Animation Trend Research
One of the most recent trends in animation is how large companies are starting to focus on stylizing their animated movies. Sony Pictures Animation has seemingly been the first to dive into this topic, as they have seemingly revolutionized stylizing animated movies. One of their most recent animated features, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, was the first of its kind to use a comic book inspired art style to pay homage to its old comic book counterparts, where its famous characters originated from.
Originating in 1962, the first Spider-Man comics had a hand-drawn look to them, containing lots of imperfections such as wobbly outlines, bleeding colors, and a few blank spots where the artists forgot to color in the image. The movie, released in 2018, mimiced this art style within a 3D environment using industry-standard software called Autodesk Maya.
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Other companies soon followed suit, developing their own unique art styles for their animated feature films in an attempt to mimic Sony's success. Companies like Disney, Mikros Animation, and DreamWorks all created their own styles and applied them to their movies in order to stand out from the crowd and become more recognizable.
Disney, for their 100-year anniversary, created Wish, which was meant to have an art style that mixed 2D and 3D together as a nod to the company's rich history in 2D animation.
Shortly before that, however, Mikros Animation created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which aimed to have a visual style that heavily resembled the concept art of the movie in order to make it look different from what was expected from an animated film.
Soon, DreamWorks will release The Wild Robot, which will also aim to have its own unique visual style, similar to one of their previous movies, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which aimed to have a painterly style that resembled a fairy-tale story.
Pixar seemingly has not yet delved into stylizing their animated movies, which is understandable considering that they develop their own in-house software, which has been designed to create animated movies that look as realistic as possible. Making drastic changes to their software to give it the ability to produce stylized animations would not only be very expensive, but it would also be incredibly time-consuming and disrupt the studio's animation pipeline quite significantly.
Disney, for their 100-year anniversary, created Wish, which was meant to have an art style that mixed 2D and 3D together as a nod to the company's rich history in 2D animation.
Shortly before that, however, Mikros Animation created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which aimed to have a visual style that heavily resembled the concept art of the movie in order to make it look different from what was expected from an animated film.
Soon, DreamWorks will release The Wild Robot, which will also aim to have its own unique visual style, similar to one of their previous movies, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which aimed to have a painterly style that resembled a fairy-tale story.
Pixar seemingly has not yet delved into stylizing their animated movies, which is understandable considering that they develop their own in-house software, which has been designed to create animated movies that look as realistic as possible. Making drastic changes to their software to give it the ability to produce stylized animations would not only be very expensive, but it would also be incredibly time-consuming and disrupt the studio's animation pipeline quite significantly.
The most common techniques that are utilized to achieve these unique styles are line art, texture painting, and adding expression lines.
With line art, most objects will receive their own outline, which makes them stand out more and have a higher contrast with the surrounding objects.
Texture painting allows an artist to directly paint the texture of an object onto the mesh itself. This gives the artist the opportunity to more easily decide where to put small details, use custom brushes to create a 2D style, make every object look their best from the camera's point of view, and paint the scene's lighting directly onto the objects and characters.
Finally, expression lines allow a character to seem more expressive, as they allow the artist to decide where to draw specific lines that help boost certain features of the character's expression.
With line art, most objects will receive their own outline, which makes them stand out more and have a higher contrast with the surrounding objects.
Texture painting allows an artist to directly paint the texture of an object onto the mesh itself. This gives the artist the opportunity to more easily decide where to put small details, use custom brushes to create a 2D style, make every object look their best from the camera's point of view, and paint the scene's lighting directly onto the objects and characters.
Finally, expression lines allow a character to seem more expressive, as they allow the artist to decide where to draw specific lines that help boost certain features of the character's expression.
As mentioned earlier, the software that is most commonly used in the industry nowadays for these kinds of animated movies is Autodesk Maya.
Originally released by Alias on February 1st, 1998, Autodesk Maya was made for the creation of 3D animations, and has been used by many large companies throughout the past few decades. Alias was later taken over by Autodesk in 2005, which still owns the rights to the software to this day.
Autodesk Maya is considered to be quite complicated by many, and often requires a thorough learning course in order to get a good understanding of the software. It also costs €2.245 annually to use, which is another reason why it is only used by professionals in the industry.
Originally released by Alias on February 1st, 1998, Autodesk Maya was made for the creation of 3D animations, and has been used by many large companies throughout the past few decades. Alias was later taken over by Autodesk in 2005, which still owns the rights to the software to this day.
Autodesk Maya is considered to be quite complicated by many, and often requires a thorough learning course in order to get a good understanding of the software. It also costs €2.245 annually to use, which is another reason why it is only used by professionals in the industry.
Recently, I have been developing my own visual style within 3D animation software as well, for which I also wanted to take a more stylized approach. I primarily use Blender, which I have over four years of experience with at this point.
The style I've been aiming for is a sketchy, hand-drawn look. I wanted to replicate human imperfections by adding sketchy pencil lines that stray from the main outline of the mesh, similar to how the human hand never moves in a perfectly linear motion.
I also used Blender's built-in Kuwahara filter in the compositor to generate a painterly-looking art style for all the image textures that I used in the scene. The Kuwahara filter simplifies everything from the camera's perspective and applies a brush stroke looking pattern that stays consistent over multiple angles, which prevents everything from suddenly snapping to a different shape every frame.
The line art that I had created using Blender's Freestyle feature does seem to flicker a bit on animated objects. There doesn't seem to be a way to fix this issue right now, but I'll try to improve upon it in some of my future projects.
The video does show off how the Kuwahara effect works; you can observe how the materials on the moving objects stay consistent and maintain a clear pattern.
The second video shows off a similar art style, but without the human imperfections.
The video does show off how the Kuwahara effect works; you can observe how the materials on the moving objects stay consistent and maintain a clear pattern.
The second video shows off a similar art style, but without the human imperfections.
Before I created my own visual style, however, I had to do research on what exactly makes a picture look hand-drawn. You can read an in-depth explanation about how I achieved this effect in my previous project, which can be accessed via this link: https://www.behance.net/gallery/193534563/Animation-Research
I'm not the only one who uses Blender to stylize their animations either; countless artists online are doing the exact same thing and are getting results that are strikingly similar to mine, likely because we used similar methods to achieve the same goals. I sometimes even take these artworks as inspiration for my own, so I can compare the differences and improve my own work.
Personally, I would say that my animation style looks the most similar to Mikros Animation's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. They're both trying to replicate a hand-drawn look, they both look imperfect, and they both use a form of sketchy line art. My art style leans a bit more towards the painterly side, compared to Mikros Animations, which aims a bit more for a fully hand-drawn art style, but if I'd ever have to choose a company where I'd have to stylize the animations' visuals as a job, I would choose this one.
