We decided to watch the new movies hoping that would serve as a good digest for Evangelion. Suddenly, I found myself getting excited for Eva again. When I was a teenager I was inspired by the Christian-laden mythology and the psychobabble. After watching Evangelion 1.11 I’m more impressed with how they rebuilt the movie’s imagery. After watching so much anime it hadn’t really hit me just how far toon-shaded rendering had come. I could easily tell that vehicles, buildings were redone as full-on 3D models but they were well integrated with the hand-drawn characters. What solidified that mind-blowing-away-ness was watching The Rebuild of Evangelion featurette. It went through how they reconstructed Tokyo-3′s buildings as 3D models and the layers of effects they put over it to achieve the images in the film.

And I thought, “I’m an engineer. I’m an artist. I can do that.”

Just to give you an idea of what’s inspiring me, here’s some screencaps from Evangelion. First up is Tokyo-3. Those skyscrapers are 3D and the houses in front are painted:

Below is one of Tokyo-3′s buildings as it’s rising out of the Geofront. The staircase for the overhead walkway, the rail guard, and trees are painted. The building is created in 3D and toon-shaded. You can see this scene in Rebuild of Evangelion as they go through the different processes of making this scene. It starts out with some crude drawings of a tree with the 3D elements behind it and then gets refined and various filters and effects are used to create the sunset scene.

I’m not sure how much CG is in this shot (I think the Angel in the upper right is CG but most of this shot looks painted), but it is quite an epic view of Tokyo-3:

As an artist, I’ve shied away from doing 3D and mixing it with my hand drawn work. I have this mental block that says, “It’s cool, but it’s cheating.” I’ve seen plenty of brilliant artists on DeviantArt who have the skills to create amazing art without having to resort to it. I vowed to myself unconsciously that I would never cheat, but now that I’ve seen the Rebuild of Evangelion it’s removed that block from my mind. It’s not cheating to me anymore. I decided I wanted to make cinematic, cel-shaded looking artwork and with that I started exploring my old friend, Blender.

Blender has gone through a great deal of changes since I last used it back in January of 2008. For instance the entire UI has changed. I had long forgotten everything I knew about modeling and rendering with Blender so it wasn’t an issue. I downloaded the latest stable build and got to work learning the ins-and-outs of this new beast.

Without further ado, this is the final rendering at 1920×1080:

I did this as a request for a Deviant Art member. It wasn’t enough for me to just draw his character. I didn’t want another free floating character without a backdrop. I wanted a cinematic look. I wanted a detailed background, toon-rendered, and bigger than life. I drew his character from the position of a camera looking down at her and to reinforce that perspective I decided to create a city to match. I deliberated on how I would approach this for a few days and then decided to go into Blender and just start modeling rudimentary block buildings and came out with this:

I superimposed my finished version of the girl, her name is Superhawke, over top of the first rendering and it served as a crude prototype. From there I built a better city and pulled the camera back to make it appear that she was higher up and floating in the sky above 50 story skyscrapers. The buildings are still fairly low-poly. I used some of Evangelion’s rebuild of Tokyo-3 as a benchmark for various details. I put simple air-conditioning units and water towers on the rooftops to give them more life. I placed some crude trees which were there to show scale and color so I could paint over them in Photoshop later.

This is the final version of that city as it was rendered:

While I was constructing this city I had begun doing various rendering tests to get down the toon shading.  The first test I did was just to use Blender’s edge rendering with the toon shaded materials. What happens is that some of the lines don’t show up and if you render it to small the lines are thick. I’d have to go into Photoshop and up the levels until the lines were dark enough and I didn’t want to do that since the color would be ruined. The thick lines, bleck. Do not want. I wanted the right colors and sharp, thin lines where I expected them to be. To get thin lines what you need to do is to render out at least 200% larger than your final resolution (which is 1920×1080 for me). In Photoshop I could then resize the image and get my crisp lines. Still, some of the thinner lines don’t show up. I decided the best way would be if I could separate out the line rendering and shading so I could manipulate the lines to darken them and composite everything together.

