Today I would like to write about an animation artist I like very much on Youtube: Dedouze.
He is very good at using blender to create 3D animations with 2D effects and the crayon tool in Blender has been very important in establishing his overall style, allowing the user to draw directly into the 3D scene. The creator can choose to use 3D modelling to aid the perspective distortion of the 2D drawing, hand draw on top of the 3D modelling for a more stylised look or add 3D modelling to the 2D animation for efficiency.
I will explain the role of the crayon tool and his creative process, using one of Dedouze’s works as an example.
Firstly, Dedouze drew the scene lines and set the general colour mood.
He then creates the models of the cable car and the station in blender, while the characters are drawn by hand in two dimensions. The magic of the crayon tool is that it allows 2D and 3D to co-exist in a scene and look natural.
Dedouze shows a frame-by-frame drawing of the girl’s movements behind the scenes, where he can always adjust the rhythm of the movement by watching the back and forth action.
Sometimes Dedouze also uses the ‘auto-frame’ function to make the movements smoother. But he specifically mentions that a mixture of auto-framing and hand-drawing should be used, instead of trying to animate the whole scene perfectly smoothly, as that would take away the charm of retro-animation.
After seeing his work I became very interested in blender and really would like to try this 3D to 2D style of animation in the future.