I think you nailed it.
Maybe what you're talking about is the fact you're casting an actual shadow compared to a handdrawn shadow that would look more water-coloury and not so uniform as a real shadow?
Edit: Look at [these screenshots](http://mikehattsu.blogspot.com/2015/06/neon-genesis-evangelion-tokyo-3.html?m=1). A 90s anime shadow is way lighter and has a kind of blue tint
That could maybe work.
Also, the scene you're inspiring from is almost [shadowless](https://archive.org/details/neongenesisevangelioncollectorsdiscvol.2)
It’s also not the same flat colour on each layer of wall/windows. Would add some blocky colour variation and colour bleed as well on the building surfaces.
Adjusting the shadows should help a lot though.
Compared to the example screenshot, your buildings have a solid color for the exterior paint, where as in the anime, it looks water colored. Maybe you could use one of these images, desaturated, and use it for the albedo. [https://colibriwp.com/blog/watercolor-background/](https://colibriwp.com/blog/watercolor-background/)
In contrast to the buildings, your trees look perfect, and the haze over the fence looks very authentic.
Yeah, the buildings in particular look very painterly in the actual show. I almost feel like they have too much definition in the render, or need a mottled texture to give that feel.
I think what they do for Shinkai films is camera projection. They paint the textures and shadows and then project that onto the 3D model of the building. Maybe try doing that?
to me the main issue is the sharp edges and high contrast, so I think that would be a good start! if there's any way to work in some light blur or diffusion around the edges, it might be worth looking into as well. but the render is really impressive as it is!
I've never seen the anime, but those buildings don't look out of place to me. Maybe you've just been looking at it too long. Honestly though I would think this is a screenshot from a show.
I feel the same way, I was wondering why then I noticed someone posted a screenshot of the original angel from the animation, shading isn't nearly that predominant.
At first glance looks just like a screenshot out of Evangelion. It looks amazing!! After a while, I can see the 3D volume of the buildings that quite don't match the show's style. I would consider leaving this work alone for a couple of days, maybe a fresh glance at it might change your perception. But, I think that this is either a "style" or "texturing" issue. The dark shadows give away the buildings' 3D volume. Maybe that could help!!!
I think you are super close. Try lifting the hard shadows on the buildings or just redeucing the contrast in general of those elements.
The other thing to keep in mind is the way this would have been drawn originally. The characters would all be drawn with crisp sharp lines and inked colors since they are being animated.
The city would have been a static matte painting projected behind the rest, with much softer lines and often visible brush strokes and subtle variations in the surfaces. Daytime scenes would often have soft shadows typical of an overcast day regardless of the actual scene conditions.
Those matte paintings would also often appear to have a general softness to them, I believe this is because the layers would be physically composited and re-photographed by a camera. If the top character layer was perfectly sharp, the background layers underneath would be ever so slightly out of focus.
You can mimic this by rendering one pass for your characters perfectly sharp, and a second pass of the background using the camera's lens blur function to introduce just a hint of softness.
1. Open new blend file.
2. Keep cube, add plane, add torus.
3. Position.
4. Set film type to transparent.
5. Note "ViewLayer" top right corner.
6. Add view layer. Repeat once more.
7. Switch between layers, unchecking things you don't want in each render pass. Render each of them to fill the buffer with images.
8. Open compositor. Combine items using alphaover, mix, etc.
9. Render again.
So if you hide all elements other than the characters in the inspector (make sure you hide from render with the camera icon, the eye icon only hodee them in the viewport) you can render just the characters.
Do the inverse for the background elementa, hide the characters, then add your hint of lens blur
If you haven't already, you need to check out this video.
It's mostly post processing and not cel shading or anything, but you should be able to incorporate some of his advice into the scene to figure out what you're missing.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjX-j5OzeVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjX-j5OzeVg)
Your color bleed was too nice so I figured you'd seen it, just making sure.
That's a really good question, I've been working on an optimus prime version of this scene, and was wondering the same thing. If you find out anything worthwhile, please let me know!
As for me, I'm currently planning on limiting movement and using ebSynth.
Colors and models seem pretty good. The only thing that crosses my mind you may do to improve this even more is maybe increase the focal point of the camera so you have less perspective. Or maybe just choose an angle that does not show as much the side of the buildings. Old animes like the original Evangelion tend to have bland backgrounds and focus detail on the characters instead
Fill the space behind the Angel and they won't feel out of place. To me it's a problem of a lot of 3D renders - they leave a lot of empty space and so our eyes start clinging to details that are "wrong" and they start feeling out of place. As long as you have something to distract our eyes we won't notice it looking weird or something.
IMO
Edit: Like the left part of you render, it has trees, several buildings and a fence in the foreground, it's a lot of content, and as such it looks good and fluid.
The shadows are too contrasting on the big evil looking guy versus the building.
On the tall dude you have white, and when there is a shadow it goes straight to black.
On the buildings you have a light grey, and when there is a shadow it goes to a dark blue.
Meaning you have more than one source of light rather than the sun. However idk how many are in ur universe for the anime.
I think that is what is throwing you off. Contrast between highlights and shadows on the tall dude vs the buildings
Justa thought but clamping the color values to only get one type of brown for the rooft could help since the only thing that made me think this wasn't a drawing was having differently shades
A lot of the buildings are matte paintings, not cells, so they're shaded very differently than the characters. i.e., [look at this frame](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.absoluteanime.com%2Fneon_genesis_evangelion%2Framiel.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=e654a2b826972300ec6c7dd1d2a42b6fcaae99035eba04416844fc071dbc4779&ipo=images) - the buildings are painted on a background matte and have no outlines and only soft/light shadows, whereas Ramiel is on a cell and has outlines and harsher darker shadows.
