Recreating Classic 2D Effects by Simulating Them in 3D

TY @_ODDEEO_ for the example animation cells!

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[unitzer]

Just wanted to note, with the deprecation of support for Eevee's bloom feature, you can still achieve this effect. You just have to use the Glare node in the compositor set to "fog glow" and then add the effect back on to your comp.

[angledcoathanger]

Building parts of a physical animation studio in 3d animation software has got to be the most meta thing I've ever heard of

[RubberRoss]

This is a fun way of doing this. Combined with Grease Pencil in Blender this could look neat.

[Fever_Dream]

This is basically how a lot of modern 2D platformers render themselves in engine! Hollow Knight and Shovel Knight for example are both games that technically run on a 3D engine, but with multiple overlapping 2D planes, to achieve a parallax scrolling effect.

[BobTheTacocat]

Regarding the end - realizing that I could "sketch in Blender" where I make a rudimentary setup of the scene in Blender, then cover over it with 2D, is maybe one of the most important things I've learned to do as a creative, I think. The fact that you can decide on a perspective and then immediately change that perspective to get a better feel is pretty huge
I think I'm overall still a beginner at Blender, I've made very few things and I have a long way to go and I want to get better at it because you can express a lot in 3D, but as a beginner I would also recommend leaning the basic of Blender to anybody, including 2D artists

[CheapFlashyLoris]

Blender novice here—Do you have any advice for how to process the feelings of guilt after sacrificing the default cube? I've tried telling myself it's what the cube would have wanted but it hasn't worked for me. Any tips would be helpful, thanks!

[JayTheDevGuy]

Blender being used for things like this is truly one of my favorite things to watch. When art tries to pass and vintage or retro without paying attention to the tiny artifacts created from old production pipelines, I think most people can feel the difference, whether they're aware of these details or not. Going the extra mile to have the light actually come from a strong light source leaking out of a masked background made all your examples look so authentic! I would love to play around with this.

Artists like you posting discoveries like this really elevate Blender from an open source program to a open source artistic community, thank you.

[Kevroa]

Damn that bloom looked really good. Somehow it never really occurred to me that you could just recreate some practical effects like that

[MaxwellNichols]

this is rad, the multiplane/2.5d effect feels way better in blender than just doing it in after effects. feels like you're filming a real model. love that authentic artificiality

[xguitarist_]

For emissive effects like at 1:44 I’m pretty sure you can just straight up use the emissive material with grease pencil strokes, so you can just hand draw your 2d animation effects in blender without having to jump between programs

[GeneralEverywhen]

Okay but like… This could be something truly transformative. I’m no coder, but there’s DEFINITELY a potential pipeline for turning a digital animation output into a transparency-enabled video file of some kind. From there, you could place it into a 3D rendering software, adjust its properties to match that of a drawn animation cell, light it as it would have been lit, then run it at a pre-set framerate and “record” it using the 3D rendering camera. Throw in some advanced caustics, refraction, and other light-transport rendering techniques to approximate the other idiosyncrasies of the old animation recording process, and you could more or less *bottle in code* the entire process of 2D classical animation. Replicating the effect at a near mathematically perfect level. And allowing for the “lost style” of old-school 2D animation to be replicated through completely digital means.

With enough programmers and enough will, you could re-de-revolutionize 2D animation in nothing more than a handful of config files, and a single executable.

[TheDefinetlyIgnorant]

Truly wild coincidence but I know EXACTLY where that skybox for the daylight scene was taken! I have been there a couple times to walk down to the bay thats below it, but its just a random bit of mountainside in Cape Town. Shot out out of my seat in surprise when I saw it haha

[ekki]

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." - Brian Eno

[emperorsmash]

As an animator whos been trying to also recreate the look of old back lit animation bloom I gotta say this is a genius approach

[thesoupbird]

Every time I see a video like this I'm shocked by how versatile blender is! I need to try this myself

[confuseatronica]

what if when you die, you wake up in another place along with all the default cubes you killed in your life

[Hersatz]

Love that more and more 2D artists uses the benefits of a 3D software.
We shouldn't limit ourselves to one medium. Arcane and Spiderverse showed us just how much quality we can get out of mix and mashing both 2D and 3D to create splendid results.

[bigscheesy]

Maaan, i literally talk all the time about how bloom from cel animation looks amazing because it is capture in camera and how modern digital 2d compositing often doesnt look as good. I need to try this now this is awesome.

[markvn]

In general, modern anime use after effects for much of their "撮影" processing, including these kind of light effects (like the T-光 effect shown here) and multiplane, 3d multiplane is a built-in feature of AE iirc and there are a lot of anime-specific plugins that are industry-used. Blender could be used for such a purpose but if you have the option to, definitely give AE a try since much of the support for these kind of 2d effects are centralized there.

[Wanderer_of_Sol]

I saw this blowing up on twitter the other day and really wish I had a project I could use it on. Also really cool other projects and ideas you've got going on here. I feel like 2D, traditional animation inspired and paper craft like effects are really overlooked in blender considering how easy they are to pull off.