(It's an odd topic to write about, especially this being the very first entry in mthe tumblr blog xp. I hope whoever is reading this won't mind, I sure don't. err Sometimes in the future, I'll also be sure to post these kinds of entry with more things to read(bloat!!) on my fun little site ifp.nekoweb.org go visit it!!!\)
Most of the characters that I've made for my little stories and daydreams are of the human species or other things similar(elves, demons, etc) I have never worked on a project of my own that revolves around anthropomorphic animal characters because I was never too interested in the idea. Cute as they are, the idea of furry characters sounded pretty silly to me then. But now I thought to myself that, maybe, just maybe it wouldn't hurt to expand my range even just a little bit yknow.
Another thing, is it's been a LONG while since I've done any proper 3d animation work for myself. Most of my time I spend experimenting and tinkering with modelling techniques, rigging process, shaders n stuff, that I don't really have the time to sew together the things I've learned into one fully-finished piece of work. So, for those very reason, I made two characters that I'll be using as little puppets for an animation project., the following drawings are cleaned up sketches of the two. The design is very rudimentary, but I suppose it's all that I need for this little project.
Elias, is a worker in a small town's burial ground. Glenn, is a data analyst for an arms manufacturing company. The two are very much in love, yada yada yada i guess. I hven't had a proper background made for the two yet, but I do have plans in the near future to expand on their relationship. or perhaps the setting on which their story takes place or something.
The idea is simple. It'll be a short animated music video of Labi Siffre's Bless The Telephone (P.S. go listen to "The Singer And The Song", the 1979 album Labi Siffre. It's a great album, totally worth my while, it might be worth yours :p) The duration of the song spans only more or less 1:40 minuts. Which is perfect since It's been quite some time since I did any animating work lulz.
Now how am I gonna plan to make an animation with the two? Well first of all, I'm gonna make a draft of the scene, like the entire rundown of the animation itself. yknow like an animatic, but on 3D, also I'll be using primitive shapes to build the draft scene. At the moment of writing this, I already have the draft finished. Now why don't I make a storyboard? The reason is,, while I think storyboards are great, I kinda suck at drawing(as far as you're concerned) and a very rough blocking of the scene in 3D can and already gets the job done. (pictures related)
The blocks in the screenshots above are only placeholders, I'll replace those as soon as I have the assets finished. Now I'm gonna work on all of the assets myself from scratch, because I can. also bcs I am literally goated(true). Props, characters, environments will take a week or two (a day for two to three for props and background environment, depending on how busy I am I suppose), perhaps more, I'll figure it out as I go. The style of animation that I have in mind is a mix of retro-styled models for props and environment and higher poly models(?undecided) with toon/anime shaders for the characters.
I have a great affinity for the look of lower-poly 3D models, those ones where it isn't very obvious that there isn't alot going on with the model itself. Ones where it much more relies on the texture of the model than the geometry of the object itself. Kindof like what you'd call a PS1 style or something. Myself, I find it very charming. I won't be explicitly replicating the PS1 look as I don't think it'll fit much into my idea, what I had in mind was the look of GoldSrc games(CS1.6, HL1, etc). There's a look that I think is pretty cool from the brush-based maps and the textures with baked lighting.
The .gifs attached above are three of my favourite assets made for this project. As of writing this, only a handful of them have been finished. What I did for the models are I used no more than a few hundred polygons for each of them(if the polycount even hit a hundred). Then I wrapped the models with 256x256 textures that I ripped from craigslist, I'll write about the details some other time.
And errr no, I think the dithering effect from the .gifs attached in this entry are all because of the lackluster conversion from .mkv to .gif. It very much is not the intended look. But it looks kinda cool, so I might(big emphasis on might) replicate it in Blender. It kinda reminds me of SH1 ngl
Above here is a character that I made to test around shaders and stuff. As you can see, It's a pretty rough demonstration of the NPR shader that I will use for this project. The gif on the right is a pretty good idea of where I'm going with the style of the characters. It is a mix of a customizeable NPR shader, and a vagrant story-esque rim-lighting achieved on post, as is highlighted on the left.
the NPR shader on the right is something that I've been tinkering about for atleast a year now. I referenced games with similar 3D graphics (genshin impact, guilty gear, etc) for this shader. It's not perfect it really isn't. For this project, I don't know how good the retro-ish style of the environment would be when mixed with the kind of 'anime' style that I have in mind for the characters. I guess I'll only know how bad it'll be when I get to a certain point in the pipeline lol
That's all that I have to share at the moment. I'll be writing more regarding this project in the future. There i think will be more frequent updates on my site(ifp.nekoweb.org), and even more frequent, albeit miniscule, updates on my bluesky! do take care!!
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