Traditional Cartoon Style 3d Animation

Traditional Cartoon Style 3D Computer Animation Nabil Nasr and Nick Higgett De Montfort University, Faculty of Art and Design, Digital Media Centre

Abstract This paper discusses an MA project concerned with the development of new techniques to allow the creation of new graphical styles for 3D animation.

Introduction Computer animation has always looked too glossy and shiny, which is why traditional cartoon specialists, such as Matt Groening have often avoided using the 3D computer graphic medium as a solution [1] Traditional animation's flexibility in terms of choice of appearance and style is appealing but in certain aspects it is very time consuming. There is therefore a need to develop techniques that exploit the speed of computer animation but provide the variety of styles of traditional animation. Traditional Animation Styles There are thousands of different styles of 2D hand drawn animations and the strength of this technique is that objects can be freely modified with ease and there is no limit to how the animation is rendered. The beauty and humanity of drawn 2D animation is the main reason why so few cartoons created today are computer animated. The technology severely limits the possible stylisation of the 'animation'. As the head of the Simpson's Creative team state "Digital is too slick and too bright – that is, too digital" [2] New Style Development The goal of this research is therefore to attempt to simulate hand drawn cartoon animation styling while incorporating traditional exaggerated cartoon movement. Low cost applications including Lightwave 3D along with Adobe Aftereffects as well as Adobe Premiere and Adobe Photoshop were chosen to develop the final style for a cartoon short featuring the adventure of an "E" key on a compute keyboard. The development of special shading techniques was identified as the key to the design solution. A unique shading method involving the use of up to 4 layers was established to give the animation its special look. See Fig. 1. This process is described and illustrated below:

Proceedings of the 20th Eurographics UK Conference (EGUK’02) 0-7695-1518-5/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE

1st Stage using - All objects are given Saturation value using the between70%-100% - All objects have a high sharp fall of

Lightwave 3D a bright colour…e.g. HSV slider has to be specular value with a e.g. A lights

Fig 1 highlight on an object is always strong. No smooth light shines can be seen any where in the animation. - All objects except for highly complex ones (the plant) have a black outline around them. - The size of the outline varies according to the distance from the camera and the importance of the objects role within a particular scene. e.g. the X key will have a more dominant outline than the monitor object. - All objects are assigned a "cell shader" plug-in that further flattens the colours on an object. - Strong contrasting shadows will be used. (Not smooth realistic ones) - All objects are smoothed by using the "phong" shading technique. 2nd stage using Photoshop - All the rendered frames then undergo a brightness and illumination boost in Photoshop. - All frames undergo a splatter filter which "bubbles" everything…making straight lines more squiggly, and hand drawn like. 3rd stage using After effects

- A bulge camera effect is added to make the whole visible frame bulge out a bit from the centre. This will round some lines within the frame. - All night time shots within the animation were rendered with bright lights and after the render was achieved the whole scene was darkened manually in Photoshop. This was essential as the Cell shader output looked very dull when rendered in Lightwave with a few lights See Fig. 2 and http://www.pocketmovies.net/detail_187.html for final results. Evaluation, Conclusions and Recommendations The final sequence was shown to both animation experts and a typical audience. Feedback indicated that the animation did not resemble any existing 3D animation and in essence a new style of animation had been created. However several people, still felt the smooth camera movements used implied the use of the digital media. Had the animation been created at 12 frames per second (instead of 25) and if static camera shots had been used, then possibly the animation would have looked less digital. The style that has been

Proceedings of the 20th Eurographics UK Conference (EGUK’02) 0-7695-1518-5/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE

Fig. 2 developed consists of up to 4 layers, Future work will include the application of a fifth layer where the outlines around the objects would be drawn manually frame by frame. This should give the whole animation a "bubble" effect and hopefully further develop the technique and help achieve the goal of a traditional hand drawn visual style 3D animation. References 1. Kaufman, D (1995), and Stepping into a new generation: US Animation Digital Ink & Paint, Animation Magazine, Vol 8 I 4, p58 (3) 2. Lasseter, J, (1994) Viewpoint, Animation magazine, Vol 7, I 14, p44