Recruiting for Revolutionary Project

[miriam]

I'm learning RenPy as I go, but I seem to recall that RenPy has the ability to recolor an image, with white shifting to the designated color and other colors interpolated. Also you can always put a semi-transparent color screen over the top of an image... it could have color gradients or just be a grey-scale and use the color change capability of RenPy to fiddle with the color. (Don't know how practical these are -- as I say, I've only just begun to learn this stuff.)

I'll tell you more about my ideas on flexible animation later when I find out whether they can be done inside RenPy. I think they can, but I'll need to learn more so I don't look like too much of an idiot when I ask PyTom about it.

[miriam]

Oops... just re-read what you said about recoloring and realised I misunderstood. Sorry about that.

Okay, here is a thought. A trick they use in a lot of modern anime these days is model them in 3D and get the 3D rendering program to display them with cartoon-style outlining and some shading if desired. The great advantage of this is that even though creating a 3D model in the first place is a lot more time-consuming than drawing a picture, when it comes to displaying it 3D is far ahead of drawing. Once you have your 3D model you can turn it to any angle or reposition the limbs which takes a couple of seconds. The pictures always look "right" and re-shoots are no sweat.

Most modern professional 3D modelling programs (like Blender, which is free) let you select cartoon rendering mode.

Now the topic is getting into my particular area of work. I build 3D virtual worlds.

[DaFool]

Hmmm...3D is fine for environments, but I'm afraid I'm not too fond of 3D characters.

Perhaps Rika-chan can send you the picture samples of the location shoots (or I can do it later...I'm about to go on vacation). I'm not sure if you also got to take a look at the engine work-in-progress. I also think rendering the locations in 3D first would be great, but looking at the script the locations are used more as establishing shots for the dialogue, so it might be overkill to build worlds just for a few shots...a big pannable 12-hour Photoshop masterpiece would probably do the job as well.

It seems to me that the best renders were at least touched-up with Photoshop (I'm no 3D expert, merely just having dabbled in various software), as there are certain elements in 3D which make them dead giveaways.

[Rika-chan]

Hmm, 3D looks interesting. I took a quick look at blender. Now, I have no idea how to do anything 3D as I've never worked with it before, but some of those pictures look interesting. I don't know if it's feasible for this project, since its so short, but I might keep it in mind for later projects.

I don't suppose you have examples of 3D characters rendered cartoon-style do you?

[lordcloudx]

If I had a 3D pic for backgrounds, I'd go filter= smart blur (default settings) ctrl+f, ctrl+f, ctrl+f, ctrl+f and trace a few lines with teh pen tool to get that hand-drawn painting-like effect in photoshop.

[DaFool]

Rika-chan I thought the final result was going to be 100% hand-drawn?

With 3D its going to be hard to achieve the shoujo style (Except Nodame Cantabile but dang that was very-well composited)

[miriam]

As you say, Rika-chan and DaFool, 3d is possibly not appropriate for this particular project because of the initial learning curve for a short project. It is worth keeping in mind though, for the future.

You will have already seen a lot of 3d stuff and thought it was hand-drawn. (I remember thinking that a number of scenes in Neon Genesis Evangelion looked for sure like they were generated in 3d and cartoon rendered.)
Lordcloudx, there is no need to go to that much effort. Here are a couple of examples of it being produced directly inside Blender:
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~icecube/comput ... -renderer/
http://docs.huihoo.com/blender/user-gui ... 17s08.html

Here is an anime studio doing 3d anime:
http://www.productionig.com/contents/ne ... index.html
http://www.productionig.com/contents/wo ... 00391.html
http://www.productionig.com/contents/wo ... index.html

People make and sell 3d models for anime. Here is one:
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetai ... =4676&cat=

It is not surprising if you haven't heard about it as this is still a very active area for new breakthroughs. For instance here is a (pdf) article on using rendering anime style hair:
http://www.hitlabnz.org/fileman_store/2 ... nderer.pdf

A lot of anime studios in Japan are slow to take it up. From what I've heard, it is being adopted more in places like Korea, the Philippines, Spain, and South America that are influenced by anime, but haven't got the ties to tradition.

[Rika-chan]

Rika-chan I thought the final result was going to be 100% hand-drawn?

Go back and read my post.

miriam, wow, some of that stuff looks really interesting. I'm definitely going to have to learn how to do 3D. Thanks for posting about it.

[monele]

but haven't got the ties to tradition

*cough*nor quality*cough*

Sorry for that, but I'm a defender of 2D . I don't mind 3D at all, but I think animation studios use it for economical reasons (seeing the end result), not artistic ones... That's where it stops being fun :/

EDIT : and sorry if this comes off as mean... I guess I'm pretty tired right now... I'll have to look at this again tomorrow ^^;

[miriam]

Rika-chan >> No problem. Glad to be any help.

Monele >> heheheh You nut. I love 2D stuff too. There is a lot it can do that is difficult or near impossible in 3D, but likewise 3D can make stuff a lot easier and more consistent with much smaller filesizes than 2D. Appropriate tools for appropriate jobs. I started off in cartoons for TV, but gradually fell into 3D. Now most of my work (when I have it) is in 3D. But I still like both, each for different reasons.

A while back I built a small world for a company. When I sent them the world it was about 50KB. They emailed me back asking for a screenshot of the world, so I did, but as I sent it off I noticed that the single photo of the world was much bigger (about 200KB) than the entire world. The single picture was taken from one position, but the world was some kilometers across and could be viewed from anywhere inside and the characters could move around doing things with no further increase in size too.

[monele]

Eheh, so true ^.^. I'm glad you didn't take my mini-rant the wrong way since I'm quite shiny eyed about your line of work, and that would have made me sad ^^;

[DaFool]

This update is just to kick myself for hardly getting anything done storyboardwise so far. (actually, 0% done since submitting the complete code)

There was easter break, and also I ended up just watching too much anime, I'll have to limit the show's I'll follow.

For a somewhat melancholy tale, I was thinking of a more washed-out shoujo look. Think of the translated doujin visual novel, 40 Days and 40 Nights of Rain but without having to use any filters. Even though the artist couldn't even draw the eyes in the correct positions, since it's lineless, the viewer's eyes adjust the image for the viewer, and the image looks pretty regardless.

I think this technique would be way more efficient than trying to achieve a Makoto Shinkai crispy and vibrant background which will be showed for 2 seconds anyway.

Productionwise, this should take out the inking process since the coloring phase can be done immediately on top of the storyboard lineart, after which the storyboard layer can be discarded.