If you want to get a deeper insight into how I created this project or want to get all the custom tools I made for this project, you can get them here: www.patreon.com/user/shop/spirited-away-in-blender-project-files-63980?u=103694046&Link&
While it's obvious that you gave it a good try it is clear to see why people prefer hand drawn when you see the first scene the 2d version looks much smoother and flows together better while the 3d looks more rigid and for want of a better word less natural? The clouds also look a bit pixelate. The train carriage looks much closer to the 2d version and is only slightly less desirable while it is a still frame, for me the real problem with 3d animation compared to 2d is when everything is moving it can often seem very jarring and unnatural, looking at something like the latest berserk I think it was 2016 it was just horrible compared to the 97 original but then there are shows like blue eye samurai which from what I know was made with a mixture of 2d together with 3d and the final result looks quite good.
Me, get them? No, YOU should do a 1-hour, 2-hour edit of the Goro series, Ronja the Robber's Daughter, and make any improvements you reasonably can afford to pour you time into, using these methods. It is a brilliant core under a thousand flaws, and you could seriously be the person to salvage a lost Ghibli film. Maybe ask around if someone can provide the edit to work as the master shot., and do some scenes to touch up the visuals where you can.
Kudos to the animators and cleanup/inbetweeners of ghibli projects! Dang! They too hard to do.. every scene is considered hard level.. I myself work as inbetweener for cartoons from big companies and even simple level scenes take a day or two to make! What more a very detailed one like Ghibli’s 😅 I might cry blood lmao
The speculation you did on chihiro's arms being longer was actually noted by Miyazaki himself. He said that he loves 2D animation because you can deliberately go off model for dramatic effect. Example: one of the reasons Yubaba looked so menacing in the final film was because she was constantly changing sizes.
They actually trained us at Pixar to rig a model so animators could "break" it - e.g. allowing the knee to bend far past a realistic angle. "Breaking" models during animation creates highly dynamic expression. You want to give tools to the animators to express their characters, not limit them with your own biases and assumptions. Such good advice!!
@@kikijewell2967 So interesting. Indeed, i remember some bts clips from animated films showing that sometimes the character rigs must break to make the cinematography work.
I don't think people realize enough how groundbreaking this video truly is, the craft and skill required to do this is insane. HUGE props the results are amazing.
@@shableepChinese studios already use 3D models for some scenes in their anime (donghua). They are pretty good. It's hard to tell whether if it's made by hand or computer.
I don't mean to downplay his skill, but this is already a fairly widely used tool in 2D animation. It's the very reason why there's so many tutorials about it, because it's a good skill to learn if you're planning to get into the animation industry.
6:44 2d animators and illustrators actually do that a lot - we prefer shape design and visual appeal more than accuracy. This is also why 3D isn't always the best tool for all kinds of animation, you really have to push it in some areas. But you did an amazing job, I honestly didn't expect you would do it so well!
You may recreate whatever you wish even in MS Paint or by finger on dirty car if you have no schedules, deadlines, goals and personal life. Usability in blender is below MVP. This package is useless crap for the artists. Its only purpose is to be a show-off for devs trying to impress other devs for a sake of open source development. Blender is all about development and nothing about real workflows or expression/art/inspiration. Animators will have much more boost form Procreate Dreams i.e. in no time. And blender team must stop developing and start asking artists...
@@SugarTouch chill man. No ones gonna make 2D films in Blender, at least in its current state. But its not as useless as you pointed out to be. It has been/is being used in 3D/2D-3D animation. The latest evangelion movies come to mind which used Blenders toon shading for 3D parts, and then there's Maya and the Three which was completely done on Blender. Even the recent spiderverse used some of Blenders grease pencil features. As a 2D artist I will always gravitate towards software specialized towards 2D painting like Clip Studio or Procreate. But don't throw Blender out of the window for 3D, it's already being used in the industry and will continue to get better.
To be fair there was nothing stopping them from keyframing in exaggerations of the mesh. The problem is 3D is used to make things cheaply, not make them good. This guy did an awesome job, but projects like these are passion. Traditional is definitely faster and requires less play with more flow, but 3D in the right hands (of someone who never needed to pay bills and had an undying love of the art and a lot of experience doing it) could absolutely do the same as traditional... it's just not why 3D work is a thing.
This is why I'm a little obsessed with the rig of the "food thief" short. A lot of work and expertise is needed to accomplish that versatility with a 3d rig, but that short shows what is possible (i can't recall a more extreme example)
one minor note at about 2:55 Miyzaki is not behind *all* of the ghibli movies. Just wanna highlight one of Ghibli's co-founders, Isao Takahata, who brought us some absolute masterpieces such as Grave of the Fireflies, Pom Poko, and Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Agree! there are soo many talented individuals at Ghibli. I just dont get why they keep giving Goro ( Miyazaki's kid) the opportunity instead of the other.
Something that may give the 3d more expression is using the model as a base then drawing elements on it. I.E. the face and all its expressions, the majority of the work would be done by the 3d model and the finer expressions can be done in 2d, like the mouth since you're basically hammering and fighting the model to get the desired shape anyway.
I agree with this. If i remember correctly this is what they did with "Into the spiderverse" and had the 3D models doing the heavy lifting and then stuff like face expression lines or other effects was able to get more focus and be refined.
@@Brixujel_Rimulex they did use the model's mouth shape in 3D though - first because they're a huge team and can deliver a top notch rig to control the mouth and have top notch animators who have enough time to make the expressions they want... but mostly because the style is designed from the ground up for 3D tools rather than twisting those tools to recreate a 2D look with pinpoint accuracy - though they do quite a bit of twisting in other areas. so motly the lines they draw are expression lines on the face, speed lines, etc... I'm not exactly sure how they handle the half tone shading though.
