Chaman Animation Studio is producing a 26-part animated series with Blender.
Felipe Esquivel Reed writes:
We're Chaman Animation Studio and we're ready to show our latest trailer of Red Legend. Animated TV series we're producing mainly with Blender.
We've been developing this project for some years. Red Legend (Leyenda Roja in Spanish) is a TV series that will comprise 26 episodes in it first season. Work from modeling to render is done in Blender, with help of freestyle. This project has been looking for co-financing in TV/animation markets like MIPCOM, MIPJUNIOR and Annecy, and we learned the need to show something different.
We're looking for a distinctive graphic look and try to avoid the classic 3D feeling. Since part of the budget is already commited with a company in China, we need to test our pipeline and check if it's compatible. In any case, we want to create all the assets and animation inside Blender. This trailer was completely done with Blender.
We're thinking on our studio as a "factory", so the animation quality needs to be cost effective. This is a breakdown on how we animate a scene:
6 Comments
I Like this simple cartoon style for blender, and have been trying to do the same for some time. I would love to find some tutorials on this subject. The only good tip I have found so far is to go to render- post-processing- and click the dge box. This gives the black edge surrounding your objects or characters.
I really like this style too. It looks to me like much of this was texture-painted, so it's not a post-processing thing, but rather everything is painted to look exactly the way it does.
You can get a lot of neat effects, though, by playing in the compositor, especially if you include render passes for more options than are selected by default (particularly color and shadow).
They used Freestyle (according to what Felipe says..).
You can read about it here: http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/
It's about to get integrated to Blender (and you can find builds with it on GraphicAll).
As for the texture (that I think does the most for this style), it's probably handdrawn (maybe in Krita or something similar), it almost looks like it's drawn on paper and scanned in..
Freestyle is now already in Blender 2.66. As I said just go to the render button, scroll down and you will find freestyle , and in post processing you can click the edge box to get those black edge lines on your characters and models. Almost like 2d cartoons on 3d software. Best of both worlds. Thank you Blender.
As for any additional hand drawings or textures, try Mypaint. It has more painting tools such as pencils, brushes, crayons, charcoal, and is more stable than Krita. An excellent piece of free software, especially if you have a Wacom drawing tablet.
I can't find Freestyle in the Render Tab (and I'm using 2.66 from blender.org). And as Freestyles seems to be a target for 2.67 (http://www.blendernation.com/2013/03/11/developer-meeting-notes-march-10-2013/) it shouldn't be in the official 2.66 build!?
(The edge option has been there for ages..)
I've played a little bit with Freestyle, but NPR aren't really my thing (even though I've done & am working on some NPR-/MoGraphish projects..).
I might've been thinking of MyPaint. :?D
I can't draw so I don't give that much of attention to those kind of programs! ;?P
Thank you for your comments.
The idea was to leave many features of the models painted. All the textures of the props are painted inside Blender, we can change colors in a minute. Characters are hand painted in Photoshop/GIMP.
Freestyle is great but it has some caveats, memory caveats. It won't render properly some scenes. Take for instance the wrestling arena shots; so many chairs crash the render. We've machines with 4GB memory, so we'll try adding more memory in the future.
Felipe