3d software to mix with 2d

Rhoel · Post by **Rhoel** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 8:59 am

Parker, just a note on Blender. They are in the middle of a GUI change-over. 2.49b is the current release but 2.5 is in Alpha mode, and dwnloadable. The change was made to make it easier for people with Maya/Max?XSI experience to pick up Blender faster, more intuitively.

The price of course cannot be beaten, its free. But despite its low capital investment cost, the results are every bit as good as many of the high end packages. It also has a Toon Render which actually isn't too bad once you get the controls balanced.

Blender exports in Obj and a dozen or so other formats. Better still is supports EXR and other high-end film image formats. So its compatible with Nuke and the like.

One thing I have done in the past is to take an untextured object, and use the output for a trace in ASP/Animo. It can be a very useful tool for head turns or odd perspectives. If you are only using vehicles, then with traced objects you could maintain the colour/line style of you film whilst still having the benefits of 3D without having to spend a year learning how to add textures, build lights, baking etc. I suspect that many of the Japanese anime are using this technique as a 3D assist: Ghost in the Shell had 3D objects with paint errors.

Rhoel.

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 9:12 am

GCharb wrote:Hello all.

From what I know, MentalRay cell shader is the most used for productions, it can be found build-in in Softimage, Maya, 3DSMax and as a plug-in for few other.

You can find examples on Mental Images gallery here

Look for Tekkonkinkreet and Asterix

You can buy Softimage from $4-500, which gives you a truly fantastic modeling and rendering package for cell shaded 3d.

Another cell shader I like allot is the one that comes with Hash Animation Master.

Two animations I made with it back in 1999

rooster.mov 3 mb

lipsynchtest.mov 970 kb

G

They're both great examples of cel-shaded animation, GCharb. From the rooster video in particular, Animation Master seems to have very good line coherence. By the way, Freestyle also lets you control the line width with a shader-type script, so imagine being able to use AS type scale compensation to make the line width smaller as the rooster went further away from the camera. Also, check out TKs other videos apart from the one that crsP posted and you will get a glimpse of just how powerful this plugin really is.
http://vimeo.com/user841633/videos/sort:date

The backgrounds in Tekkon Kinkreet look absolutely phenomenal, but that looks more like an oil-painting shader than a toon-shader to me

. I can only imagine how they would look when they are animated and the camera is moving through them. I wondered why I had not even heard of this film. Turns out, it was not even released in Australia! Oh well, I guess that's what Amazon and region-free DVD players are for, I guess.

AmigaMan · Post by **AmigaMan** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 9:16 am

Rhoel that's great news about Blender's GUI change. That was the biggest drawback I think as, to me, it just wasn't intuitive at all when I tried it. That might just be my Maya experience though. I think a lot of studio's are following Blenders progress very closely.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 9:47 am

Ha, Blender ... I tried to learn it some months ago, but even with the help of a book I had to give up. Not because it was too difficult - the basic concepts of 3D are always the same - but because lots of stuff wasn't even mentioned in the poorly maintained webpages they boast being the "manual". At least I expect any manual to accurately list each and every GUI element and explain it. I could work may way from that.

A new version, heh? Let's wait if they update the manual too.

MentalRay ... yeah, we used that in that Asterix production, and the results were pretty cool, especially the storm sequence. That's 15 yrs ago now ...

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 9:57 am

I think the biggest mistake they made is calling it Blender 2.5 and not Blender 3. It was in development for 2 years and has been validated by a team of 3D professionals and developers for the best part of a year as part of Project Durian. This project will also generate many tutorials as well as all of the movie source files. There's already two technical references that will be available for it that you can pre-order on Amazon. Seriously, forget what you think you know about the Blender interface and documentation!

lanatieng · Post by **lanatieng** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 12:43 pm

quite amusing explanation!

actually i was also lookin into blender after learning anime studio!

- Lanati eng.

GCharb · Post by **GCharb** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 2:06 pm

lwaxana wrote:GCharb--lol I love that sync test! Didn't realize the origins of GCharb. It always makes me think of the plant "chard." Interesting, one of those tekkon kinkreet images is in my inspiration file! (The one where they're sitting on the sign.) I had no idea it was 3D. I thought it was some kind of watercolor.

That toon stuff was way fun back then, made much much more but it got lost over time. I made the best toon shader tutorials for Animation Master back then, the files are still available through Hash ftp.

You thought the lipsynch was watercolor or am I missing something here

Amigaman, yeah, I remember that animation

Rhoel, just had a look at Blender 2.5, much more comprehensive, last I had a look I deleted the whole thing after an hour or so!

slowtiger, Mentalray is darn nice, but the toon shader is a bit of a pain, has materials and lens shader to it, very powerfull though.

Rudiger, from those examples, that Blender toon renderer seems very powerfull, have you worked with it and if so, what is your impression of it as a production tool, and I mean Blender and the toon renderer!

Just rendered an image from the Big Buck bunny intro scene and it took 10 minutes at 1920X1080 on my quad core, not bad

G

konnerbelly · Post by **konnerbelly** » Thu Apr 29, 2010 8:50 am

While you're at the DAZ site looking at Carrara take a
look at their freebie DAZ Studio - it's a 3D character program
and it might also do what you need to do. If I wanted to render the 2d characters separate, I had to render out 2 passes for them: the color pass and an alpha pass. This is because their embeded alpha works for the shader so you do not see the card, but the alpha of the render shows the card, not the character's alpha..

I used a toon shader to render my 3d stuff and it turned out pretty cool.

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Fri Apr 30, 2010 7:21 am

GCharb wrote: Rudiger, from those examples, that Blender toon renderer seems very powerfull, have you worked with it and if so, what is your impression of it as a production tool, and I mean Blender and the toon renderer!

G

Oops, didn't see that question before. I haven't really had any direct experience with either Blender or Freestyle, but I have been reading a lot of the developer blogs about them both over the years, and that's what's been getting me excited. The beauty of Freestyle is it's simplicity. It basically takes the edges from the 3d model geometry and decides whether they should be visible or not according to certain criteria. Each edge is then rendered according to user parameters.

Actually, for the longest time I had the same idea for writing a 3D converter for AS, as all the elements you need are there. You could project the 3D mesh into an AS 2D mesh and create a separate shape for each face. You could then have automatic shape ordering easily enough and even use the hide edge property to dynamically show boundary edges. You could even do a tidy up pass where you direct and merge curves and edges according to the visible lines. However, when Freestyle came along it seemed like it would make more sense to rely on that to do most of the work and just write a script for importing the resulting 2D vectors into AS.

As for how it would work for production, I can't really say, as I haven't had the chance to used it yet, but I imagine, with its new scriptable GUI, it would be similar or even better than the situation with AS, in that you can customise the tool to match your workflow as you go. I'm hoping by the time the final version of Blender 2.5 is released I'll have finished my current 2D projects and will have time to test it out personally.

Dodgy · Post by **Dodgy** » Sun May 02, 2010 4:55 am

I wrote a AS importer for LightWave ages ago. It imports shapes as curves so you can freely mix polygon objects with your AS objects. Works fairly well, though I haven't updated it in a while. A lot of the way it works as well has parallels with AS, such as bones and IK in AS has an analogue in IK boost in LW. With the Unreal plugin for LW, you can also get a lot of control of line width and shape. This is something I came up with wholly done in LW.
http://www.mikegreen.name/MyAnims/StreetComp.mov
http://www.mikegreen.name/MyAnims/Natty ... _Small.mov