freestyle #5

6 Feb

3D ANIMATED EXPLORATIONS

THE PROJECT

Freestyle is for me a capital part in the renewal of my creative process. Blender is actively developed by hundreds of people around the world. All of them are united by an interest to further a completely free and open source 3D creation pipeline. The possibilities are astonishing. 6 frames per second is bold and allows in a few keyframes to express the idea of movement.

This animation style became a trademark and is part of the identity of this graphic series.

Design, modeling, shading, lighting & animation: Thomas CHARIER.

Get them with sound on instagram!

~ 2020

3D training moves

Freestyle as its name suggests is a purely experimental work. In this series I push my graphic research around composition and colors into a gymnastic theme.

The creation of short loops allows me to develop a visual language with an abstract narrative as the posts progress. Each visual exist alone but also complete a story.

“Let’s keep up the tempo with Jack™, your own personal coach!”

All this work is done within Blender. The research was developed around concept sketches designed with GreasePencil technology.

The objective was to find the limits of the 3D creation pipeline in a single software package. This study highlights a new approach to the graphic process.

This mixture of 2D and 3D animation combine to bring the viewer into a unique universe, rich in color, on the border of the abstract.

Broken shapes disrupt figurative objects and characters. They allow me to play, assemble and decompose elements at my taste like I could do with modular graphic work. Plus its really fun to animate!

The first intention was to experiment with contrasting colours. The result exceeded the expectations of the initial approach. The original idea was transformed into a series of tryptics mixing traditional 2D animation and 3D composition.

“Jack’s trying hard to lose his winter fat!”

As any creative project, there have been twists and turns of direction throughout the production process. I started with solid color shape without lighting to finally end up with plastic materials with pathtracing lighting.

The clay textures remain very simple — but detailed for closeup shots — while preserving the graphic spirit of the flat areas of colors. Also the textures are animated in time to create a striking stop-motion effect.

technical breakdown

For this looping series I push the animation as far as I could do with a motion graphic visual.

Grease Pencil makes possible a new interaction between traditional 2D drawing and 3D meshes.

It allowed me to draw a basic 2D character and ajust the character design as well as my animation timings. I played with basic shapes as wood/clay blocks to create the 3D body parts. Keeping each part as geometric object is a fundamental to keep volumes consistency in your character animation.