90's Anime in Blender - Tutorial

In this video I go over my process for creating digital art inspired by some of the classic anime of the 90's, let me know in the comments if you're interested in more art style videos :)
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BLENDER ANIME/NPR MASTER PACK:

FREE FILM & VHS OVERLAYS:

SOCIALS:

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:35 Composition & Setup in Blender
11:16 Parallax & Movement
14:26 2D & 3D Assets
15:45 Colour, Linework & Post effects
22:34 Frame Rate

Music:
Esprit - Summer Night
Kenji Kawai - Patlabor 2 - Unnatural City I & II (1 hour)

All rights reserved to their respective owners
©1988, 2017. Akira Committee

[JanScottFrazier]

Thank you for making this! I am new to Blender (2 months) but worked in the anime industry in Japan in the 90s, including at Production IG for Ghost in the Shell, Blood the Last Vampire, etc. Your video helps me think about using my new tools with my old skills and techniques together. When we first shifted to digital production, the worst problem was backlighting (all those glows). There was no tool for it and it took a good deal of work to get it close to what we could do in the camera room. Even then, in camera we had to shoot the scene, run it back, change the camera so it had a light under a frosted glass pane on the camera stand, then shot cels with everything blacked out but the light areas superimposed over the original scene. It was slow and expensive and there was no preview but looked so good. Things are so much better now! :) fwiw we used to shoot everything on camera with diffusion filters, ranging from very light to heavy, and the change to digital made everything a lot sharper. Adding in scratches and VHS glitches is funny to me because we worked so very hard to make that not happen. Thanks again for this video!

[ayylmao.mp]

This feels like a part of a course that'd go for $249, incredible.

[EQuivalentTube]

Couple words on framerate:
Notice how on those old animations, different objects have different framerates! For example, the main character has 24-30 FPS, while the midground and surrounding junk might have 20 or 16. This is very important in that it points attention, highlights objects and helps to convey different materials properties.

[darksylinc]

Amazing.

Btw if someone is wondering why the 12fps train at the end looks so choppy while traditional animation typically does not, it's because it's missing line strokes to convey sense of motion (i.e. it acts as some sort of motion blur, though it's not technically blur).
These strokes are very common in manga to depict motion in still images. But they're also present in animations. Sometimes the shape gets deformed or the light leave a streak for a strong effect.

The train at the end lacked those, thus the only way to know it's moving is by looking at the animation, and since that's the only reference, at 12 fps it looks choppy.

[Vanisher]

This one going straight in my best tutorials playlist, thank you for being a part of this community

[eilonwy]

Awesome video! Stuff like this is what makes me so pumped up and excited bout doing 3D

[kickheavy]

I have these discussions about old school 80s and 90s anime all the time so this video was extremely refreshing. Not only was your thought process and breakdown very thoughtful but you also kept the 90s aesthetic going for this actual youtube video as well. The stone/granite backgrounds with the thick bevels on the graphic/text portions of the video were a nice touch! Very detailed. Along with the music and everything of course. Dope video. So thoughtful!

[anon]

90's japanese animation quality was the height of 2D animation that hasn't been seen again in 20 years. The animators during that time were masters.

[pimt.]

The moment I scream in fangirl. Can't say THANK YOU enough for sharing your talent.

[Strelokos]

So I wasn't the only one seeing this 90's imagery aesthetic. Night cities are the best so far... glowing windows at the distance make me feel isolated and surreal. This is why I consider all the 90's titles I watched being highly psychodelic

[gatinha]

Another thing that is game changer is ink bleed in strokes, mask/keyed to a grunge texture layer.
You make a parallel node to the stroke, displace it a little bit and add a bit of outer glow to it and then put a grunge texture set to screen blending mode but with It masked to the Outer glow.
It looks incredible, also a ortographic camera in some cases can really sell a 2d look

[craigbaker]

I love how big the Blender community is. I am attracted to Blender for a dozen reasons, 2D animation being a major one. I am not generally a huge fan of 'anime" though the aesthetic techniques you display here have given me a new appreciation for the now nostalgic feeling I get from the olde original traditional cel animation stuff. You have brilliantly employed some very basic techniques to evoke different emotions and I really agree with your basic premise that the original medium's constraints forced a type of discipline that then became a hallmark of the style itself that requires careful consideration to re-create using modern 3D given that options are now so exponentially expanded .
Regarding the framerate I feel it has a HUGE effect on my appreciation of what one would call"anime" The limitations and thus decisions to use as FEW frames as possible and still achieve a consistent look is key to the entire aesthetic for me. 12 fps stepped up to 24 is way preferable for me than anything too oozing silky smooth like 30ps. A main complaint I had about video vs film initially before I ever understood the effect of frame rate and the shutter speed relationship for motion was the overly creamy smoothness. 24fps is LOCKED into my skull as THE frame rate for motion picture story stuff. And the 12 fps stepped up to 24 is itself a huge part of the functional pleasing aesthetic of "anime" which, to me, has always just really meant "limited motion animation".

[mndlessdrwer]

The interesting thing about comparing traditional and 3D animated workflows is that for traditional workflows, you end up with a pretty consistent amount of workload throughout the entirety of the production process, from the pre-production storyboarding and initial character reference sheets, through to the week-to-week animation workflows. With the 3D workflow, you have a larger initial time investment in creating character models and environments, adding skeletons for animating, and determining lighting, shaders, materials, etc. So you typically end up with more initial workload that you can do before the show starts airing, and then there's less that you need to actually make during the production, so you can focus more on just animating the existing resources instead of needing to redraw vast amounts of keyframes per episode, and potentially have to repaint entire background and environmental panels multiple times to cope with changing camera perspectives. I have a lot of nostalgia for 2D hand-drawn or hand-painted animation, because it has just so much unique character to it, but I do believe that 3D animation will reach a point in the near future where it will become almost indistinguishable from it if that is the desired art direction.

[johnlucas]

I'm so glad I found this and I'm grateful that there are people like you who are into these! The anime's I've(and everyone around my age) watched during the 90s was so different from the anime that I've seen from later in 2000s to 2010's onwards.

[bowlofsoup]

Didn't even know you could recreate such a style with this blender.
Really shows the potential of 3D anime.
Keep up the great work.

[VarleyGGz]

I love how trying to copy anothers art you fall upon techniques that end up giving it your own style. I bet the more you study in this way, the more you find what feels your own.

[aaronstanley]

honestly, this video is the best explanation of why generations of animation feel so different. it's a great video that even non-animators should watch to learn and appreciate the history of anime and more generally animation as a lot of the core philosophy carries over to American animation.

[AMNEZA]

I never realized how much I needed to watch more random Blender tutorials until the last week. I've been just trying to do stuff and learn by doing, but watching tutorials makes me see that things can be way simpler if you know the goal you are trying to achieve. Thanks for this tutorial, it gave me a good slap to the back of my head, and now I am even more motivated to improve.

[niks]

Original 12FPS is very important, because pen and paper artists at that time would blend motion blur or other exaggerated deformations into each drawings(some studios did it using computers in post-production, but most old school ones like Studio Ghibli didn't) so some kind of motion downscaling/reverse interpolation would be closer to original intended art style..

[rodneyabrett]

That was pretty badass. Especially since I was born in the 70s. I really got into those 80s and 90s anime masterpieces in my early 20s. I remember collecting fuzzy VHS copies from comic conventions that were copies of a copy of a copy, but still being blown away by the artistry of them so it's pretty awesome to see a super cleaned up version in Blender! Great work!