Blender: Animating Stylized 3D Characters

I made a short 3D animation of stylized characters for my course's final assignment. It was for the Computer Graphics course held by Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. It was done in 3D using Blender within three months. The finished animation video can be watched at the bottom of this page.

This is my first time to officially learn Blender in an official course held by an institute. Every student was free to make any 3D animation with Blender, so I chose to make an animation of something I like: an animation of my favorite fictional character, "Violet Evergarden." The character is taken from Kyoto Animation's Violet Evergarden Anime series. I chose to animate her to learn to model complex objects on Blender in a fun way. I took a risky way to model a complex character because I thought that this risk could give me a bunch of experience in a short time. Another reason is that because I wanted to create my own 3D character and use it in my own Unity game in the future.

The model sheet below was used to model Violet: a fictional character in the anime "Violet Evergarden." It is used as the blueprint of her cloth, boots, and hair.

Model sheet for Violet which I used during the blueprinting process (taken from https://i.redd.it/stqw31c3cak41.jpg)

The first week was a little overwhelming since this assignment was held in the same period as my other project. To blueprinting a 2D image into a 3D, one needs to do very complicated steps, starting from deciding the art style, making the seams for the UV mapping, and rigging it.

I chose to pertain to its cartoony style by using a toon shader. For the base body, I use MB-Lab Add-ons, which included a simple anime-style toon shader. I also used this shader for the whole character; her dress, hair, and boots.

Her hair was made using curves, which then later converted and combined into a single mesh. However, even though it was relatively easy to make the hair using curves, I found that this became a problem later.

After finished with the hair, I started to model her dress. It was a very time-consuming process since I wanted to make the dress as close as the model sheet. I learned many techniques and hotkeys while making the dress. Until this point, I have not realized that I have made a big beginner mistake.

To effectively model and rig an object, one needs to first plan it out on which method to use because it can affect the rigging and animating part. For instance, I need to learn how to make a clean topology to better result in the rigging process. Since it was taught in the class after I finished the dress modelling, I immediately fixed and cleaned my topology, which is very messy after learning it the right way. Also, because I made the wrong choice to model the objects separately (i.e., separate dress parts), it added another level of difficulty when combining them into a single mesh to rig and animate it. I also made a mistake by combining the meshes using boolean.

After I'm sure that my mesh can be rigged, I started to mark some seams. The cloth and boots texture was referenced from a collection of screenshots (such as part of her dress or boots), which I took from various Youtube videos related to the anime (Disclaimer: by Kyoto Animation). Then, they were combined into one image and edited for the UV Mapping. More effects were added (such as pink cheek and shadow on her dress) directly on Blender's texture paint section.

My model was quite hard to rig; for example, rigging the skirt part of the dress and her hair. My messy topology was one of the reasons the bones won't stick to the mesh. That is because overlapping meshes threw errors when I tried to parent them to the bones. I spent some excruciating hours fixing the model's mesh topology. As a result, the time for me to UV map, rig, and animate becomes shorter. Consequently, I hurried the rigging process by using Rigify add ons to put armatures and Inverse Kinematics on the character automatically.

Since I had a problem Frankenstein-ing the Rigify building blocks to add bones to the skirt part, I resort to using a mesh deform modifier and customize the skirt animation. I also did the same trick to animate the hair mesh. However, this time I use Lattice for it. Even though this kind of trick can save my time, I did not like to use this shortcut since it can not be used as a playable character in Unity.

I stumble across more problems when testing to pose my character: weight painting. It seems that for some part (such as finger and palm), it keeps resetting the weigh after I modify it. I realize that I spent too much time trying to fix this. So, I thought that this issue could be skipped this time because the problematic mesh part will not be noticeable from the viewer's side (and it does!). So, I move on to the next part: animating it. This time I did not have any issues, which made me quite happy that day, thinking I was about to finish the assignment soon!

I knew that rendering could take hours as I already experience this when I rendered my high school animation years ago. Rendering with Eevee is fast, but it didn't render correctly when I tried to render emissive mesh (the pink sakura mesh). So, I switched to Cycle. The result is nice and crisp, with time and hardware as a sacrifice. Although I have enabled GPU rendering, it still took more than 5 hours to complete 200 frames of animation while burning up my laptop up to 98 °C. I don't know if it's related, but later after I let my laptop cool and opened Unity, it froze up for the first time!

Finally, I managed to finish a complex character modeling and animation within the deadline. I learned a lot in a short amount of time. The number of mistakes I made in Blender as a beginner gave me such unforgettable experiences. I also find that modeling with Blender is quite satisfying and fast once I get used to its hotkeys.

The teaser of the final result

Disclaimer: Character from Violet Evergarden by Kyoto Animation