Well, Blender has a means of doing that when it finishes the rendering, it’s called (wait for it) the compositor. You can basically add nodes and string them together to manipulate the rendered images and layer them together. You can try and combine nodes to create all sorts of effects. To do this you need different render layers. So, one layer had my AC Units with the shadeless materials so I could get the the black lines on a white background. The only rendering options I set on this layer was to do edges. The edge rendering was set to 100. The second layer was my toon shaded version and it had all of the default rendering options checked. To get darker lines I used the RGB curve on the line render layer and increased the levels until the lines showed up and then Blender composites the toon-shaded layer to it using an Overlay mix node.

Here is a line shading test with shadows:

Here’s the blender compositor node setup I used:

click to enlarge

This is the final rendering with both the toon render layer and the lines:

So far so good. I figured out a decent way of doing the rendering. Here’s the problem: with my city scene doing the compositing in Blender is going to be a pain in the ass. Basically it means duplicating the geometry and there’s already a lot of geometry for the city. This is what my blender file looks like from the camera’s POV:

Doubling that geo to do both layers would tax my machine. I attempted it anyway and it only caused Blender to up and crash during the rendering phase after all that trouble. So it was back to the alternative way: render out the individual scenes for line rendering and the toon shading and composite them in Photoshop. Here’s a grayscale version of the buildings with the lines as composited in Photoshop:

Once I had all of this going there were a few other tests I wanted to try. I wanted to see if I could reflect the sky in some of the buildings but building a skybox, while that was easy, didn’t provide good results. It’s something I still need to explore. I thought of environment maps, but I’m still shaky on how they work in Blender. I even played with ambient occlusion and got this rendering:

I thought of compositing that with my final image, but the AO just doesn’t fit. I wanted cel-shaded coloring and it would make it look too shaded.

One more note, I also tried a version of Blender 2.5 with Freestyle integrated. Freestyle is a Google Summer of Code project to do toon rendering. I thought it would be a boon and solve all my problems. Certainly there are scripts in there that do an amazing job. I found one with the right line thickness and decent enough shading, but alas, it didn’t work out. Everytime I tried to render my city at 200% the resolution it would crash Blender. I tried the parametric line rendering but it didn’t work either. Of course this version of Blender 2.5 is an experimental one, so it’ll be a bit before it’s working well. I thought of going back to an older version of Blender with Freestyle as well, but honestly, it’s a different UI, and I’m not interested in learning it. So this approach was the best way and something I intend to explore further.

As for my friend…we watched Evangelion 1.11 and 2.22 and it left him brimming with questions and no resolution so I picked up the Evangelion TV series and we rewatched that. All I can say is, he’s seen it all now except for End of Evangelion which we’ll watch sooner or later. Those last two episodes of the TV show…painful, utterly painful to watch for me nowadays. Of course, Eva’s probably not best marathoned straight through. Back when I was in high school we did that to a friend. When he watched the last episode he turned to us and said, “I’m never watching anime again.”

I used to do this thing on Paradiseworld.net where I would post a new sketch everyday and then write something about it, or just write something in general. I don’t draw everyday anymore and I’m looking for more finished projects, but I made this great painting for my brother as a belated Christmas gift (my gifts are all belated). I was so glad with the results I thought I would post the image to both my sites and my DA page. So this is a re-print from Paradiseworld.net of how I put the image together, but you can read that after you look at the image itself. It’s safe for work, but…if you consider youself to be a paragon of virtue and good taste, well, I don’t apologize, and no, you can’t unsee it. Another note, if you click on it, it will open to 1920×1200 pixels. Enjoy!

From Paradiseworld.net:

Happy New Year!

No, putting this painting up doesn’t signify that I will be updating with new daily sketches, but, it is a new painting. I did this for my brother, the GrimbySlayer, as a Christmas gift. What better gift to give than Catherine with handcuffs and a suggestive candy cane.

In my nearly 18 month absence from updating this website, I have been drawing and gradually making improvements. Most of those improvements are in art technique and not so much so in my portrayal of the fairer sex, but we all have our vices, don’t we? This image for instance, started out as a grayscale image so I could get the range of values correct without worrying about color and texturing. I spent a lot of time getting the values, proportions, and balancing right of the girl (Catherine). Adding color was simple. I just overlayed the color on a separate layer. I had to figure out how to blend it in Photoshop but it wasn’t too difficult. I ended up using a layer setting called “vivid light” and then adjusting the color using the sliders in the hue&saturation dialog until they were what I wanted. A nice side effect of this process is that I can change the color to whatever I want without screwing up the shading.

