Tea Time

The pre-​​production work on the project I had to squash in between Sleep­ing Dragon is com­ing along nicely. This short film is ten­ta­tively named “Tea Time”, but that’s bound to change before the film is completed.

So far, the story is fin­ished, the sto­ry­boards are almost there and even the char­ac­ters are mostly done.

And here they are:
Rupert and Edward from Tea Time
Beau­ti­ful, the two of ‘em. Rupert and Edward, old blokes as Eng­lish as they get. I tried to get as much char­ac­ter into them as pos­si­ble with­out get­ting too car­toony, and it’ll be more clear when they’re animated.

It’s nice that I can ben­e­fit from all the research and devel­op­ment done on Sleep­ing Dragon. Although the look will dif­fer slightly from Sleep­ing Dragon, many ele­ments and espe­cially shaders can will be re-​​used in this projects. I also intend to once again use 3delight for ren­der­ing the char­ac­ters. The back­grounds will be a mix­ture of 3D ren­ders and 2D paint­ings, with the focus clearly on the painting.

Next I’ll be work­ing on the scenery, an old rail­road sta­tion were the two of them will have their lit­tle quar­rel. I’ve already tried sev­eral dif­fer­ent set­tings, but alas none of them suited the story all that well.
The solu­tion: A sur­round­ing park with lots and lots of CG trees! So I’ll be look­ing for ways to ren­der a ridicu­lous amount of trees… as quickly as I can! After all, there’s only a few weeks left ’til the deadline.

Toon shading techniques

While still toy­ing around with dif­fer­ent story ideas, I’ve spent some time on improv­ing my toon/​cel shad­ing tech­niques. At first they may look awfully clumsy and com­pli­cated because it’s a rather sim­ple thing to get a toon shaded image from just about any 3D ren­derer, nowa­days. Even pretty “ink” out­lines are no longer the prob­lem they used to be.

Yet the tech­nique I’m devel­op­ing gives the artist (in this case me!) a lot more con­trol over the look and, best of all, even major changes can eas­ily be applied long after the 3D render-​​farm has gone to sleep. Being able to setup things like color, con­trast, line thick­ness and even light­ing in post can be a huge advan­tage when you think of the alter­na­tive: Time con­sum­ing re-​​rendering!
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