Magnum Force Playing Cards Kickstarter
Baz shares the creation process of the cartoon character video he created for a Kickstarter campaign.
As a long time Blender user and enthusiast, I’m thrilled to finally show a project I’ve been working on for the past year on which I used Blender extensively. I’ve been using Blender in my work for a few years now and it has been perhaps the most invaluable program in my toolbox bar none, and it wouldn’t have been possible for me to create the following animation without it:
For the Kickstarter pitch video, I decided that I’d attempt to animate it in the style of an 80s cartoon intro such as He-man, Thundercats, GI-Joe, etc. I knew that I’d need to use Blender to augment the hand drawn animating process because I didn’t have the luxury of time to do it all by hand, and so I set up crude 3d models and animated them with simple armatures, and used them as a basis to draw over.
I initially wanted to use grease pencil, but I hadn’t been as practiced with it at the time so I did all the draw over rotoscoping in Photoshop instead (indeed now that the new grease pencil update is in 2.8 I plan to replace Photoshop for this purpose).
I also exported lighting passes, done in Blender internal, to get that cell shaded look, and layered it in compositing to get the final effect.
I used particle effects in many instances to get those energetic bursts of lights,
As well as where I needed to create fireworks,
Each of the anime style, fast moving backgrounds were done entirely using procedural textures in Blender,
Of course all of the product reveals and animations at the end were done in Blender cycles, and for a couple of the sequences I employed the use of Animation Nodes, which is one of my absolute favorite addons.
I don’t know where I’d be without Blender today, I owe a great deal to this amazing program and as such owe a lot to the people that make it possible, from Ton himself to the developers and the amazing community that supports it.
If any of what you’ve seen here Interests you, check out the Kickstarter itself.
You can find more of my work at: www.bloodandchrome.com
And if you have any questions about the animation and how Blender was used feel free to email me at [email protected] !
hahaha looks like fun, i was lughing so much when i saw that Comando Ninja on your site…. Over the top funny and Retro
It’s Totally Awesom!!!
Thank you!
What i dont get is is that Grease Pencil in 2.78 and 2.79 is already super usefull i think. What ive seen of it. Does 2.8 have so much more and better features for artists like this?
Thanks Robout!
Grease pencil much more geared toward artists in 2.8, as well as having a whole bunch of new features. There’s an update video on Blender Developer’s youtube channel I believe that goes through it all.
I checked the video but a lot of things could already be done. I mean the layers. 3d aspect everything was there already. Now they’ve added it to the main panels and gave its own dedicated space which is good
But I’m not sure it should always be visible. It takes 2/3 panels of space
I think having grease pencil as its own object also makes things much better and easier to work with, not to mention some of the grease pencil effects/modifiers look super useful as well.
Yeah, I noticed all the effects and extra additions it can have. I’m not an illustrator. But I saw some vid yesterday from an old update were layers were added. The power of simply editting content and the animation just simple worked even with updates to a a face like colour and position of eyes and ears
is excellent, please create a course on how to do this.
many we would pay to know how
Thanks! I may look into doing some Twitch streaming at some point so that if anyone is interested they can watch my process.
Ho. Ly. Shit. That was the most awesome ad I’ve ever seen. Ever! And you did it all in Blender? Amazing! Also loved the music.
Thanks! As outlined in the article, I alternated between Photoshop and Blender. I composited it in After Effects. I’m hoping to move as much of my workflow to Blender and/or other open source software.
Impressive. And somewhat like the 1990s.
Thanks!
very cool! awesome!
Thank you!
Open content project/free cultural license CC-BY or CC0? I only give money for project give me something can use create new stuff, have no monoply against me.
Amazing
Thanks Alimayo!
And big thanks for all your tutorials on Youtube!