Photorealistic NPR : Replicating 90's cel animation - Chris Boylan

Why, despite our best efforts, have we yet been unable to crack the code of replicating 90's style cel animation? From the light reflection of the painted cels into the camera lens, to the slight shake from the camera rig as it was suspended above the light table, the advent of high quality Blu-Ray transfers, has now more than ever, revealed the detail and quality of these great works.
Join me as I demonstrate how, using a combination of Grease Pencil, CG modeling, 2d animation, motion tracking, and the real-time compositor in Eevee, I have been able to convincingly reproduce the look and feel of 90's era 2d cel animation.

[@itsjustcavan]

having seen a lot of attempts at 3d based animation trying to mimic 2d hand drawn, i came into this with limited expectations. when i saw the final my jaw DROPPED. really well executed. bravo. cant wait to see more people try to achieve this level of fidelity when going for the look of this era.

[@zerosevenanimation]

Thanks! I really think it comes down to paying tribute and treating the initial inspiration with reverence, so I'm really glad that came across.

[@petefury94]

You should check out Worthikids' work too

[@TimDownsAnimation]

the rig and how it's animated sorta unconventionally is pulling a LOT of weight here, I think. The broken hierarchy sounds like it'd be so hard not to go "off-model." But I can definitely see how it kinda emulates drawing, which is so cool! good stuff!

[@AwwGeeZ1983]

My understanding is that when anime and video games manage to replicate a decent 3D for 2D effect, it's because they're tearing those rigs apart in every frame. Making sense in 3D space matters much less than looking like a drawing. FighterZ did it a lot.

[@10upstudios]

hand animated 2d characters are rarely perfectly on model. perfectly on model 2d animation would look exactly like 3d animation with a basic cel setup, it's inherently too precise to look human

[@MadsterV]

This was pure gold and I wish that render was longer, it's beautiful. The closeup could have fooled me easily.

[@vatti9999]

Would love a full breakdown of the character from modeling to rigging specifically how the hair is done.

[@infectioussneeze9099]

THIS

[@zerosevenanimation]

@@infectioussneeze9099 @vatti9999 I'd been considering putting together a course if there's enough interest.

[@abanana2859]

+1

[@NotSoMax]

This is incredible, I’m a 3D artist in the middle of a large personal project that has that retro 2D look so this is like a treasure trove of information, very specific things I’ve had trouble either finding or describing, great time saving tricks, I love it

[@zerosevenanimation]

Can't wait to see!

[@Tine_of_Nice_Dreams]

the music on your reel that used to play in the anime commercials before the actual show on vhs tapes sent me back in time. your love for the art of the era really shows in the details.

[@rolfathan]

2:08 That list is basically all you need for the perfect blend of 90s action anime. Do I love other anime visual styles from that time? Absolutely. But the visual style of these four just sums it up so well.

[@SeanCC]

Very cool. Another digital artist that recognizes this exact period as the pinnacle of anime aesthetics. A couple things of note, the backlit, bipak optical effects were also, essentially, created by in-camera 2D filtration. In addition to colored gels, a diffusion filter would cause the soft scattering of the light. Some possibly from old or no coating on the lens but that would do a more subtle fogging of whole frame as light bounces around all through the glass. Occasionally you'll see effects created through paint and sometimes airbrush, but these lack any punch or "light" quality. Also, ambient vibration wouldn't be a major cause of whole image, macro variance because the camera, the rig holding it and the animation stand all have very good mechanical rigidity relative to each other. Where your macro variance from frame to frame, for the whole frame, comes in is anime production using fast and simple and inexpensive transfers to video that will not have the pin-registered precision for high end post-production plates. This is simply gate weave and jitter and you can see it in literally all films shot on film and transferred to video unless there was a conscious effort through some restoration process that involved *scanning* film frames versus telecine, and having someone do a digital stabilization pass. But that's rare and modern. Their film post is sometimes so rough and fast and down to the wire that you get the very strong "bounce" at nearly every single cut in a show like Evangelion, which has some of the best animation ever created for a television series at any time, from any studio, but the show was put together with old school, film school quality splicing of pieces of film taped together and these cuts bumping during the quick, likely one-light transfer to tape master sometimes mere hours before being broadcast. And, IIRC, there is a version of the show that was put out in HD where they went through and did a stabilization process to the show. And it looks wrong. I won't watch it because the jitter and bumps at splices are part of the aesthetic for the original show. But really cool. I love this stuff.

