'Crumbs' was made in only ten days with a combination of Blender and Lightwave.
James Campbell writes:
Crumbs is the result of a 10 day film festival competition. Animated in Blender and exported using the "mdd" format to Lightwave. All the backgrounds were going to be 3D but running short on time I decide to make them 2D and it has given it a more traditional 2D look and feel.
What I love about these sort of competitions is that is forces you to create art in a different way and not get hung up on the latest technology. I must admit the animation and images could use a lot more refining but I like that people can see what is possible and know that someone hasn't spent countless hours refining it and well I still have to go to work!
The reason for using lightwave was it rendered a lot faster in HD compared to BI and cycles in some cases 3x faster. The bigger size render was so I could move the shot around as needed in the composite. Cycles is great for real looking images and the ambient claymation look but not well suited to this style of rendering. It can be achieved but is a little slow and complex to setup. Lightwave has a cel shader called Big Eye Small Mouth (BESM) which gives you an instant anime look. At first glance it might look like a basic step gradient but its not, it seems to round the shading more. It also respects ray traced shadows. Meaning it doesn't rely on ambient light or self illuminated material. The other major reason was a new feature that only Lightwave has called "Intersection edges". What this does is create lines where ever objects intersect. This is a feature a lot of users including myself have been really wanting in freestyle. Fingers crossed it gets some love soon though I'm sure the developer is very busy.
ps It won best sound design