The hair has a totally different process. I did do a grayscale version of her hair but I hated it. I redid it a couple of times and I found making a grayscale image and then trying to overlay colors looks like ass. It looks like ass because the edges of her hair are individual strands and that’s hard to cut that precisely to overlay color. So instead, I made a blonde palette for her locks and created a hair brush which is a just a couple of dots that streak and fade out with pen pressure. With that I was able to give her hair that layered subsurface-scattering kinda look.

The candy cane I will admit looks like utter shit.

All the leather that she’s wearing I’m quite pleased with (aside from the obvious reason). Next to the glossy looking shading I gave it I also added a layer of texture — something I’ve been wanting to try and do and this image gave me my first chance at it. I don’t think it looks great, but it’ll improve with time. Her stockings also have a layer of texture giving it a fishnet look (and making her look trampier).

The handcuffs turned out really well. I started out with an image I found on google of a pair of handcuffs. They did not look like that. Rather the cuffs were displayed almost flat so I could get a pretty good front  view of them. I used the vector tool in Photoshop and traced the outline of the cuffs and made the two parts: the clasp and the main half ring thing that connects to the other cuff. I took those vector outlines and skewed and distorted them until I got something with a bit of perspective. I shaded them to look like chrome. So really super bright for the parts facing the light source.

Oh, you may find some inconsistencies with the lightning. Yeah…I’m working on that, but I feel that overall it’s not terrible. Though not great.

I like the way the bean bag/sack of toys looks. I don’t know what’s in that sack. You might imagine that it should have some corners protruding since its supposed to contain presents. To achieve the look I got a texture of crushed velvet, desaturated it, and turned it into a photoshop brush with some scattering effects and alpha and then I just sloppily drew over the nicely rendered image of it on a separate layer to give it a textured look.

Overall I liked this workflow the best and I like the detail that painting it gives me. I’ve tried to ink and color my work, but I’m not a big fan of lines. I am learning to do more inking with various japanese pen brushes and super thin pigment liners, and it’s looking good, but I like the fully painted and rendered look. I think that suits me best. Just to prove I am still drawing you can see my drawings here on DeviantArt:

http://albinogrimby.deviantart.com/

I also don’t post too much to Paradiseworld anymore, because I have a new blog at

www.cournesupremacy.comcar hire bulgaria

Yeah, I don’t have another better reason for posting there versus here. I guess one better reason is that I’m tired of maintaining the backend of Paradiseworld and the PHP scripting I did for it, I’d rather just use wordpress and have a blog without all the hassle. Plus Paradiseworld’s format is more restrictive based on how I built the website. It’s about drawing on a daily basis and putting those works front and center. I don’t sketch everyday anymore and instead I’ve turned my eye towards more finished projects. The Courne Supremacy is an outet for me to document those changes.

I admit the shadows aren’t correct, but I only half-heartedly shaded it in since the real test was to actually build the room itself using a perspective grid, which I thought was a success. The room’s nothing spectacular, but hey, I’m learning how to do it, and I’ll show you how I did this in a nutshell. This image started with a perspective grid I put together in Adobe Illustrator. It looks like this:

Can you see the space that the “living room” picture is sitting in? We’re looking inside of a 12ft. by 12ft. cube. I didn’t bother to build the grid for the back wall or the front wall (the one closest to us). I figure when I print this grid out to draw over, I’ll be able to use a T-Square and draw whatever lines I need to help me identify locations on the back wall grid.

Take the grid, lay it down on a flat surface and draw whatever it was you were going to draw with it. Carefully using light lines, a T-square, a triangle, and some rulers, you can figure out where things are relative to one another in the grid-space. Say each block is one square foot, then a sofa could be 2 ft x 3 ft. and sit in the center of the room. You’d know where to place the TV. If you needed to subdivide the space a little more, using a blue pencil and your rulers could help you do just that. And in the end you’ll have something that might resemble this:

Now you can scan this image back into the computer and using your favorite graphics program, take out the blue and after some clean up you’re left with the image up above.

