Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.
When I started with this hobby, I didn’t think doing backgrounds for my animated shorts was going to something to worry about. After all, they were the portion of the whole thing that didn’t (generally) move, right? Plus, I considered myself kind of artsy and I had done a few paintings, so I thought to myself: “How difficult could it be?” I didn’t expect the answer to be “FREAKING HARD”.
As it turns out, creating backgrounds for a short is no walk in the park. It’s not that you have to learn about color, or drawing, or composition, or even effects (which you have to do, though, sorry). The problem with them can be summarized in one word: consistency. That’s right, if you want your backgrounds to frame your animation effectively, you have to be consistent, and as I soon realized, that is one difficult thing to accomplish. When I was a kid, my dad (a civil engineer) taught me how to draw two-point perspective and since then, that has become a bit intuitive for me. However, if my camera looks at the same scene from a different angle and I have to draw that, everything gets screwed up, because it is very hard for me to get the layout right from a different view. I end up with a coach that lies at twice the distance from a coffee table, for example, in comparison to the first shot.
ENTER: Google SketchUp
SketchUp is a 3D modeling application that you can download for free from our friends over at Google. It has many capabilities, but what drew my attention is how easily you can get seemingly complex models done, with just a few clicks. It’s tools are not very intuitive, but the learning curve for them is ridiculously short. With the instructional videos from screen name: SketchUpVideo and 4sketchupgo2school on YouTube you’ll be able to do very nice things with it in a couple of hours (make that three). Some animated series like Futurama, use 3D sets rendered with toon shaders that make their three dimensional objets look like 2D drawings. That’s certainly a nice way to use 3D, but an expensive one, and not the one I want to try out.
You see, I want to draw my backgrounds myself, but I’m going to get SketchUp to tell me where everything goes, and as a bonus to help me out with the perspective. My project takes place near a well-known church in the city where I live, so I want it to be present throughout the short. Unfortunately there was no model for it on Google Earth so I had to create it myself. As I wrote before, it is not complicated at all, once you get the hang of it. The two tools/techniques I used most in this case were the “Push/pull tool” for extruding every structure up from basic shapes drawn on the ground and the “Follow me tool” for mouldings and spheres. Here’s a panoramic view of what I created:
This took me a little past three hours to complete,
including the time it takes to learn basic SketchUp.
In a 3D space where you’ve made a mock-up of your set, and marked with big blocks where your buildings, nature and props go, you can quickly move your camera to explore what shots work best for your project. Not only will you get the correct layout, but you’ll also get your perspective right in every shot. A nice feature of SketchUp is that it lets you apply a photograph as a texture to any surface. In my case, that lets me visualize more clearly what I want as an end result. I browsed through flickr and found some façades that give me a better idea of the direction I’ll take. Let’s take a look at a nice establishing shot:
Which is based on this original rough sketch:
What if we climb on top of the chapel or take a look across the street?
What next? You can’t use these pictures for your project. No matter how cool it was to craft them, they’re still a long way from finished, so the next step is to take these and import them into your image editing application and paint your scene on top of them, using the blocks as reference for the position of all your objects and using the lines as perspective guides. However. we’ll explore that in a different post. Hopefully, this technique will ease up the process of drawing consistent backgrounds. Have a great day!
Leave a comment.
Hi,
That is a nice idea using sketchUp for backgrounds and such. TBS suffers from usable templates and some basic materials like walk cycles and frequently used effects like smoke etc. This often leaves the freshers frustrated with TBS itself. One should be really skilled to do something in TBS. If anybody takes initiative to create free templates for TBS newbies i am all for it. In fact i can contribute with basic action figures which can be rotoscoped for quick previews.
Cheers
Kannan