Moho Forum

After reading this recent post:
Are Family Guy, Simpsons, King of the Hill, etc in 2D ?

a question came to my mind, i was wondering what 3d software is used to make those 3d vehicles and space ships you see in shows like family guy but specially in futurama and Star wars the clone wars.

Are Maya or 3d max a good choice to achieve this kind of 3d look, if dont,
Can you tell me please what software is used to do that??

I think I remember hearing that they use Maya on Futurama.

I'm trying to achieve a similar effect in my backgrounds by integrating a couple of models made in blender and then tracing them with AS vectors. I'm just waiting on the person making my models. I can let you know how it goes if you're interested.

Maya is used for South Park. Obviously overkill. 3dMax and the Illustrate cel renderer was used in Ghost In A Shell. Likely that the 'big' shows would use Max\Maya\Softimage, but you don't need to spend all that money if you want cel shaded. Or any money at all if you use Blender 3d. Example: http://vimeo.com/3324084

Just to add, the example uses the Freestyle renderer, which will eventually be integrated within Blender [but you can still download a branch of Blender with it integrated now].

AHH!! Thank you so much for posting that crsP! I have been trying to find a 3d modeling program for cartoon style rendering and I have only seen really expensive rendering packages. Freestyle looks awesome!

crsP wrote:Maya is used for South Park. Obviously overkill. 3dMax and the Illustrate cel renderer was used in Ghost In A Shell. Likely that the 'big' shows would use Max\Maya\Softimage, but you don't need to spend all that money if you want cel shaded. Or any money at all if you use Blender 3d. Example: http://vimeo.com/3324084

Just to add, the example uses the Freestyle renderer, which will eventually be integrated within Blender [but you can still download a branch of Blender with it integrated now].

Ok thank you all for your comments, that vimeo video was really nice, thats exactly what im looking for, im going to try blender.

By the way can i export stuff like that to OBJ'

Yes, Blender exports to OBJ, as well as a few other popular formats.

Do you mean that the freestyle rendering will be visible on the obj file imported into Anime Studio? Sorry if this is a dumb question. :D

From my understanding of how OBJs work in Anime Studio, regardless of what 3d program you use, to get the light and shading on the OBJ you must first 'bake' the render to the object's texture [which you can do in Blender]. I believe that if you imported an unbaked OBJ, Anime Studio is using it's own internal 3d renderer on the model. So with that in mind, OBJs from Blender should act like any other OBJs. Although I haven't tried, I do not see why you couldn't bake the freestyle render output to the model in Blender and import in AS. Keep in mind that if you bake the textures, the lights are not dynamic - the shading and highlights will stay on the same position of the model. If that makes sense.

Thank you for explaining this. This is very exciting news!

I've always had a soft spot for the 3D cel-shaded animation they were able to achieve in Futurama. Definitely way ahead of it's time for 1999 and I think other production companies have only recently been able to match it. Apparently, they used Power Animator, the precursor to Maya. I found this thread many years ago, so it's good to see it's still around.
http://www.peelified.com/Futurama-Forum ... urama.html

I was going to mention the Freestyle renderer for Blender as well. I've already seen some very impressive results achieved with it and it's only going to get better! I love how it's shader-based so there's almost no limit to the different styles you can create with it.

crsP wrote:From my understanding of how OBJs work in Anime Studio, regardless of what 3d program you use, to get the light and shading on the OBJ you must first 'bake' the render to the object's texture [which you can do in Blender]. I believe that if you imported an unbaked OBJ, Anime Studio is using it's own internal 3d renderer on the model. So with that in mind, OBJs from Blender should act like any other OBJs. Although I haven't tried, I do not see why you couldn't bake the freestyle render output to the model in Blender and import in AS. Keep in mind that if you bake the textures, the lights are not dynamic - the shading and highlights will stay on the same position of the model. If that makes sense.

The only problem with that idea is that it wouldn't work very well on the rendered lines. One thing though, the freestyle renderer already supports SVG output, so I would love to try and come up with a SVG to anime converter one day, so you could import vector cel-shaded animations and render them with AnimeStudio's 2D renderer. That way the 3D animation would have exactly the same look as the 2D animation.

Rudiger--That converter sounds like it would extend Anime Studio's 3D capabilities immensely. I encourage you in any such endeavor! ;D

Out of curiosity, can the freestyle line quality match Anime Studio's if the models are rendered within blender? For example, say I created an animation rotating around the 3D background elements in Blender using the freestyle renderer. Then I imported the video to anime studio and built the rest of my background around the rendered video?

Thanks for the link about Futurama's methods. It is so thorough even covering fps! It gives me a lot to think about.

I think one of the benefits of Blender is you have quite a bit of control over the anti-alias method, so it should be possible to output something that closely matches AnimeStudio. Also, if you rendered your output to SVG, I believe there are open-source SVG renderers out there that use the same anti-grain geometry library that AS's uses, so that should match even more closely. The only problem is that there's no way to turn off AS's own image filtering on the imported video/image sequence, so there may still be a difference.

Actually, in a way, I'm jealous of the quality of lines that Freestyle can produce. I love how analog they look and it's almost a pity that AS can't quite match it. Hehe, maybe I've got it backwards and I should be working on a anime to blend converter so we can use Freestyle to render both the 2D and 3D vectors !

Also, glad you liked the link. It's hard to do better than the hearing from the 3D-Director himself. It was pretty cool how he listened to people's feedback and was keen to improve the look of the 3D to make it look more hand-drawn.

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

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.

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Rudiger--yeah, converting seamlessly both ways would be a dream! O_O

I was going to give Animation:Master a mention too.
A friend of mine made a short film using the Toon shader in A:M an I thought it looked great. He insists it was just the default settings and could have been a lot better. I've just got permission to link to it here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gADuDaMsjJs