I think it is a thing called rotoscopy, usually on top of an actual recording, but often over 3d renders (maybe animated with motion capture) since you can change camera angles dinamically instead of depending on the angle the camera is recording
Something touched on in the behind the scenes for "Encanto" is that the animators will break the models to get better atmosphere from their poses. It's something considered contrversial, but the effect of making deliberate anatomy errors to make a more dynamic pose is a better payoff.
Disney and other studios are breaking their models a lot more lately, the stuff that blends old-school cartoon style with digital animation like Hotel Transylvania, Luca, and Turning Red really leaned into it, but you can see it start to show up in more subtle ways in more straight-line digital stuff as early as Onward and Encanto
What i appreciate abt this video is how it centers 3D animation as a translation of sorts, rather an an equivalent to or replacement of 2D animaiton. They're incredibly different mediums, each with their own flaws and benefits. 2D animaiton is by no means a thing of the past and both mediums can learn a lot from the other. Great video!
I don't know what Miyazaki would think, but I think it's truly inspiring. While I admire and adore 2D animation, I find modern 3D artists' efforts really impressive. Great job and I love your explanations of each step.
As a Japanese person, I am impressed by your 3D recreations! In our manga and anime, destructive compositions and anatomy are often used. While 3D captures a vision without distortion as seen by the camera, manga and anime creators capture the vision as seen by the Brain, where certain parts are emphasized and others are extremely subdued. Therefore, when recreating in 3D, it’s necessary to deliberately add distortions⚡️
ARCSys (Guilty Gear, if anyone doesn't know) did an insane job behind the scenes with the tricks you mention, where the 3D models are so blown out of proportion to create depth and exaggeration like the media you mentioned, in the animations that seeing how it works outside of the 2D plane they present the game in, is absolutely wild.
Good GDC talk by them here: ua-cam.com/video/yhGjCzxJV3E/v-deo.html the timestamp ~29:30 where they talk about replicating the exaggerations of 2D in 3D.
And for anyone who isn't interested to watch, they use a lot of scale animation which is making parts of the body massive and others smaller to appear further away or closer when they really aren't, along with a myriad of other techniques.
Pretty much since their goal was to emulate traditional art, they limited their modeling to how you would "fake it" using a pencil on a 2d piece of paper. It's really well done and cost a pretty penny. @@wakkaseta8351
I think the best way is like how arcane dealt with it, Using 3D to simplify the work, then painting over each frame to add the artsy feel. Idk much about the cinema world and if that saves time and money, but it seems like it would to me
Great job man! One quick way is also to draw grease pencil lines directly to the surface and parent it with the 3D object. If you need movement you can sculpt the lines and interpolate them. Lineart is awesome but it can be a pain to all fix extra strokes later 😅
If you were to design the characters from scratch around the cel-shader (centralise their mouths more give their faces more gometry communicate more with overall shape). This would be a perfectly valid pipeline for making a movie. I especially enjoyed the way you projected a background painting on rudimentary geometry for the train shot. You can't move the camera around too much where you didn't plan it, but you instantly can get 3D shadows and volume and get away with basic movement. That's keeping with the 2D pipeline and still getting 3D applications out of it. Love that. You'd have to storyboard a production like this beforehand and nail the energy as you go as you won't get the freedom to move the camera later. The 2D assets on layers will be painted with specific angles and distances in mind.
very cool, ghibli art style is so nice and translates pretty decently in 3d as seen in ni no kuni. honestly videos like this makes me want to see them work with another developer again
As an exercise these type of work is immensely helpful in creating great looking 3D art. It allows you to break things down frame by frame and see what adds to the soul of a final product and allows you to think in similar vein. Anime is starting to have 3D work that comes really close, and stuff like Arcane just blows everyone away.
From someone who tried to learn basic Blender and gave up after two years of struggle when realized I failed miserably, I cannot stretch enough the insane amount of skill this person has put on display in this video. I'm floored! Kudos for the amazing job.
Lmao miyazaki's son made a 3d anim film and miyazaki was so disappointed that he basically refuses to acknowledge it as a ghibli film. He would probably like this more than that though because at least it doesn't dip into the uncanny valley. I think he just thinks his son is untalented tbh 😂😭 i feel kinda bad for the guy. Must be a lot of pressure. Anyway this was awesome and tysm for the video!
@@atoaster2070 directing and artistic directing are two very different things. He may have a talent for directing, but the artistic direction of his 3d movie was awful
They made "from up on poppy hill" together so i think miyazaki softened it up a little on his son after his disappointment in earthsea. You sound a little mean by the way. Imagine if it was your son.
This is genuinely crazy! the amount of skill and knowledge combined to recreate those scenes in 3d is something that you have to be very experienced to be able to pull them off. Thanks for uploading this videos man. Keep up the great work.
gotta increase the focal length a bit, and change where the camera is slightly. I feel like a lot of the "weird cg look" is just from the camera angle and FOV
12:07 I’ve become obsessed with the idea of a variety of making exact copies of stylized 2D art with Blender lately and “why?” of it is so that ultimately I know how to use those looks on concepts that I make from scratch. So yeah, this.
honestly, have a little bit of trouble telling the difference. so you did a pretty awesome job. the real test is when you see more than a few seconds in actions (like minutes) to really see your work at play.
