freestyle #6
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
easter eggs
Freestyle as its name suggests is a purely experimental work. In this series I push my graphic research around composition and colors into a surprising Easter myths.
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.
“The truth about Easter eggs finally comes out.”
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.
“Easter bells have finally arrived! True masters in the art of hiding the good stuff.”
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 animation and 3D digital sculpts.
The plastic textures remain very simple — but detailed for closeup shots — while preserving the graphic spirit of the flat areas of colors.
technical breakdown
As any creative project, there have been twists and turns and changes of direction throughout the production process.
In fact, this project is the result of a very old student work.
At first this project highlighted the creative process of creating traditional animation through preparatory work, animation and coloring. The design of the characters, the storyboarding and the cutting of the timeline had already provided, at the time, a solid base for the execution.
When I was still animating everything on paper, I choose to draw each frame of the animation to 25 images per second and was solved in a considerable waste of time at the time. Digitizing hundreds of sheets and inking them on a computer was a painful experience, but instructive.
“This reckless experience allowed me to understand in depth the issues involved in such an animation process.”
In the end, half of the frames were deleted and recompiled in 12fps. At 25fps the animation by hand generated subtle variations in the contours which, at real speed, caused a disturbing noise.
I gave a second life to this student project by converting it into a new 3D graphic series.
The addition of 2D animation in a 3D space is usually a recurring problem for artists as tradionnal animation is always done from the camera field of view.
Thanks to Grease Pencil I can bend these 2D animation in 3D and add an animated handmade touch to the visual.
I tend to say that people empathize more with traditional animation because of the skills it involves.
Craftmanship is key!
