Category: Project 2

In this section, I generated a 3D model through an online software called MESHY. I used it to quickly prototype a character and place them into a basic environment to test early concepts. The focus here was not refinement, but rapid iteration and experimentation with workflow enhancements.

• Environment Setup:
  A simple scene was constructed to simulate a mountainous environment. Although it’s very early-stage, it represents the initial direction I wanted to take for my world-building—especially the concept of ascending a mountain, which remains central to the broader project.
  
  
• Electric/Lightning Effects:
  The lightning around the character’s feet is two-dimensional animation. I achieved this by attaching animated planes to the feet of the character.
  • These effects are currently asynchronous—they don’t yet match the character’s footsteps.
  • That said, this still serves as an excellent early proof-of-concept and visual exploration of how elemental effects might interact with motion later on.
    
    
• Why I Used MESHY:
  This was part of my broader strategy to experiment with AI-generated meshes. My rationale for doing so is as follows:
  • It significantly speeds up the modeling pipeline, giving me more time to spend on composition, lighting, texture, and animation.
  • It allows for more creative flexibility, because I can quickly generate and iterate on multiple character concepts or props without getting bogged down in topology.
  • Even if the output isn’t perfect, it’s a solid foundation I can clean up, re-texture, and shape to my liking.
    
    
• Lighting and Direction:
  I also started experimenting with dramatic lighting—sharper shadows and dynamic highlights—to explore how I might accentuate the movement and atmosphere of the mountain climb in future shots.

Investigation into Painterly Art Styles in Animation

Painterly styles bridge the gap between traditional painting and digital animation, employing brush-like visuals, expressive color, and atmospheric composition to convey emotion and narrative depth. They emphasize mood over realism, often allowing less detailed models to evoke stronger emotional resonance.

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1. Loving Vincent (2017) – Fully-painted feature film

Background: The world’s first fully oil-painted feature—65,000 hand-painted frames recreating Van Gogh’s impasto style .

• Color & Composition: Thick, vibrant brushstrokes replicate Van Gogh’s dynamic color palette—yellows, blues, and greens merge to evoke emotional turbulence.
• Model Detail: Rough, stylized models embrace abstraction; character likenesses emerge through color planes and strong silhouettes.
• Effect on Story & Movement: The style enhances the emotional weight of each scene—brushstrokes swirl during turmoil, remaining static in melancholy, guiding viewer emotion.
• Pros: Unmatched expressive power, unique visual identity.
• Cons: Immense resource requirements and slower production.

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2. Tangled (2010) – Disney’s painterly CGI approach

Background: Disney used Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) to mimic Rococo painting influences in 3D .

• Color & Composition: Soft pastel lighting layered with brushtexture shaders gives forest scenes a lush, storybook appearance.
• Model Detail: High-detail CG models combined with textures that kind of imitate brush strokes looks surprisingly appealing, but not glaring at all.
• Effects & Motion: Brushstroke textures subtly animate with light, reinforcing movement and depth, yet remain invisible.
• Pros: Combines rich visuals with strong character animation; high production polish.
• Cons: Balancing painterly aesthetics with photoreal requirements is technically demanding.

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3. Lilo & Stitch / Ghibli-Inspired Indie Games

Background: Games like Crescent County and The Red showcase hand-painted textures in real-time engines https://shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com/creating-painterly-3d-scenes-preparing-assets-for-npr-8d6c726cc34f

• Color & Composition: Inspired by Studio Ghibli, they use vibrant yet muted palettes, hand-brushed textures, and layered depth. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/pixar-makes-painterly-cg-new-research-could-change-the-look-of-their-films-95205.html
• Visual Traits: Stylized filter retains visible brushstroke orientation and texture over time engadget.comyoutube.com.
• Color & Composition: Dull warfronts contrasted with vibrant highlights—brush direction draws focus to characters and dialogue.
• Model Detail: Block-form characters textured with painterly strokes create emotional atmosphere over fidelity.
• Special FX: Light bloom and subtle canvas overlays add painterly finish; motion blur integrates shading into stroke flow.
• Pros: Emotional resonance through atmosphere; simple models reduce workload.
• Cons: Texture repetitiveness can reduce visual novelty.

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Color, Composition, and Models

• Color Usage:
  • Painterly art prioritizes emotional palettes—warm reds signal climax (Loving Vincent), pastels evoke calm (Tangled), earth tones create nostalgia (11-11 Memories), while greens evoke serenity (Ghibli-inspired).
  • Color transitions often align with narrative shifts—palette wars or dawn-to-dusk style changes.
• Composition Techniques:
  • Defined by broken brush textures—silhouettes are drawn into scenes using directional strokes that follow character motion.
  • Depth cues rely on color over detail—foreground held crisp, backgrounds soft and blurred.
• Model Geometry:
  • Low-detail geometry is common: stylistic abstraction replaces realism (Loving Vincent, indie games).
  • Some solve motion with high geometry but simplified shaders (Tangled), balancing animation quality and texture fidelity.
• Special Effects:
  • Use of procedural shaders to mimic brush wobble or streaks responding to character movement.
  • Explosion, wind, and smoke effects styled with animated stroke patterns that complement the painted aesthetic.

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Pros and Cons of Painterly Styles

Pros

• Emotionally powerful and evocative—painting textures engage viewers at a visceral level
• Simplifies geometry workload—modeling needs are often minimal
• Unique visual identity—distinguishes projects in saturated markets
• Natural integration of FX and shading—brush style serves both texture and motion

Cons

• High labor intensity—frame-by-frame consistency is challenging (Loving Vincent)
• Shader complexity—real-time painterly requires bespoke tools (Crescent County)
• Potential loss of readability—overworked textures can obscure actions
• Risk of visual fatigue—static brush patterns become heavy or redundant over time

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Conclusion

Painterly art styles in animation and games offer a powerful synthesis of traditional art and digital performance. Case studies from Loving Vincent to Crescent County show how palette, composition, and texture coherence can elevate storytelling and mood. While resource-intensive, the end results can be visually stunning and emotionally resonant—provided pipelines and shader systems are properly managed. If used thoughtfully, painterly styles empower expressive visuals without sacrificing performance or narrative clarity.

Off World Media Production Toolkit

This week, we explored the process of creating 360° videos using the OFF World Media Production Toolkit. I’ve always been curious about immersive formats like this—whether in games, film, or VR—and this session gave me the chance to see just how different the workflow is compared to traditional linear video.

Unlike fixed-camera storytelling, 360° video opens up the perspective entirely. Instead of directing the viewer’s gaze, you invite them to explore the space freely. That shift completely changes how you think about composition, blocking, and even pacing. It’s more like building a world than framing a shot—and it’s that viewer agency that makes it so immersive.

To get started, we downloaded and installed the OFF World plugin. A particularly useful feature that comes with it is Sprout, which allows software like Unreal Engine and TouchDesigner to communicate seamlessly. This real-time linking means we can preview interactions and visual outputs from TouchDesigner directly inside Unreal before committing to a final render. It’s a smoother, more integrated workflow and makes cross-platform experimentation way more intuitive.

Once the toolkit was installed, we moved on to setting up a 360° camera in Unreal. That involved tweaking the project settings, creating new Blueprints to handle the capture process, and using the Sequencer to animate the scene. After rendering the footage, we used Adobe Media Encoder to make final edits and export the video in a viewable format.

This was a really valuable experience—not only did it demystify the technical side of 360° video, but it also gave me a new perspective (literally) on how to structure narrative in immersive formats. I’m now considering ways this could feed into future projects, especially anything experimental or VR-based.