How a Gnomon graduate brings anime characters to life

References and composition

I wasn’t exactly sure how I wanted to combine the models, so I went through reference images of the show to gather some more inspiration (always a good excuse to re-watch a show you love!)

Finally, I decided on the road shoulder but with night lighting. I also added some more references to my PureRef board. 

At the same time, I started blocking out the composition.

Modeling in Maya and Zbrush

During the 10 weeks of the course, I had to touch-up my old models and make an environment for the characters, so I tried to evenly progress each model and set everything up and render as soon as possible.

Usually I start in Maya to set the scale and start the initial block-out. For hard-surface objects I stay in Maya most of the time and jump into Zbrush to model organic shapes if needed. On Canti, I used Zbrush to sculpt connecting pieces on his neck and ankles.

For the Vespa, I only sculpted some folds on the seat in Zbrush; everything else was modeled in Maya. 

If I modeled for higher resolution, I would do a Zbrush pass on subdivided models to add some extra damage and bake a normal/displacement map. For this project, I just painted some scratches in Substance since I wasn’t planning any super-close-up renders.

For Haruko, I used Maya for scale block-in, but most sculpting was done in Zbrush. I used Maya for occasional topology adjustments. I prefer clean topology for sculpting and it saves time later if you need to retopologize.

I initially made Haruko’s Rickbacker entirely in ZBrush because it was for an Intro to ZBrush class and I didn’t know Maya back then. But I updated the model for this project, using optimized topology and UVs.

V-Ray Render Elements and V-Ray Layers

I used Substance Painter to texture all the models. For Haruko’s face I used Female 30s Multichannel Face #07 from Texturing.xyz and used this Photoshop workflow to quickly apply albedo and displacement maps.

Because my plan was to render full figures (not close-up) with night lighting, I textured them keeping that in mind. For a single shot like this, it was important to fit in our weekly deadlines.

Camera setup and final composition

It can take a lifetime to learn how to create a powerful and engaging composition. If I dare to summarize what I learned over the years of trying to study it: just slap a Golden Spiral on it. Works like a charm.

Hot tip: Use Photoshop’s built-in overlays in the Crop tool to check with different types of composition rules: Golden Ratio, Golden Spiral, Rule of Thirds, etc.

Lighting and camera

I wanted to try the “deer in the headlight” type of lighting in one of my works and finally got a good opportunity to explore that for my FLCL crew. I tried different combinations with added rim lights and distant lights but I think the best effect for this look was achieved with just one main source: V-Ray Rectangle light close to the render camera with HDR texture of an actual bike headlight (found at hdrlabs under Lightsmith Collection).

I have one V-Ray Dome light in the scene with Night HDR at very low intensity just in case it might be visible in reflections. I also added V-Ray Sphere and Rectangle lights for the Vespa’s headlight, backlight, turn signals and Canti’s screen. I rendered them with the Light Select Render Element and animated separately in Nuke. 

Post-production

For post-production we used Nuke. First we needed to separate render elements we want to control with a Shuffle node and name them accordingly. Then merge them back together with Merge nodes on Plus.

I added glow to the lights for an atmospheric effect. With Transform node I animated slight zoom in on the main render and offset zoom in on the foliage render for a parallax effect. I added flickering to Canti’s screen with NoiseCurve node, value set to random. I added a sine curve to the Mix parameter of the node that merges Vespa’s signal and back lights and keyed the main headlight mix manually (turn on, fade out). Finally I added LUT corrector with the Vectorfield node to bring image from raw to sRGB gamma. 

The final output was rendered as a 180-frame .png sequence at 24 fps and was combined into a video format in Adobe After Effects.