Just curious about the technique used to design and animate this movie. Curious what software they used, but more specific they seem to draw the character’s mouths, eyebrows etc on the face of the models. I like the cartoony look and actually think the characters did not stray far from the original comic book because of this.
Would you use the grease pencil to do this in blender or would you export this to some other application and apply the hand drawn features of the character?
I am not sure what software they used but, I think that grease pencil may work, or you could also try to replicate the effect by using animated textures almost like the Lego movie and TV show does.
I looks like Blue Sky in the maker, so I would guess Maya. Most studios use proprietary software, so that is a very good possibility.
To my eye, it looks like they have a basic model with the iconic shape of the characters. The eyes, and mouth look like bezier curves with control points that are shrink wrapped to the base model. Some shapes, like the outer eyes, are free from the head, or possibly switchable weather they shrink to the head or are free.
Thanks for bringing this movie to my attention. The preview looks great. I love how they have stayed true to the 2d comic while bringing the characters to 3d.
Good luck!
Freeze frame: the old-school hand-drawn techniques of the new CG Peanuts trailer
An article on FILMdivider by Charles Madison
This is an excellent article which helps to explain why I think this CGI adaptation is so different. I watched many of the attempts to remake old 2D cartoons and while they are not necessarily all bad, the characters just look different. As if you wish you weren’t biased by the original 2D version.
So it seems they are using (at times) several layers for some of the character’s facial features. Very interesting to me because I’ve only been interested in CGI work for cartoon like characters …coming from 2D myself. I’ve always struggled with trying to model the facial features of cartoon characters and there is not a whole lot of tutorials on this style of modeling. And this is only natural because cartoon …is cartoon…and can look anyway unlike actual real human beings who have standard features for eyes, nose, mouth ears etc.
I’ve always thought about doing this, but never really seen it used this way before in a major film.
PS: I really wish they didn’t have so many forums here, very annoying when the moderator move your post and you have to search for it. There seems to be far too many different categories of forum, and I think it discourages participation and discussion rather than help.