experimenting with some other things like atmosphere and dust. I also started making freestlye lines baked into some meshes like the cup, meaning that no matter where the camera was looking some lines would be hard baked in and always try to generate.
I also started adding in some small things like plants i had made last semester to fill out my scene and even some things like the coin and ring i had done term 3. However one thing i needed to be cautious of was also making sure that these objects were decimated as if they were cel shaded they didn’t need to be super high poly, and all being high poly would do would be drive up the render time and the generation of the freestyle lines.
I experimented with using a particle system in a small cube box with transmissions to create dust, however this really didn’t add a whole lot to the scene and even after making freestyle lines excluded from the dust it really didn’t look right or add anything.
I also experimented with using volumetrics and while i did like the look, it both didn’t fit the art style and had the same issues with going outside lines that bloom had.
More experimenting with the volumetrics and the dust particles.
Even with making the dust very subtle it seemed to just not fit the style and look off as well as the volumetrics.
I decided to go back to the way i had it before and simply tweak my emissions harder.
At this point i ran into my first major issue. In the above photo everything is in focus and there’s no depth of field, however using depth of field would only cause the render to blur. Freestyle lines are generated in a post process after the render, meaning they would all still be in perfect focus and ruin the way it looks. However i came up with a fix to this that i will discuss later on in this post.
Now i started working hard at building out the areas where my camera angles would be as well as adding in things like posters and other objects that were all artwork i had done in the past and then used the photoshop plugin to create in a cel shaded style to fit the scene.
I had a wall of lights that i wanted to be one of my main focused shots, i used a bezier curve to build out the cords and made the string lights and emitted the lights the same way i had done with the vines, however first i went about photoshopping a load of my polaroid photos into the art style that i wanted to fit the cel shading art style, then going in and putting these onto each of the picture s i was hanging from the string lights.
The uv’s needed to be remapped on some of these which definitely created some funny looking stretched textures.
Next i made my light instances real instead of a particle emittion as i wanted to tweak the light colors and rotations along the string lights, and made sure there was no overlapping emittion geometry, deleting where need be.
A consistent issue i was having with a lot of my lighting was that it was emission lighting, not direct lighting. This usually would be fine however, emission lighting has an odd way of not working super well with toon shading and can cause a lot more gradual diffusion on a surface instead of the sharp diffusion i was looking for. I tried to edit the emission values and see if there was any way of making it so that i could tweak the angle or radius of emissions but this wasn’t doable. i started to have the idea of taking direct lighting and putting it beside or fully inside the emission instances, removing the object’s shadow casting properties and then either curbing the angle of the light if it was an area light, or the radius if it was a point light to get some really sharp curves and get that simplistic cel shaded lighting style. For now i was simply experimenting with it but later this would become my main way of lighting.
I tried changing the texture of certain light emissions but these still had relational data as they were grouped as particles, i removed all instance data from them and went about tweaking the lights of each of them and rotating them to give them some differences.
I also had some odd geometry slip ups when moving cables occasionally but fixed these by simply smoothing with the sculpting tools.
Once i had made a lot of the lights different colors and started to make them a little different from one another, i tried out making individual lighting for each to see if i could get the sharp lighting i was looking for instead of diffusion
Around this time i also experimented with tweaking the scale of diffsion on the walls but this didn’t seem to do a whole lot for me.
To get the lighting to be a lot wider, i moved the actual physical lights away from the object lights to give a kind of circle of light around each one and removed their shadow casting capabilities, which made it look a lot more appealing and in the art style i wanted.
I then went about using this new direct lighting system instead of the emission based lighting system i was using previously around my scene.
Next i had to fix a lot of the little pictures as the UV’s were still off, however it made some pretty interesting little photo errors.
For the posters around the room i used a combo of some of my old art for the tapastries and made them cloths that i could deform and freeze, and used the photoshop filtering i had done on both them and the posters.
I wanted to add some more detail onto my lava lamp and decided to make some small animations in after effects. Initially i wanted to hand animate it but then decided to use the AE particle effect cc mercury.
Using mercury i could both make the color but also remove the color using the shading and only have the outline if i toned it down heavily
Initially i just doubled this up and tried to render it, however after i decided to render out the color and shadows as seperate compositions and then recombine them. Using the multiply function in after effects, and even double up the outlines if i wanted it to be darker.
I doubled it up and tweaked the outlines and then re-exported it
I attempted to put this on the lamp, fixing some odd geometry with the lamp and re-uving it, however even when being properly uv’d it just looked wrong, and needed to be simple to fit the art style as this was complicating a simplistic art style.
I also went about filling many picture frames around the room with more photos and overall trying to build out the scene a lot more. Even creating some small things in illustrator for some small photos.
At a certain point i also intended to build a small lucky cat as well, however this ended up not being built later on due to time constraints and technical issues.
I tried once more to also incorporate some of the blocky models into my scene with the hopes to subdivide them, however blender’s remesh just simply isn’t built for it and it would have been better to build out the model as one object from the start.
I also wanted to build a small roman dodecahedron as a small piece of the scene, however i wasn’t entirely sure where to start with building one as there were no shapes even remotely like this in blender.
I managed to find a plugin that allowed for different shapes not traditionally in blender vanilla and used this along with the math function to make a dodecahedron.
It had some odd topology even to start, however to do what i wanted, i combined the faces for each side, inset them all by face and then deleted the inset face.
It took me a couple tries to get what i wanted with the right thickness and i used vertex groups again to make spheres come from every outward verticies to match what i had seen from a lot of the roman dodecahedrons.
At this point i was needing to make some final touches and updates, and made some more clothing and sculpted it to fit on the bed, as well as fixing some small cacti and making some cacti variations.
This was a point at which i had major issues. I had optimized my scene as much as possible, yet a full frustrating day of rendering later, things refused to render properly and would constantly freeze on render. I worked on optimizing to the max hopinjg this would fix it, decimating things and even completely grabbing everything and putting it in a new scene and tweaking the backgrounds, nothing would work.
I then learned that the version of blender i was using had a known bug, and after updating would render properly if set to GPU rendering.
One good thing about this change is that it had removed any lighting glitches i was having in the old scene, such as world enviornment interfering with colours, and i was able to rest my colours and get a bit of a nicer darker blue tone to the scene overall.
I made some last minute adjustments to my scene and started rendering.
At this stage, i need to talk about an issue i discussed much earlier with freestyle lines not blurring properly.
I had never touched the compositing side of blender until this project, so going into it was completely foreign to me and took some time to getting used to. One thing i found was that i could render both the z depth from my camera and then render my freestyle lines both as passes, then make the export an open EXR and combine the two after the render to get the focus depth on the freestyle lines that i wanted. This was an extreme headache to initially get but once i figured out how to work the compositing workspace of blender it became repetition.
All that was left to do at this point was fix some minor issues and make some transitions for between the shots in after effects.
After all this comping the project was finally done and can be found here.