[@zerosevenanimation]

Yeah I actually learned about gate weave and splicing during the conference! I was talking with a live action filmmaker about my observations and he mentioned the splicing at the front end of each shot, so the fact that you knew about that already is pretty dope. (I hadn't known until after my presentation!) Thanks for your comments!

[@ShmoopDooper]

I loved Pantheon, it was amazing! Never hear people mention it but it's one of my favorites from the past few years.

[@zachhoy]

what a masterful pipeline, really incredible results!

[@fisrtnamelastname3083]

Wow! It looks amazing!

[@MrUndetermined]

bro you worked on pantheon!!! im listening

[@NicoleHam]

commenting to remember to watch this over and over and over again. You've touched on so many specific points I want to explore with npr, specifically your approach to the brush strokes and the natural 'handdrawn' jitter. Sometimes it looks too much like temporal noise, other times the style of jitter has that 'uniform line' blob or it looks too straight / generic cel shaded 3d to me. Your style of doing it captures EXACTLY what I think -- that nailing the style needs the individual frames to look organic, not exactly the model itself. I also really love how you approached that color. The 'imperfect' noise on the edges lets the color dance around behind the lines a bit like a real animated cel sequence would. Cel animation takes so much work, prep and precision, and yet still human error exists, so theres the natural 'tropes' of cel animation wiggle and paint errors.. I've honestly never thought of thinking of stylizing my colors that way, BRILLIANT dude SO cool

[@thelaw3536]

This was actually really good. Especially the bloom animation

[@Gobolinn]

bravo on pantheon very underrated series

[@ahmedabz5761]

Excellent work 👏 thank you for sharing with us

[@AutodidactAnimotions]

Hi Thank you for this video!! I loved Pantheon and was thrilled to recently find the second season after being told previously it would never be released. I have recently become very interested in 2D & NPR animation rendering and have developed a few methods to get the look I want in Blender.

[@100HourSave]

super cool, very inspiring

[@fricod4396]

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing!

[@queekchan]

this is really cool!

[@pn4960]

Wow, thank you this is amazing

[@SwaagMan]

Excellent video

[@macks033]

damn haven't heard that song since I was renting anime from the video store in the 90s

[@locustslacker6614]

Super valuable information

[@Igorooooleynikov]

It is very insightful! Kinda took all this visual mistakes for granted. Although final result is t really pulling off that old animation feel. Maybe it is KZbin colour compression but I feel there is not enough value gradation between bg and character. And in the second cut perspective is too perfect, combined with how hands are drawn, cut overall gives feel of webgen animation. Still it is great result, I'm amazed at how one person could have so much skills.

[@manashieldmedia]

thank you for this!

[@reddaneali5997]

Well done 👍

[@sami444L]

I love this and i love pantheon

[@lucianomunoz]

Thats nice!

[@sharp_swf]

Chris!!! Awesome

[@indigowolf8712]

Involuntarily exclaimed, "holy shit!". music was too loud though...

[@kenzietownsend6644]

90's anime forever. :D I'm not biased or anything.

[@Unyield-nh3el]

very cool !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@anaxe4370]

so dope

[@zerosevenanimation]

Thank you!

[@virgilhawkins3390]

I can;t find that website he was talking about at @11:10 - does anyone know where to get a hold of that color order chart?

[@Texian]

I was gonna ask the same thing. Searching with Google, Kagi, and asking ChatGPT turned up nothing relevant.

[@AwwGeeZ1983]

Yeah this is driving me insane.

[@penguino118]

The narration is kinda misleading, the color chart shown in the slide isn't an actual sheet used by animators but a recreation by 玉英 (Yuying?) based on real color sheets and data which got archived by an user called ねこまたやさん (Nekomataya) on their website. What he means by the setteidreams mention is that you can find what colors the Gundam model sheets used by their written color codes, which are part of the recreated chart (like all of the 90s gundam sheets are black and white photocopies, so a real color chart sample scan from a collection would probably be useless anyways). I managed to find the chart by screenshotting and cropping it off the video and reverse searching. I can't post the source site's link or even allude to it because KZbin's safety team is composed of babies and crappy AIs so they just remove or hide my comment, but it should be somewhat easy to find through the reverse image search.