I really love how Hoyoverse (Mihoyo), with their Cinematics on UA-cam for the game called Honkai Impact 3rd create their 3D Models to look 2D, they've also circumvented the problems that you've encountered in their own way by intentionally ultra deforming the character from the perspective of the camera, similar to what Miyazaki did with 2D~ I find what Hoyoverse did simply a Masterpiece of Art~ I think they are also applying similar techniques in Honkai Star Rail Cinematics too~ Plus their music is also amazing~ In all cases, I definitely encourage you to check those Cinematics, I have made a playlist on my channel in case you're curious and want to find it easier, but it's not hard to find normally~
Man this is good, I envy your 3D skill set. As a beginner in 3D, it's amazing to watch someone work in so many dimensions in one project, so comfortably. And the output was seriously good. It translated far better than I would have thought it would
Amazing! I'm working on something similar for The Boy and the Heron, and your tip for making fur (8:05) is so helpful! I've been overthinking how to do the feathers, but your technique is so simple and looks really nice. Good work.
I personally always prefer 2D and the craft, and how every frame is beautifully hand drawn, and every frame is intentional, and it’s something I love about ghibli. However, despite all this I still love both mediums, 3D animation can also beautifully impressive, even if I would rather have ghibli stay hand drawn.
We already know that the ghilbi look can be done faithfully in a 3D engine becase of the Eden Anime Mini-Series and of course Ni No Kuni. But matching the 2D look is nice. It ends up being a styling choice.
For the weird normals around the mouth, you can use a proxi with custom normals and a data transfer modifier on the original mesh so the normals will stay the same when you move vertices. Still not perfect but it can do the job 😅
I just want to experience a world that feels like this in VR. There were some Ghibli demos someone made when Oculus Rift was still a dev kit, but it was just a small taste.
Putting so much tender love and care into ensuring the 3D render looks as close to the original as possible really shows that you loved Miyazaki’s film. Thanks for creating and sharing this masterpiece with us!
Mouths can be really weird in all sortsa 2D animation, so probably just drawing the mouth onto or in front of the model (like you did with the nose) woulda been the best option. Usually the dead giveaway of 2D-looking CGI is either the mouth or the fingers.
this video was super awesome. looks great and really enjoyed it. specifically the way you transition between montages and showing off what you have worked on are really good and satisfying on top of already producing super impressive stuff. really glad your video was suggested to me c:
Wow! You actually did a whole or better than I expected! Not meaning that to offend you, but this style of 3D can be very easy to make look wrong and hard to make look right, though you actually did a pretty good job! It does still have a slight 3D feel, but if you were to practice this, I swear you’d have it down pretty soon!
I am amazed I thought this was clickbait but its a masterpiece. The fact that anyone for free can make a Miyazaki Film from a laptop is astonishing. The skill and patience to make it, equally.
While I feel that 3D can do some amazing things and get really close to 2D, it's likely never going to fully replace it. Instead, a 2D/3D hybrid workflow would be the next best thing. Set up everything in 3D, (composition, background, characters, etc.) and then use 2D for cleanup or additional details. You could fully replace the face in 2D afterwards for example, fix shadows, or cover over areas where models may have been clipping. You could even get really into it and save line art for the 2D process. It's basically what a lot of anime studios today do, using 3D elements in 2D anime. It's really fascinating, but I feel like a big thing they get wrong is framerate. 3D stuff looks too smooth, while 2D has a certain chaos to it. I wonder how, from an animation standpoint, you'd fix that issue.
Speaking as a 3D animation student, I think the only way to make your animation less smooth (as in, more chaotic like you said) would be to literally set animation keys on every frame. Which would basically take almost any power away from the computer
I will be studying this video at length. Obviously you have a ton of skill, talent, and incredible creativity with Blender. But! You have also shown me at least one hundred unique transitions and movements that I absolutely loved while watching this. I loved every moment of it!
There's another way to incorporate lines to the characters or any object for 3D animations looking 2D. I never knew the special shader node works with the coloring, but it would take some time to adjust the shadows. Impressively creative.
I think if you perfected the proportion of the details it could be nearly indistinguishable from the original. Anyway this is a great cel shading animation tutorial for blender! Thanks for that. 😊
There is no substitute for hand drawn animation. The imperfections are what make it so charming. Most CGI loses all of the imperfections that give it so much character.. and most studios are too cheap to spend the time adding it... and you end up with animation uncanny valley.
I think the trick is and what they do in the anime industry is to 3D model the BG but keep characters 2D and even use 3D character models to trace to save time but don't completely trace over the face and hair since that is what usually has a 3D look so just use the 3D face as heavy reference but 2Dify it if that makes sense and tracing over base body and drawing clothes more manually like the face and hair.
As this was a childhood favorite, and having watched it literally over 100 times (3 times in one day...) I figured I should at least be able to tell the difference in Chihiro's movement when she hugs Haku... Side by side, I could tell... couldn't until I noticed the somewhat stuttery movement... it's hard to explain, like it's not at the same frame rate ig... either way, it is exceptional. I am thoroughly impressed, though it probably doesn't mean much coming from me. I am curious if you would be able to use a motion capture AI to capture the motion of the video and make more bits of the movie, or if you intend to make more parts of the movie... or if you only planned on doing this as an example. Figure the AI motion capture might help with moving the models throughout the movie, like after she cleans the river spirit and all the characters are jumping on the upper floor.
