(These are all mine barring Amy’s street signs and cafe blockouts top right.)

The first ref I created was really used as an excuse to get into Rebelle, which is known to be the software that spiderverse used when creating their movies. It was an exercise in looking at the types of painterly textures that it could generate:

I lined the interior blockout that I made and painted from there; I actually submitted this piece of work to Leana Hillen, who was kind enough to give us some painting workshops, for feedback:

This feedback, along with some feedback that Alec provided, showed me that this piece was much too textured and – in places – saturated. It is an incredibly distracting painting and it does not properly convey the night time.

I collected some more ref for my next attempt:

Environment: Exterior

I wanted to add a concept to the collection we have of the exterior in the ‘real world’ and put Charli into the concept to see her there:

This was to get an idea of her in the space but also to play around with potential colour palettes – specifically looking at warm pinks and peaches around the Hilmore Art Academy.

I’m not super happy with how flat and boring these look, however as this needed to be generated quite quickly they’re sufficient.

Environment: Exterior Abstract

I also wanted to try and provide a piece of concept work for the abstract sequence; here I made a version that was more ‘normal’ where I tried to focus on overbearing buildings and creating a sense of how small Charli feels in these scenes – I also did a version that is more painterly in order to experiment with painterly brushes:

Playing with colour and lighting here was a lot of fun, but I’m still not convinced that these are exactly what we’re looking for – again, I’m not convinced in my skill level to generate paintings to the standard of our reference. However, I do like the lineart used in these – I think this is something that we should attempt to carry forward.

Props:

I created some props with the following ref in mind:

I wanted our props (particularly key props) to carry forward this saturated sort of look, with some painterly aspects – I particularly enjoy the idea of LOD and graphic reduction – this is something we will have to consider whilst creating our assets:

I’m pretty happy with these designs as concepts; they are perhaps a bit complicated, however, a scaled-down version of these might be quite nice.

With the ref, I moved from previous designs to look at a more spiderverse rendering style:

Considering these silhouettes, we all loved a number of these designs but we decided to keep on iterating and try to reduce the complexity for sculpting whilst also keeping the rocker/mosher art vibes (whilst being slouchy and comfortable in her lounge-wear) we wanted for the character:

We all agreed that we loved the first design here, and Josh came back with some feedback on this, following some suggested updated ref:

We received further feedback from Alec that potentially we should rethink the tattoos, or rather, reduce them – this is something we were all willing to accept, and we have Charli’s finished design:

I also made some headway on our approach to sculpting, having a call for advice from Mike Cauchi, who gave me a lot of amazing pointers and resources:

Technical RnD

Finally I have completed some preliminary tests in some ways that we can start to think about texturing our assets:

This workflow involves painting normal maps to achieve painterly strokes – this allows for the base colour to appear painterly, and also for the strokes to be influenced by the light. I followed the following tutorial for this:

I quite like this workflow, it feels very intuitive to me as a painter and I liked the results. However, it is quite time consuming – I’m not confident that we could do this for every asset. Perhaps we could limit this to key assets and props, though? I also need to remember the influence of value in this approach, the darker values should be placed on areas of the object that will not be lit, and vice versa – it looks a bit odd on my test, that the light and focal point is dark in value due to the normal painting.

I moved on to trying shaders in blenders node view – I am a blender novice, I don’t understand how it works at all but I managed to work this out after a few hours of bashing my head against a keyboard:

I think this is probably a much more efficient way of achieving what we need, however it doesn’t look as good on my cup asset unfortunately – not entirely sure why that is, but we definitely have those painter effects, at least, for this test!

This following technique might be a good way of getting painterly textures for further away objects that do not have a lot of base colour, as it was a really simple process:

All this required was baking the normal maps in blender and then exporting them into photoshop and applying a painterly texture. This is just a default filter, but we could look at buying much prettier textures to apply. This technique gets a bit tedious if the asset is more than one colour, however, so it might be an idea to restrict this workflow to minimal assets with not a lot of colour involved.

Finally I played around with Blenders new brushstroke plugin, which gave some really interesting results.

Going Forward:

Unfortunately, one of our team members has decided to take a year out; as such, we’ve had to reassess our scope and our duties. I will be creating assets, as defined, and also looking at building environments along with Adam whilst Amy will be taking on sculpting our character and the bulk of the animation. This is something we will have to look for further advice on from Alec and our lecturers.