The technique behind The Red Shoe
After I finished The Red Shoe in 2005 I wrote a short mini-tutorial of how I achieved the look of the film. I noticed I still get hits from people looking for it so I might as well put it up again with a new, shorter introduction and some expansion (and additional spelling mistakes), for your reading pleasure.
Introduction:
In 2005 I finished my first short as both animator and director. It was called The Red Shoe and was made after a script by Anton Raukola and Håkan Rudehill (which whom I would later form the animation studio Bortbyting). For the film I wanted a look somwhere between 3d and 2d, so I developed a technique using Light Wave 3d’s edges, some displacement and motionblur to produce the look of the film. Here is a short step-by-step of how it was archieved.
Step-by-step:
Make a tessellation ball (O) in Modeler, leave segment at 4. Hit tab to subdivision it. Save and send to Layout.
Give the ball a smooth white, 100% luminous surface and save it again. If you want to see what you are doing, it is advised that you set the luminosity as a 100% gradient instead.
Go to Object properties for the ball (O) and (p). Set render sub-patch level to 6. On the Deform tab, Give the ball a displacement map. Turbulence will work fine for today. A texture value of 0.01 should be ok. Set scale to 1mm on every axis. Click on the position tab and make an envelope to move the texture Y +100 meters on frame 1. Now, if you want the line work to crawl during animation, set Post behavior to linear, if you want it to be fixed to the model, set it to repeat.
Copy the texture and change Blending mode to Additive and Displacement axis to X, copy again and set displacement axis to Z. Close the Texture editor.
Now you have the basis for the line work, but you lack the actual line. Go to the object properties, Edges tab, click silouette edges and choose a color. Change the colour of the background (Window>backgroundoptions) to white. Press F9 and you should get this:
Because you havn’t enabled any motionblur yet, all you get is a bumpy ball.
One more thing before you get that nice (kind of)handdrawn render. Go to Camera properties (C) (p). Set antialiasing to atleast enhanced low, turn on dithered motionblur and press F9. In a matter of seconds you will see this:
This looks way better.
By using this technique you can sort of paint on objects by making denser geometry where you want more lines.
If your object is really dense in one place, you can use a weightmap to lower the displacement in that area to avoid the same thing.
Combining this technique with regular toonshaders give a pretty, handdrawn feeling to pictures and animation. You could also try setting the displacement (and maybe also the motionblur passes) to much higher values for a more watercolour look.