This fact that anime charters have weird geometry I did know, but that it is so much not realistic I didn't. And if in Japan would do as good CGI as you, nobody would care about it, but then you look at some animations you start thinking what they using and how it end so bad? It would be great video too :D
The quality here absolutely blew me away! ♥ Seeing the tricks that make what would normally give away its 3D nature look completely 2D seems like such a delicate skill to master that I don't know if I have the patience for. The only criticism I could give is Chihiro's hands on Haku's face look floaty. If you were going to try it again you could IK rig the hands, and have them attach to two bones on Haku's jaw so they never mismatch their positions. Besides that I had to pause and make sure I wasn't watching the original!
I feel like 3D animation shines with inanimate objects, and traditional animation excels at expressing motion and emotion. Though I suppose what is a lot of the charm in Ghibli productions, and other, soft, and inaccurate 2D animation is that inanimate objects are treated as something living and changing. Hadn't thought of that before, so kudos for making me realise it.
As for the arm length, that's no problem with models, you can make the arms longer, or shorter with the use of bones. However there are limits to how that can look. Video games do it all the time. In the shot it looks fine, but if you move the camera, you find the character is in bended messes.
Awesome video and impressive skills. The beauty of 2D animation lies in its high artistic feel, while the beauty of 3D animation is its precision. Ultimately, it’s all about creating visual appeal and connecting with viewers’ emotions.
Fun fact: This is done by a software that is both 3d and open source (maintained through donations of people that want a future without greedy corporations) :)
Noggi, as a programmer I can tell you - This is INSANE! Only GOD himself knows from where you have so, so much Patience and Dedication both of them on a Level Infinity!
FYI this technic called : 3D Cell Shading. I was research about this for my thesis on 2019. And i was predicted this is will be more efective to use in the future. Now its so popular for real big production project. ^_^
Besides being off-model, 2D can also just take a different approach to perspective, especially with faces. As you obviously noticed in the hug scene, as Chihiro's face tilts, her eyes stay looking basically the same, sort of as if the front of her face were more of a flat plane. Or a really strong example: Spy Family. In that drawing style, as the head rotates away from the camera, everything becomes skewed, almost as if squashed along a diagonal. This is especially true in the manga, but shows through in the animated version as well. Imagine trying to do that in 3D. I think a cool approach would be having different head models for different sorts of shots. Many drawing styles would need a different head model for profile shots than face-on shots.
To me, to imitate in 3d the hand made animation looked such a stupid idea, but then I kept watching and I have to say that it make sense to see the challenge and the amount of things to learn. It's at the end equally a Zen practice, so it's definitely the same.
I feel like, for me, using a basic reference model with the correct proportions, then sketching over it with 2D would be a better choice. Because then you can have your key frames, and manually interpolate with 2D sketching just like you would with actual 2D animation. I find that trying to get a 3D rig to work like a 2D character just does not work in most cases.
Miyazaki has some very strong opinions that many of us disagree with. That doesn't mean we don't respect him and adore his films and their worlds and stories. I personally wanted to use Blender to recreate 2D animation for my own anime projects, but I'm opting to go for traditional animation, for characters and props at least, for the reasons you stated. I loved this video, it's actually quite inspirational for someone who is making effort to do this sort of thing.
If you want to get a deeper insight into how I created this project or want to get all the custom tools I made for this project, you can get them here:
www.patreon.com/user/shop/spirited-away-in-blender-project-files-63980?u=103694046&Link&
demon slayer
While it's obvious that you gave it a good try it is clear to see why people prefer hand drawn when you see the first scene the 2d version looks much smoother and flows together better while the 3d looks more rigid and for want of a better word less natural? The clouds also look a bit pixelate. The train carriage looks much closer to the 2d version and is only slightly less desirable while it is a still frame, for me the real problem with 3d animation compared to 2d is when everything is moving it can often seem very jarring and unnatural, looking at something like the latest berserk I think it was 2016 it was just horrible compared to the 97 original but then there are shows like blue eye samurai which from what I know was made with a mixture of 2d together with 3d and the final result looks quite good.
Me, get them? No, YOU should do a 1-hour, 2-hour edit of the Goro series, Ronja the Robber's Daughter, and make any improvements you reasonably can afford to pour you time into, using these methods.
It is a brilliant core under a thousand flaws, and you could seriously be the person to salvage a lost Ghibli film. Maybe ask around if someone can provide the edit to work as the master shot., and do some scenes to touch up the visuals where you can.
Kudos to the animators and cleanup/inbetweeners of ghibli projects! Dang! They too hard to do.. every scene is considered hard level.. I myself work as inbetweener for cartoons from big companies and even simple level scenes take a day or two to make! What more a very detailed one like Ghibli’s 😅 I might cry blood lmao
3:48 you probably tried to tell us about demons
The speculation you did on chihiro's arms being longer was actually noted by Miyazaki himself. He said that he loves 2D animation because you can deliberately go off model for dramatic effect. Example: one of the reasons Yubaba looked so menacing in the final film was because she was constantly changing sizes.
They actually trained us at Pixar to rig a model so animators could "break" it - e.g. allowing the knee to bend far past a realistic angle.
"Breaking" models during animation creates highly dynamic expression.
You want to give tools to the animators to express their characters, not limit them with your own biases and assumptions.
Such good advice!!
@@kikijewell2967 So interesting. Indeed, i remember some bts clips from animated films showing that sometimes the character rigs must break to make the cinematography work.