How do I make this fancy-smancy perspective grid?

So, obviously, if you want to draw something with a low horizon (low angle) or draw a two-point perspective image (a cube seen on the side), then this grid is totally useless to you. Don’t despair you can make your own. If you have Adobe Illustrator CS (and really any version will probably do. If you like using Flash or some freeware vector tools, you can still put a grid together. I’m going to assume that you have some ability with Illustrator so when I say things like “smart guides” you know what that means. I also assume that you know some geometry, since doing perspective (to me) is a very mathematical thing, that’s the terminology I’ll use to describe it.

The first thing to do, is on a layer, place the horizon line and then make a line perpendicular to it anywhere along the horizon line. The point at the intersection of these two lines is your vanishing point. This is the point where all the lines will shoot out from. For the sake of this demo the vanishing point is made larger with the red dot.

The next step you’ll want to subdivide your space vertically by drawing lines. To help me (what’s not pictured) is that I used Illustrator’s rulers to determine the spacing. Nothing special in this case, each line is just 2 units apart. So my grid will be six blocks wide. It looks like so:

Using these vertical lines and Illustrator’s smart guides you can easily pinpoint the start and end point of your line segments. Draw from the vanishing point to each point where the red lines intersect the lower dark line. Hopefully, you put the red lines on a separate layer, right? And colored them red? This way you can use those vertical lines as a reference guide and hide them when they’re no longer needed — or just plain out delete them to remove clutter.

With the cutter removed, now I can start drawing the horizontal lines that complete a floor grid. Start by drawing horizontal lines that define the boundaries of where the grid lies — this way you can find out how deep you want the grid to be. Once you have those lines laid out you have a trapezoid, or a grid plane in perspective. How do you know you’re square? Lay down a diagonal from one corner of the square to it’s opposite. Now you’re square. Maybe your perspective square looks narrow, or too fat, you can adjust that by manipulating the lines. Once you’re happy with everything, and it’s all nicely spaced you can start to form the grid squares. At every point where the diagonal you created crosses one of the lines going back to the vanishing point you can draw a horizontal line, and you’ll quickly have a 6×6 grid. Want more? Draw more vertical partitions.

Do you want walls? You can use the same procedure above to build them. On a separate layer make horizontal lines just like you did the vertical lines. Now the horizontal lines and vertical lines should together make a square 2D grid if you were to view them together. For the sake of clarity I haven’t included them so you can see what the spaced horizontal lines would look like. They’re all lined up with the bottom of the grid, that is considering that that is the edge of the room — where the wall closest to you is.

Now just follow the same pattern. Draw lines to the vanishing point and draw vertical lines that meet where the horizontal lines of the floor meet the wall. Do the same for the ceiling and other wall (or whatever else you need) and you’re done. I then colored my grid all a “non-photo” blue (really just a blue that didn’t show up in the blue layer in Photoshop), and printed it out — of course, after some clean up with the lines to make the grid more finished looking. Draw over it and scan it back in, remove the lines and you’re in business. So why go through all the trouble of doing a proper perspective grid? I like/want to invent realistic looking scenes where things are placed relative to one another, the best way is to get your perspective right and a grid helps. Not only that, a grid cuts down on the time it takes for you to figure out where everything goes in a 3D scene. You won’t have to second guess because you can draw the floor plans on the sides and reference them as you draw.

One experiment I want to try next with this method is to freehand draw a perspective scene and then take it into Illustrator and figure out all the correct perspective lines based on my freeform drawing, print out the corresponding perspective grid and get to work drawing a final image over it. Whenever I get a chance to do it, I’ll post it.

Of, if you just want to get started drawing with a perspective grid here’s a larger version of the one I made for myself.

Perspective Grid Large

You can print it out and start drawing perspective, like, right now!

Happy drawing!

