Various Anime-Styled Animations

Artwork Animations
1

I have been using Blender for several years now modeling various anime-styled models and characters.

While I have dabbled into animations since the beginning; I only just recently decided to get more serious about them (past 6 months or so)

I figured I’d broadcast some of my WIPs and finished projects for everyone to enjoy, hate, or laugh at. Whatever floats your boat :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Right now I animate in two major render/shading styles. One is a super cartoony take on the Touhou world starring Bkub’s “Chen”. Completely random animations that make little sense and are not meant to be taken seriously. This style relies heavily on Freestyle.

The other is a more realistic yet still very stylistic approach to rendering anime-style models. Kind of a 50/50 look between NPR and realism. Since these animations require much more effort, time, and attention I seldom do more than some sort of cycle or random emote-like animations.

I’m kicking around a third type which will once again be more cartoony; but not as cartoony as Chen.

I use the VSE to composite my videos together and other than some overlays that I create using Photoshop; virtually everything is done from within blender.

Music credits can all be found in the descriptions of the various Youtube postings.

Anywho, time for the goods. Here are some of my favorite Chen videos.

My newest one. Had a lot of fun with this. Not much to say about it from a technical standpoint.

Had a hoot with this one. Mainly did this to give myself the chance to mess around with various rigid body physics and the Explosion Modifier. The physics and explosions are totally whacked; but help lend to that cartoony feel.

A more subdued video. Really only started this for the crayon scene, to toy with Dynamic Paint. Then just went from there in random directions.

Here are some of my other various animations;

My most “complete” animation using this style. Essentially Remilia (The main character of this animation) is a vampire; and is longing for her humanity. The portrait she holds up and looks at is of her younger sister Flandre; who is also a vampire. Though her vampire form is not shown in this animation.

Just finished this one today. More various animation practice.

Well that should do for now. Lots more on my Youtube page for those interested. I will keep uploading various stuff here in the future too!

Thanks for taking a gander, and let me know what you think.

2

Its really nice, congrats!.
I am interested in this style, in fact I tried to do something like that in an animation, but I am afraid I failed miserably. I also used Freestyle but it was a major pain. I would appreciate it if you watch it and let me know what I did wrong with respect to the shaders (I know there is a lot of problems with the walk cycles and animations)

Here it is:

I tried to find a tutorial for anime style shader. It would be nice if you make one.

TIA
Cheers!
Eliut

3

Before I begin I must say that I really enjoyed that animation. The mood and style changes between dogs was an especially nice touch.

As for the shading; well it really depends on what you want your end result to be. I personally find that super detailed textures (such as all the grass, pavement, and fur textures you used on the first dog scene) really detracts from that “anime” feel. The blue dog was about perfect in regards to texturing imo. (This may have been the whole point of the texture shift; but figured I’d point it out regardless)

That’s probably been one of the hardest things for me to do with my more strictly-toony shaders. I like to put in lots of details but then it throws it all off (in my humble opinion)

The first thing you should do is sit down and ask some basic questions; such as do you want real shadows, no shadows, or “normal” shadows? Perhaps even “blob” shadows on the ground like the old PS1-era games. How about specularity. How much if any of that do you want? Finally; just how flat/2d do you want it to appear. Remember that shading makes things appear 3D, so the flatter and less shading you apply (AO etc) the more 2D things look.

Hope some of that helped ya out; if you have more questions feel free to ask me.

4

Thanks! Regarding the textures, no, the shift was not on purpose. I tried to show the change of mood with the music, the camera fov, depth of field and the saturation. But with the textures I was clueless. I used a toon shader:

Capture.PNG1284×428 68.1 KB

And the lamp settings had a size of zero, I think I did right, but I am not happy with the result.
I would appreciate it if you can show your node settings for the shaders.

Also the pencil type of animation you did is awesome, would love to know how you did it.

Cheers
Eliut

5

Alrighty; well for starters I still use Blender Internal for everything; so I’m not at all familiar with Cycles just yet. Though for my Chen characters I use virtually no material nodes. Just a single solid color usually applied to faces or a simple bright texture map if I require more detail.

I personally use Toon shader with Intense 1, Size 3, and Smooth 0. Set emit to 1 and ambient to 0; which makes it so they require no diffuse lamps but can still be shadowed.

After that I stick in my shadow lamps with very tight shadows and the power extremely low, like .05. Just enough to feed shadows for a shadow pass. I do this because I don’t want a black shadow, but a soft-lighted shadow which I do in the compositer (Makes the shadows softer, just darker hues of the material’s color instead of black/grey/etc)

As for the pencily-sketch one. It is a merger of Freestyle and the old style of using various filters (I use prewitt in this case) to outline things in the compositer.

6

These are pretty awesome. I like the style.

7

Thank you kindly!

Here’s a few more I’ve done.