Arcsys games famously do this to achieve the 2d look
You can definitely do that in 3D too but people are afraid to do such things 😊
Blizzard did this for Overwatch as well
I don't think people realize enough how groundbreaking this video truly is, the craft and skill required to do this is insane. HUGE props the results are amazing.
seriously. i bet you some of these tricks are gonna make their way into at least a couple animation studios
@@shableepChinese studios already use 3D models for some scenes in their anime (donghua). They are pretty good. It's hard to tell whether if it's made by hand or computer.
FR, when i saw the thumbnail the first thing i thought was “this cannot be real, that looks too good”
I don't mean to downplay his skill, but this is already a fairly widely used tool in 2D animation. It's the very reason why there's so many tutorials about it, because it's a good skill to learn if you're planning to get into the animation industry.
Wonderful, you’re so talented! I think Miyazaki sensei would at least be politely amused at your tribute. Thanks for sharing, man!
6:44 2d animators and illustrators actually do that a lot - we prefer shape design and visual appeal more than accuracy. This is also why 3D isn't always the best tool for all kinds of animation, you really have to push it in some areas. But you did an amazing job, I honestly didn't expect you would do it so well!
You may recreate whatever you wish even in MS Paint or by finger on dirty car if you have no schedules, deadlines, goals and personal life. Usability in blender is below MVP. This package is useless crap for the artists. Its only purpose is to be a show-off for devs trying to impress other devs for a sake of open source development. Blender is all about development and nothing about real workflows or expression/art/inspiration. Animators will have much more boost form Procreate Dreams i.e. in no time. And blender team must stop developing and start asking artists...
@@SugarTouch chill man. No ones gonna make 2D films in Blender, at least in its current state.
But its not as useless as you pointed out to be. It has been/is being used in 3D/2D-3D animation. The latest evangelion movies come to mind which used Blenders toon shading for 3D parts, and then there's Maya and the Three which was completely done on Blender. Even the recent spiderverse used some of Blenders grease pencil features.
As a 2D artist I will always gravitate towards software specialized towards 2D painting like Clip Studio or Procreate. But don't throw Blender out of the window for 3D, it's already being used in the industry and will continue to get better.
To be fair there was nothing stopping them from keyframing in exaggerations of the mesh. The problem is 3D is used to make things cheaply, not make them good. This guy did an awesome job, but projects like these are passion. Traditional is definitely faster and requires less play with more flow, but 3D in the right hands (of someone who never needed to pay bills and had an undying love of the art and a lot of experience doing it) could absolutely do the same as traditional... it's just not why 3D work is a thing.
@@SugarTouch Wtf are you talking about
This is why I'm a little obsessed with the rig of the "food thief" short. A lot of work and expertise is needed to accomplish that versatility with a 3d rig, but that short shows what is possible (i can't recall a more extreme example)
one minor note at about 2:55
Miyzaki is not behind *all* of the ghibli movies. Just wanna highlight one of Ghibli's co-founders, Isao Takahata, who brought us some absolute masterpieces such as Grave of the Fireflies, Pom Poko, and Tale of the Princess Kaguya
There's one more that hayao miyazaki did not do...
But we don't talk about earthsea
@@mishli7670 shhhhhhhhh
@@mishli7670hey Goro also did From up on poppy hill & it's *good*!
Princess Kaguya is my favourite film of all-time and I would say his magnum opus!
Agree! there are soo many talented individuals at Ghibli. I just dont get why they keep giving Goro ( Miyazaki's kid) the opportunity instead of the other.
Something that may give the 3d more expression is using the model as a base then drawing elements on it. I.E. the face and all its expressions, the majority of the work would be done by the 3d model and the finer expressions can be done in 2d, like the mouth since you're basically hammering and fighting the model to get the desired shape anyway.
I agree with this. If i remember correctly this is what they did with "Into the spiderverse" and had the 3D models doing the heavy lifting and then stuff like face expression lines or other effects was able to get more focus and be refined.
@@Brixujel_Rimulex they did use the model's mouth shape in 3D though - first because they're a huge team and can deliver a top notch rig to control the mouth and have top notch animators who have enough time to make the expressions they want... but mostly because the style is designed from the ground up for 3D tools rather than twisting those tools to recreate a 2D look with pinpoint accuracy - though they do quite a bit of twisting in other areas.
so motly the lines they draw are expression lines on the face, speed lines, etc... I'm not exactly sure how they handle the half tone shading though.
I believe Land of the Lustrous did the same thing in order to capitalize on the strengths of both 2D & 3D.
Reminds me of how for the film Belle, they sculpted multiple models of the digital character’s head to fit specific camera angles.
I think it is a thing called rotoscopy, usually on top of an actual recording, but often over 3d renders (maybe animated with motion capture) since you can change camera angles dinamically instead of depending on the angle the camera is recording
Something touched on in the behind the scenes for "Encanto" is that the animators will break the models to get better atmosphere from their poses. It's something considered contrversial, but the effect of making deliberate anatomy errors to make a more dynamic pose is a better payoff.
Disney and other studios are breaking their models a lot more lately, the stuff that blends old-school cartoon style with digital animation like Hotel Transylvania, Luca, and Turning Red really leaned into it, but you can see it start to show up in more subtle ways in more straight-line digital stuff as early as Onward and Encanto
What i appreciate abt this video is how it centers 3D animation as a translation of sorts, rather an an equivalent to or replacement of 2D animaiton. They're incredibly different mediums, each with their own flaws and benefits. 2D animaiton is by no means a thing of the past and both mediums can learn a lot from the other. Great video!
I don't know what Miyazaki would think, but I think it's truly inspiring. While I admire and adore 2D animation, I find modern 3D artists' efforts really impressive. Great job and I love your explanations of each step.