[@AwwGeeZ1983]

@@penguino118 The word "settei" was throwing me, I kept hearing "sentai dreams." Clarification hugely appreciated. And still a really good resource, looks like.

[@zerosevenanimation]

@@penguino118 This is actually incorrect, but I can't link to any of the twitter threads where I found the original posts. My comments keep getting moderated/deleted.

[@sebbosebbo9794]

my next weekend is a marathon ....

[@wstyles]

What was the anime motorcycle clip that is shown before the Gundam example?

[@unitzer07]

Venus Wars

[@PlinaZ]

Does anyone know how he achieved the hair flipping effect?

[@asdfghjk7231]

Blender?

[@jeremybiggs8413]

What’s this guys KZbin / Twitter? They placed a video of him over those details…

[@zerosevenanimation]

My comments are being suppressed, but I'm the guy.

[@Uhfgood]

Why not do this completely in blender grease pencil?

[@zerosevenanimation]

Grease pencil still doesn't feel the same to me as drawing. Also the texture brushes I want to replicate pencil lines don't have the same quality. I'm going to try a different approach with my next big project. But I won't be embarking on that till well after Grease Pencil 2 and Eevee Next are released.

[@Uhfgood]

@@zerosevenanimation - I think you could configure it so it would do what you want, but I was just curious, why OP didn't.

[@zerosevenanimation]

@@Uhfgood Right, as the OP I was answering your question.

[@Uhfgood]

@@zerosevenanimation - Your name wasn't highlighted, and I forgot it was on CG Cookie -- so I thought you were someone else who was answering me.

[@zerosevenanimation]

@@Uhfgood no worries!

[@user-ur3zk3no8s]

CBB

[@droid806]

Thanks for sharing! Small details: there a strange artifact on the shoulder greenish color and overall all the suit, It's kind of distracting. Again thanks for sharing this is amazing

[@TreyPDB]

you sound like FitMC

[@RayRay-uw6ms]

i duno, the final result looks like a cheap flash animation, doesn't remind me of classic anime at all

[@tocide]

Well it's not just the effects of what makes it look like a cel animation is what makes it look 90s, it's also the way you draw the line art, or color the cel, the way you animate and sequence each movements and frames, what changes it is that it was captured from film and also when it reaches masses it kind of just gets compressed and looks more low quality than it already is. Some are very soft looking, some are paper grainy with textures of all kinds like film, pencil, brush, pens, and some gets a tint/color balancing that wasn't even on the original which is the case for sailor moon

[@abanana2859]

Go check your eyes man

[@miwiarts]

NPR stands for "Non-PhotoRealism". So saying "photorealistic NPR" is a bit of a contradiction lol

[@rensou82]

I don't know why people the do "choppy" animation for 3d movies these days trying to mimic old animes. Movies back there were we'll made, lots os frames. Then became cheap and got worse around 2000. If you want to mimic something, pick the best not the mediocre ones.

[@NextToToddliness]

Looks like crap.

[@SimGunther]

Which thing? The final demo? The thumbnail? The entirety of animation before (current year)? Help us out, buddy...

[@naiknaik8812]

Lmao

[@Marco-tv6wc]

I don't get it, you just rotoscoped a 3D animation and turned it 2D. What's the point, then? Why not just work in 2D from the start? Why waste time creating a shader, and a character and all that, if you're not going to use it. Maybe I didn't understand this properly, but this isn't a blender animation that replicates an anime look through clever shaders or render engines or whatnot, it's just a 2D Animation (that has not even been made in blender with grease pencil) traced over an unnecessarily complex 3D animation. It's not hybrid if the 3D animation is hidden underneath and was just used as a reference, the "Arcane" show is an example of hybrid animation, this isn't.

[@zerosevenanimation]

From boards to final comp was 10 working days at ~4 hrs per day. This is immensely faster/more efficient than even today's fully 2d digital workflows. Having the CG model as a base gives me the flexibility to draw final, on model lineart, right from the start at a breakneck speed with high consistency through the entire shot. It's a no brainer for me.

