District Arts Fest 2020

Manga Edits in Blender

I have found that I have been getting back into a lot of the things that I have liked in middle school. So for this blogpost I am going to attempt to create those manga edits in blender. Normally people do them in after effects but I don't want to learn how to animate in a whole new program so I am using blender. My general knowledge of these edits is that they take a panel or drawing and split it into separate layers that they then animate. I feel like I can manage to do this in blender since I like to make things look more 2D and I hope shape keys will help in making flowing hair.

 This is a very good example of what I am talking about:


 I'm doing it with this image though:


 So first in ibis PaintX I took the manga panel I wanted to animate and broke that into separate transparent layers. I also drew in certain parts like the antlers so I don't have to worry about blank space. I then saved these as transparent images.


 Then I put these into blender like I did with hair textures in the sims hair blogpost and arranged them so they matched up.


 Next I played with shape keys to see if I can deform the mesh that way. I figured out that I need to subdivide the mesh in order to actually morph it but it does seem to work.


 Then I animated the planes the way I wanted and exported it. I did not experience any problems with this other than the gray of the background matching the shadow on the neck but this project wasn't something too big to motivate me to go back and change that.

 I noticed while animating I forgot to try and make the eyes blink which I think would work if I made the eyes a separate layer and used shape keys but, although this is very simple in comparison to most edits, I figured out something pretty cool. Maybe I will even try this with my own drawings.

Planning Out

On tik tok, I saw this thing with frogs and it kind of made me think of a pixelated frog like something you would see on a playstation game. Because of that, I decided I wanted to make a piece with pixelated frogs. That was like three weeks ago. I tried three separate times to make something and I do not like the results. So I am hoping putting it out on paper would help me figure out what I want for this piece. I know I like the color scheme but it does not spark joy.

So first I tried to draw the character out on paper and see if I did not like that. I wrote out some characteristics I wanted and tried drawing the face based on that. With these two sketches I got the silhouette that I was looking for but I did not feel it would work with the piece.

 From there, I thought that maybe its her lack of a body so I went on forever 21 and chose an outfit for her. I like the drawing, and it gave me the idea of drawing a normal human and using the color scheme and frogs to make it look crazy. I also think I need to change the background even though I do like it. I feel that it is currently too simple which is holding me back with the character. So I think the background is something I should visit afterwards.

 Lastly, I have three ideas on making the frogs: pixel art, draw it, or model it. At this point I think that I am going to do the drawing one since I feel it will take less mental power.