As a Japanese person, I am impressed by your 3D recreations! In our manga and anime, destructive compositions and anatomy are often used. While 3D captures a vision without distortion as seen by the camera, manga and anime creators capture the vision as seen by the Brain, where certain parts are emphasized and others are extremely subdued. Therefore, when recreating in 3D, it’s necessary to deliberately add distortions⚡️
ARCSys (Guilty Gear, if anyone doesn't know) did an insane job behind the scenes with the tricks you mention, where the 3D models are so blown out of proportion to create depth and exaggeration like the media you mentioned, in the animations that seeing how it works outside of the 2D plane they present the game in, is absolutely wild.
Good GDC talk by them here: ua-cam.com/video/yhGjCzxJV3E/v-deo.html the timestamp ~29:30 where they talk about replicating the exaggerations of 2D in 3D.
And for anyone who isn't interested to watch, they use a lot of scale animation which is making parts of the body massive and others smaller to appear further away or closer when they really aren't, along with a myriad of other techniques.
@@QQnowQQlater So basically artificial foreshortening?
Pretty much since their goal was to emulate traditional art, they limited their modeling to how you would "fake it" using a pencil on a 2d piece of paper. It's really well done and cost a pretty penny. @@wakkaseta8351
I think the best way is like how arcane dealt with it, Using 3D to simplify the work, then painting over each frame to add the artsy feel. Idk much about the cinema world and if that saves time and money, but it seems like it would to me
Great job man! One quick way is also to draw grease pencil lines directly to the surface and parent it with the 3D object. If you need movement you can sculpt the lines and interpolate them. Lineart is awesome but it can be a pain to all fix extra strokes later 😅
If you were to design the characters from scratch around the cel-shader (centralise their mouths more give their faces more gometry communicate more with overall shape). This would be a perfectly valid pipeline for making a movie. I especially enjoyed the way you projected a background painting on rudimentary geometry for the train shot. You can't move the camera around too much where you didn't plan it, but you instantly can get 3D shadows and volume and get away with basic movement. That's keeping with the 2D pipeline and still getting 3D applications out of it. Love that. You'd have to storyboard a production like this beforehand and nail the energy as you go as you won't get the freedom to move the camera later. The 2D assets on layers will be painted with specific angles and distances in mind.
very cool, ghibli art style is so nice and translates pretty decently in 3d as seen in ni no kuni. honestly videos like this makes me want to see them work with another developer again
As an exercise these type of work is immensely helpful in creating great looking 3D art. It allows you to break things down frame by frame and see what adds to the soul of a final product and allows you to think in similar vein. Anime is starting to have 3D work that comes really close, and stuff like Arcane just blows everyone away.
From someone who tried to learn basic Blender and gave up after two years of struggle when realized I failed miserably, I cannot stretch enough the insane amount of skill this person has put on display in this video. I'm floored! Kudos for the amazing job.
Lmao miyazaki's son made a 3d anim film and miyazaki was so disappointed that he basically refuses to acknowledge it as a ghibli film. He would probably like this more than that though because at least it doesn't dip into the uncanny valley. I think he just thinks his son is untalented tbh 😂😭 i feel kinda bad for the guy. Must be a lot of pressure. Anyway this was awesome and tysm for the video!
To be fair, Goro Miyazaki directed Tales From Earthsea and From Up On Poppy Hill, so he does have talent.
@@atoaster2070 directing and artistic directing are two very different things. He may have a talent for directing, but the artistic direction of his 3d movie was awful
Well yeah. From the looks of it Miyazaki doesn’t really seem like a great person but he does have a lot of talent
@@chaoticcritical9335??????
They made "from up on poppy hill" together so i think miyazaki softened it up a little on his son after his disappointment in earthsea. You sound a little mean by the way. Imagine if it was your son.
This is genuinely crazy! the amount of skill and knowledge combined to recreate those scenes in 3d is something that you have to be very experienced to be able to pull them off. Thanks for uploading this videos man. Keep up the great work.
gotta increase the focal length a bit, and change where the camera is slightly. I feel like a lot of the "weird cg look" is just from the camera angle and FOV
Oh my heck you're so flipping cool. ART PEOPLE ARE JUST THE COOLEST. Man I wish I wasn't a peasant.
12:07
I’ve become obsessed with the idea of a variety of making exact copies of stylized 2D art with Blender lately and “why?” of it is so that ultimately I know how to use those looks on concepts that I make from scratch.
So yeah, this.
this is amazing, I can notice the effort you put into the editing and the scenes, I love it! keep up the good work!
Thank you. :)
honestly, have a little bit of trouble telling the difference. so you did a pretty awesome job. the real test is when you see more than a few seconds in actions (like minutes) to really see your work at play.
It's official, fans will be the ones to finish the Berserk anime we all deserve.
Not only are the displayed Blender skills really impressive, but the video editing and flow, as well as the music choices, are all so good!!
This is borderline insane to do
I really love how Hoyoverse (Mihoyo), with their Cinematics on UA-cam for the game called Honkai Impact 3rd create their 3D Models to look 2D, they've also circumvented the problems that you've encountered in their own way by intentionally ultra deforming the character from the perspective of the camera, similar to what Miyazaki did with 2D~
I find what Hoyoverse did simply a Masterpiece of Art~
I think they are also applying similar techniques in Honkai Star Rail Cinematics too~
Plus their music is also amazing~
In all cases, I definitely encourage you to check those Cinematics, I have made a playlist on my channel in case you're curious and want to find it easier, but it's not hard to find normally~
Man this is good, I envy your 3D skill set. As a beginner in 3D, it's amazing to watch someone work in so many dimensions in one project, so comfortably. And the output was seriously good. It translated far better than I would have thought it would
Sounds exciting 20 hours to go
Worth it!