[@chrisjansen1943]

I dont see a single photorealistic thing here. I dont think you know what that is.

[@zerosevenanimation]

I used PBR to emulate the acetate material, as well as the painted backgrounds and the color fill/lines that are mapped onto each transparent cel. The final comp is shot in camera using a lighting setup that mimics studio lighting and the glow effects are done with a double exposure method in the compositor.

[@chrisjansen1943]

@@zerosevenanimation None of which describes what photorealism is

[@SeanCC]

@@chrisjansen1943 you have a limited idea what that term even means is the problem. Not all photos are of life or the world or of living things. This is recreating how a thing like cel animation is perceived which is photography and much of this is due to the fact of it being photographed. It is just a different kind of photorealism.

[@chrisjansen1943]

@@SeanCC No, what I have is a specific term. The correct term. And what you described is not what I'm saying photorealism is. Photorealism means that it is indistinguishable (within reason) from real life. That is not what this is.

[@Mtaalas]

You love 90's animation exactly BECAUSE it wasn't made with 3D CGI. It was full of hand painted, real CELLS and that's what gives it that look and feel. It's ART and needs huge amount of mastery, time and effort to do. You start making it in blender or other 3d software or let alone with (*throws up*) generative AI...you lose everything that makes that style great. People just need to sit down and start drawing more by hand. Bring back hand animating on real cells! And if you do all that effort anyway to replicate the look in such a minute detail... it's basically taking as much time and effort as just drawing it by hand. So why not just do it by hand?

[@zerosevenanimation]

1) Supplies for traditional processes don't exist anymore. 2) Buying physical cels and paint would be extremely cost prohibitive. 3) 12 seconds of finished animation from boards to final colors still takes dozens of people weeks, if not close to a month to turn around(even with the use of modern technology...) I finished this piece in 10 working days, averaging 4-6 hours on the box per day. By abiding by a strict method, the visuals feel more authentic than if you had just applied a filter to the footage using post effects. In the end, CG is just a tool to help an artist execute their vision more efficiently. The results speak for themselves.

[@SeanCC]

@@zerosevenanimation this. There are so many 3D animated series now and most of the ones that do conventional shading are just boring but an aesthetic like this would make them far more enjoyable, IMO. Cartoons with realistic shading are just one aesthetic and thankfully we have all kinds of looks now thanks to various efforts to lend 2D graphics stylization to 3D animation, whether that's the kind of thing something like the Spider-Verse films do, or TMNT or Mitchells vs The Machines, Arcane, Dragon Prince or RWBY. Photorealism and physically based looks can be boring if that's the whole basis for a look, generally. Worse if you don't have the budget to really hit it in every way. If you don't, then clever stylization can elevate work. But this takes an artist's eye to identify all the things you're recognizing, where the lesser operator would just slap on some plug-ins and call it a day.

[@deadby15]

AI will be way better than humans at everything.

[@Darius_Vi]

1:43 oh how I hate this 4 frames per second nonsense!!!🤢🤮😡😖

[@professorc-dawgscastle8591]

Ok

[@SogonD.Zunatsu]

3d imitating 2d is a fool's errand. Want to do 2d? Learn to draw. Otherwise you'd best try and leverage the stuff 3d is good at instead.

[@LOC-Ness]

takes like this are more anti-art than whatever boogeyman you're shadowboxing

[@SogonD.Zunatsu]

@@LOC-Ness 3D trying to imitate 2d is literally ANTI 2d art. Lol. Walk along.

[@Ozzianman]

No, not really. It is a style within 3D art and there are way better examples of 3D imitating 2D. The games Hi-Fi Rush and Guilty Gear Xrd/Strive comes to mind. Spiderverse comes to mind as a very good animated movie with a mix of 2D and 3D elements to create a style that is otherwise not achievable in pure 2D. 3D and 2D are both good and I don't mind the two being mixed together based on stylistic and/or practical decisions.

[@SogonD.Zunatsu]

@@Ozzianman These exemples you gave look good enough.. for being video games. No one would be fooled or accept them if they were anime.

[@Ozzianman]

@@SogonD.Zunatsu And that is not my point. My point is that the idea of 3D looking like 2D being anti-art is anti-art by itself. You probably didn't catch my edit which added Spiderverse as an example of good animation blending 3D and 2D.