So…here’s the final drawing (click to see the whole thing):

Now, here’s how I put that drawing together…

The first step I did was to draw a “thumbnail.” Not quite a thumbnail. Thumbnails are supposed to be pretty small and quickly drawn. This is definitely not that. It took maybe an hour using measurements from a T-square and a straight edge for all the perspective and then some time to fill in all the fuzzy looking organic trees and shrubs. It’s not perfect either, but it’s ready for greater things.

I actually went out of my way to use Illustrator and cook up a sheet that had two 16×9 frames. These two 16×9 frames fit nicely on a 8.5×11 in sheet of paper, and I can print them out and use them for whatever I need. By the way, that frame is obviously not 16 in. by 9 in., but the ratio is 16:9 like a cinematic widescreen camera view. I didn’t want them too small because I wanted to add a considerable amount of detail and do perspective work. I didn’t have any smaller thumbnail drawings for this sketch, just this one. You’re probably thinking that I don’t really need something like that. Well, I’m a bit OCD when it comes to doing (perspective) drawings, so I like to know the box is 16×9 and where the frame is. I used to not draw with a frame at all. I would just draw onto a sheet of paper, so everything seemed to float in space without any solid ground. I’d throw it in at the last minute just to give characters something to stand on. I’ve seen storyboard and layout pages where there are printed tick marks or actual boxes for drawings to go into. It’s a good way to stay consistent, and to know “art goes here” in the box, and everywhere else is where art doesn’t go.

I scanned the above sheet into my computer. There’s a couple of tricks going on here. One is that I drew the entire drawing with a blue pencil. It’s an animator’s thing, and I’ve seen other artists do it, but the idea is that you draw your sketch in blue, and then you can go over it with a pencil or ink and get a final drawing. Scan into the computer, and take the blue out, and you’ve got a good, relatively clean drawing that can be further refined and painted digitally. The second trick has to do with the printer…

In the image above, on the left you see the smaller version of the drawing I put together. After scanning it in, I scaled it up in Photoshop until just the top 16×9 frame fit on one sheet of regular sized paper. I printed that out. Now I have a blown up drawing that I can make a more final rendering of. A nifty thing about having a color printer is that you can preserve the blue lines. That means when I scan the drawing in again after making my final rendering over it, I can remove the blue and get my picture. Also you’ll see on the blown up drawing, I’ve added in two figures walking (or they should look like they’re walking, but that’s another issue). BTW, if you’re curious about CMYK vs. RGB…doesn’t seem to matter. Printers print in CMYK color space, if you didn’t know, but I didn’t bother to make a conversion from RGB to CYMK. It prints out just fine and when I draw over the blown up image and re-scan it, you can pull the blue out just as well.

Drawing over that blown up drawing and it looks something like so…

Here’s how you get rid of the blue lines in Photoshop…

Goto your layers panel, pick channels, and then select only the blue channel. You’ll see your picture cleaned up automagically. No? Not quite? Maybe you see some lines hanging around or some residue from your blue drawing. No problem. You might want to adjust the color levels of your drawing and try it again. You can also just pick the blue channel and adjust the levels on the blue layer to get visual feedback that that layer is getting cleaned of all your unwanted blue lines. You’re done, if all you want was the sketch in your computer. The next step I would take would be to either quickly paint the drawing in Photoshop or really go to town and paint everything. I probably won’t do that with this image, since this is a practice sketch.

Maybe you don’t have Photoshop? I’m sure there are channel layers in your software of choice, but you’ll have to chime in about software such as GIMP, because I don’t know how they work.

As for the printer I’m using, it’s a Canon MP600…

I highly recommend it. It does pretty fast printing for just black and white text, you can do photo printing (4×6, 8.5×11 in.), it will scan, and even work as a copying machine if you don’t want the hassle of turning on your computer just to make a duplicate of a document. So far I’ve had it for a month. I’ve done a lot of printing out especially of blue line drawings, and I’ve done a few photographs that I’ve taken with my digital camera. Everything looks nice and the ink cartridges still seem pretty full. It’s also a relatively cheap multipurpose machine. It cost me $160 at Amazon.com, and I’m sure if you shopped around more you could find it for less. (Geez, looks like it’s even less on Amazon.)

Anime Drawing on Hunting the Elusive