Wow it took only 20hrs
What a beast you are! This is all amazing. The animation, the video, the editing... everything. You deserve more views and subscribers for sure!
0:50 ...yeah? Because, it is a painting.
just shows how cool and unique 2d animation is. nothing can beat it.
Amazing! I'm working on something similar for The Boy and the Heron, and your tip for making fur (8:05) is so helpful! I've been overthinking how to do the feathers, but your technique is so simple and looks really nice. Good work.
I personally always prefer 2D and the craft, and how every frame is beautifully hand drawn, and every frame is intentional, and it’s something I love about ghibli. However, despite all this I still love both mediums, 3D animation can also beautifully impressive, even if I would rather have ghibli stay hand drawn.
We already know that the ghilbi look can be done faithfully in a 3D engine becase of the Eden Anime Mini-Series and of course Ni No Kuni. But matching the 2D look is nice. It ends up being a styling choice.
For the weird normals around the mouth, you can use a proxi with custom normals and a data transfer modifier on the original mesh so the normals will stay the same when you move vertices. Still not perfect but it can do the job 😅
Just wow. SO wonderful to see how you, step by step, created each scene. Thank you for enriching one of my favorite movies even more.
Bro, this is so well done, like I get the art behind Spirited, and you cant take away from that, but you nailed this one mate!
I just want to experience a world that feels like this in VR. There were some Ghibli demos someone made when Oculus Rift was still a dev kit, but it was just a small taste.
Putting so much tender love and care into ensuring the 3D render looks as close to the original as possible really shows that you loved Miyazaki’s film. Thanks for creating and sharing this masterpiece with us!
This is absolutely TERRIFIC! great Job Noggi san
Mouths can be really weird in all sortsa 2D animation, so probably just drawing the mouth onto or in front of the model (like you did with the nose) woulda been the best option. Usually the dead giveaway of 2D-looking CGI is either the mouth or the fingers.
This is nothing short of incredible.
The displacement to make the character wobble is absolutely genius idea ! thank you !
Hats off to you, this is the closest I’ve seen when it comes to replicating the ghibli style
this video was super awesome. looks great and really enjoyed it. specifically the way you transition between montages and showing off what you have worked on are really good and satisfying on top of already producing super impressive stuff. really glad your video was suggested to me c:
Wow!
You actually did a whole or better than I expected!
Not meaning that to offend you, but this style of 3D can be very easy to make look wrong and hard to make look right, though you actually did a pretty good job! It does still have a slight 3D feel, but if you were to practice this, I swear you’d have it down pretty soon!
I am amazed I thought this was clickbait but its a masterpiece. The fact that anyone for free can make a Miyazaki Film from a laptop is astonishing. The skill and patience to make it, equally.
While I feel that 3D can do some amazing things and get really close to 2D, it's likely never going to fully replace it. Instead, a 2D/3D hybrid workflow would be the next best thing. Set up everything in 3D, (composition, background, characters, etc.) and then use 2D for cleanup or additional details. You could fully replace the face in 2D afterwards for example, fix shadows, or cover over areas where models may have been clipping. You could even get really into it and save line art for the 2D process.
It's basically what a lot of anime studios today do, using 3D elements in 2D anime. It's really fascinating, but I feel like a big thing they get wrong is framerate. 3D stuff looks too smooth, while 2D has a certain chaos to it. I wonder how, from an animation standpoint, you'd fix that issue.
Speaking as a 3D animation student, I think the only way to make your animation less smooth (as in, more chaotic like you said) would be to literally set animation keys on every frame. Which would basically take almost any power away from the computer
I'm amazed at your ability to recreate these scenes and with your attention to small detail!
"imitation can only get you so far" that's so true
I will be studying this video at length. Obviously you have a ton of skill, talent, and incredible creativity with Blender. But! You have also shown me at least one hundred unique transitions and movements that I absolutely loved while watching this. I loved every moment of it!
There's another way to incorporate lines to the characters or any object for 3D animations looking 2D. I never knew the special shader node works with the coloring, but it would take some time to adjust the shadows. Impressively creative.
I think if you perfected the proportion of the details it could be nearly indistinguishable from the original. Anyway this is a great cel shading animation tutorial for blender! Thanks for that. 😊
There is no substitute for hand drawn animation. The imperfections are what make it so charming. Most CGI loses all of the imperfections that give it so much character.. and most studios are too cheap to spend the time adding it... and you end up with animation uncanny valley.
This channel is Underrated AF
Probably the highest quality editing I’ve seen on a video in ages. Kudos
I think the trick is and what they do in the anime industry is to 3D model the BG but keep characters 2D and even use 3D character models to trace to save time but don't completely trace over the face and hair since that is what usually has a 3D look so just use the 3D face as heavy reference but 2Dify it if that makes sense and tracing over base body and drawing clothes more manually like the face and hair.
The original scene has a painterly feel because its literally a gouache painting...
As this was a childhood favorite, and having watched it literally over 100 times (3 times in one day...) I figured I should at least be able to tell the difference in Chihiro's movement when she hugs Haku... Side by side, I could tell... couldn't until I noticed the somewhat stuttery movement... it's hard to explain, like it's not at the same frame rate ig... either way, it is exceptional. I am thoroughly impressed, though it probably doesn't mean much coming from me. I am curious if you would be able to use a motion capture AI to capture the motion of the video and make more bits of the movie, or if you intend to make more parts of the movie... or if you only planned on doing this as an example. Figure the AI motion capture might help with moving the models throughout the movie, like after she cleans the river spirit and all the characters are jumping on the upper floor.
