Project Acheron – Spider-Verse inspired workflow
The Class Creatives team recently shared this detailed Behind the Scenes post on the Blender Artists forum. I thought it was an interesting enough read to republish it here.
We have been working on project Acheron for a few years, and we wanted to share our progress and final renders with the community. Our goal was to replicate techniques from the Spider-Verse with unique assets and also document the entire process of how this workflow can be achieved for anyone interested in trying to achieve a similar style for their own projects.
This started out as a proof of concept based on a single piece of concept art by professional industry veteran Lamnho Giang 1 (aka LalaGi) and we are continuing to build out additional shots for this larger scaled animated short project.
We created the assets in Blender and used Grease Pencil to add hand painted textures and outlines for the main character to achieve the graphic look seen in the original concept art piece.
Once we were happy with the proof of concept workflow, we wanted to push our limits further and bring in more complexity with a longer sequence with more aggressive visuals. We took some video footage we shot on a trip to Tokyo of the Yurikamome Line monorail across the Rainbow Bridge for inspiration and created several additional tests with the new 3D assets created in Blender.
When we were happy with the test results we started creating the final shots for the sequence. We took some inspiration from Akira and also used some other videos online to get the cinematography and movements realistic yet stylized.
We were recently featured in Wacom’s blog about this project, since we were using all Wacom hardware for 2D and 3D animation. We have some additional insights there if anyone is interested, as well as a video breakdown on everything in our YouTube video 1.
We hope to shed as much light on our YouTube 3 channel on these workflows as we create new shot sequences. As for the course, it is continuously being updated (over 20 hours through 150 lectures of instruction now) as we get more shots completed. Any purchases in the course are helping us fund the project so that we can hire additional artists and document the entire process.
We’d be happy to try our best at creating any additional workflows that you request, and give as much insight as we can for the community as we continue to finish the project. These are only 3 shots of several others that we are creating for the full project. We are planning to fully score the entire sequence and document the professional audio process as well, which we hope will also assist anyone who might be creating their own animated shorts.
We hope this is helpful and we hope you enjoy the visuals as much as we did creating them. It’s amazing what Grease Pencil and Blender can be used for these days to push the 3D medium.
Thanks for reading!
~ Class Creatives team