This fact that anime charters have weird geometry I did know, but that it is so much not realistic I didn't.
And if in Japan would do as good CGI as you, nobody would care about it, but then you look at some animations you start thinking what they using and how it end so bad?
It would be great video too :D
This slaps hard, amazing work as usual! 🔥
The quality here absolutely blew me away! ♥
Seeing the tricks that make what would normally give away its 3D nature look completely 2D seems like such a delicate skill to master that I don't know if I have the patience for.
The only criticism I could give is Chihiro's hands on Haku's face look floaty. If you were going to try it again you could IK rig the hands, and have them attach to two bones on Haku's jaw so they never mismatch their positions.
Besides that I had to pause and make sure I wasn't watching the original!
I feel like 3D animation shines with inanimate objects, and traditional animation excels at expressing motion and emotion. Though I suppose what is a lot of the charm in Ghibli productions, and other, soft, and inaccurate 2D animation is that inanimate objects are treated as something living and changing. Hadn't thought of that before, so kudos for making me realise it.
this still looks better than Earwig and the Witch
As for the arm length, that's no problem with models, you can make the arms longer, or shorter with the use of bones. However there are limits to how that can look. Video games do it all the time. In the shot it looks fine, but if you move the camera, you find the character is in bended messes.
9:59 this transition i like most. and also spirited away also one of my fevorate movies so yaa, love it.
just gonna mention the insanely creative cinematography shown off in transitions
Just watched this movie again the other day. This video popped up and had to watch. This is amazing and hope you do more videos like this!
I'm not an artist and I don't know blender but I watched all 12 minutes in awe. Well done!
This video has so much production value. This gotta get up to everyone UA-cam do your magic pls
You're incredible, my man. WHEW. SKILL.
Awesome video and impressive skills. The beauty of 2D animation lies in its high artistic feel, while the beauty of 3D animation is its precision. Ultimately, it’s all about creating visual appeal and connecting with viewers’ emotions.
Re the mouth: i think the people working on Belle had shared some really enlightening process images/videos on how they tackled that sort of problem!
This is awesome. Very well done.
I like the 2d style it had good details but the 3d style you made it had me impressed
Studio Gibli used SoftImage XSI
This is the most insane idea i have ever seen and it looks amazing
Fun fact: This is done by a software that is both 3d and open source (maintained through donations of people that want a future without greedy corporations) :)
Noggi, as a programmer I can tell you - This is INSANE!
Only GOD himself knows from where you have so, so much Patience and Dedication both of them on a Level Infinity!
I don't see a use for creating it in 3d except when you are gonna use the animation for multiple endings mechanic
FYI this technic called : 3D Cell Shading. I was research about this for my thesis on 2019. And i was predicted this is will be more efective to use in the future. Now its so popular for real big production project. ^_^
I don't know anything about using blender, but this was really entertaining to watch. The effort that you put into this video really shows. 🖤🖤
Besides being off-model, 2D can also just take a different approach to perspective, especially with faces. As you obviously noticed in the hug scene, as Chihiro's face tilts, her eyes stay looking basically the same, sort of as if the front of her face were more of a flat plane. Or a really strong example: Spy Family. In that drawing style, as the head rotates away from the camera, everything becomes skewed, almost as if squashed along a diagonal. This is especially true in the manga, but shows through in the animated version as well. Imagine trying to do that in 3D.
I think a cool approach would be having different head models for different sorts of shots. Many drawing styles would need a different head model for profile shots than face-on shots.
Wow! You showed some great techniques in a very short amount of time! Thank you!
5:45 lol cute lil easter egg
As a 3D artist I always did love 2D style I been always mixing up my 3D to look 2D … you’re channel is very inspiring keep it up :)
This is amazing, it is even hard to see the difference if you don't pay attention to small details
the hard part about modern tools on the computer VS pen/ink/ect on paper, is there is no "happy accidents"
bro this is incredible. amazing breakdown and workflow
To me, to imitate in 3d the hand made animation looked such a stupid idea, but then I kept watching and I have to say that it make sense to see the challenge and the amount of things to learn. It's at the end equally a Zen practice, so it's definitely the same.
I feel like, for me, using a basic reference model with the correct proportions, then sketching over it with 2D would be a better choice. Because then you can have your key frames, and manually interpolate with 2D sketching just like you would with actual 2D animation. I find that trying to get a 3D rig to work like a 2D character just does not work in most cases.
It really depends. Some rigs can push the character model really far
This is crazy good work not just on the art side but also in editing and presentation. Very impressive!
Holy shit you're good at painting and you speak so casually about it
Blender will never dominate the professional segment and that's a good thing
Daym that cinematography is on point! I like the scene where you put on that artist glove
Miyazaki has some very strong opinions that many of us disagree with. That doesn't mean we don't respect him and adore his films and their worlds and stories.
I personally wanted to use Blender to recreate 2D animation for my own anime projects, but I'm opting to go for traditional animation, for characters and props at least, for the reasons you stated. I loved this video, it's actually quite inspirational for someone who is making effort to do this sort of thing.
I'm still in shock over how you "projected the train car onto the 3D model"... Like, holy UVs Batman.
I like how you show all the process. I'm learning a lot from your videos. Thanks!
Not even five minutes in and im incredibly impressed by the quality of this video. Great job