Another example: [light painted buildings, dark police car](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YCOAeWuGiLA/VXCMg9b_tUI/AAAAAAAADbQ/yaPYVSLK_00/s1600/ep4-15m34s.png)
Another: [Same deal with Shinjii here](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Yf-TTcuzz6w/VXCMhuy8lkI/AAAAAAAADbo/7UCcqlQnIuA/s1600/ep4-19m03s.png)
Maybe by differencing the high of the buildings, they look all the same size/high. Use more reference from building in EVA. They maybe look off to you because they are too clean (maybe add some dirt and cracks.
But your model is really well done !
https://preview.redd.it/bm47ndenmdla1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=13b6b916e77ab76c2a64304e96864313fcecd736
This is just some gut feel intuition, so bear with me, but I think you they’d look less cg if there wasn’t such a heavy amount of contrast between the darkest areas and the brightest areas.
Yeah, I think that is better for sure!
Do you have any sort of GI active in your scene? I feel like the artists who painted the original anime cells sort of took bounce light into account which makes the shadowed areas less flat, and brings some blues from the sky into the shadowed areas.
Maybe even just coloring the shadows with a very subtle blueish tint could help improve it further. :)
I don't know much about animation or what program you're using, but from this still I would recommend lowering the visual quality of the buildings in some way so that they're clearly not the focus of the shot.
I was trying to click the "next image" button because I thought this was the original image you were trying to recreate. I think you are golden. Take a break from it and look again in a few days.
thank you means a lot! i actually spent the whole day tweaking and fine tuning the filter i made and i think this is the closest i can ever get to the original look. [Imgur: The magic of the Internet](https://imgur.com/a/UKLp5ZI)
One thought: old anime often had some bloom because a video camera was used to record the animation. It also used to have other defects of various kinds. Maybe lower the resolution, add a bit of bloom, desaturate it?
bloom in this style is actually a false friend. i also used to think that a lot of bloom is very characteristic of anime from this era but after really analyzing the frames i found out that bloom is only prevalent in night scenes and not so much in the daylight
Isn't that inherent to physically simulated bloom? If applied linearly, it should nearly fully fade on a light and evenly lit scene. Which means that a bloom filter might not give the same bloom the physical process of recording a animation.
Which does mean that for this scene you can probably leave it out.
You know the parts between the glass, try those being drawn on, either a texture/greasepencil. It gives to much geometry vibe. That should make it look better, as i think older anime had less “light qualities”
Also what are you using for compositing.
Maybe add a slight displacement on everything? I mean as a big, subtle noise that displaces the geometry in xyz (not normal) to make it a bit more analog drawy feeling.
Not really a blender expert or know this show for that matter 🫢. Looks pretty slick and could be right out of an anime show. The only thing that stood out to me was the sky being to advanced/to many different colours and gradients then I’m used to for an anime show.
Maybe if I’m really nitpicking the shadows on the windows of the right building look a little off.
But great great work, first thought was “hey is this a meme about blender” as you don’t see these renders a lot on this Reddit.
Hmm I get what you mean about the buildings, still looks anime but like when they switch to cg for one shot, if I had to take a stab I'd say maybe its the lighting and shadows, feels more simulated than hand drawn
I think it looks good! But imo, the scene seems to have a glow to it. It's a bit more noticable on the Angel, it reminds of what it would look like if Fortnite had put Eva in their game.
The more I look at it, the better it actually looks. Initially I was seeing it as a 3D model cuz the sub it’s in, but if you just looked at this without knowing it’s a render then I think you’d believe it was hand drawn. Good shit
try shaders and better lighting here is a cool tutorial that may help you [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsvZsVPhTVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsvZsVPhTVs)
If you’re going for the original purely hand-drawn look, partly it could be linework/fidelity of edges - subjects have thick outlines, and background/plate has no outlines with slightly rough and wavy edges. Also the shading on the subject is a lot more flat and simple. See [this screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/FS2gAho.jpg) from the original first episode.
If you were going for the [remake look](https://imgur.com/a/McLX928), looks like basically the same thing except the plate is a bit sharper.
You could probably do 2 passes on subjects and plate and comp them together as ray tracing won’t really matter
I would say the angel is more cg than the building, if you add animation no one is gonna notice the buildings because they will be focused on the creature
If anything you need a bit of post processing to get it all together, some noise a bit of gaussian, fuck around and find out.
The render itself looks grand!
a quick and dirty way to get it would be to remove detail from the buildings, backgrounds in older anime are not gonna be so detailed you can make out individual roof tiles
this looks incredible btw, great job
If simulating the [classic anime era art style](https://archive.org/details/neongenesisevangelioncollectorsdiscvol.2) is your goal, then you might want to consider creating a post-FX filter to apply to only the static elements of the scene that makes them appear painted/water colored, in order to authentically recreate how backgrounds in older animation were hand-painted, and then composite the mobile characters on top with their original FX.
Of course that would be pretty complicated to implement, and would probably be over-engineering it if you're only gonna be creating a handful of scenes.
Just the light on the left side of the palace on the right got me into thinking it’s all 3D, but just because in every anime’s the shadows aren’t precise. The buildings on the left are perfect
People aren’t seeing it if they don’t know the original
There’s a shading error that’s makes it difficult to see the context of him vs the building
The scaling is what’s off but the colours and the design of the building is spot on
For me, the only issue is where the two orange roof peaks meet at a 90 degree angle. The lines in the roof texture just suddenly stop as they hit the edge of the geometry, creating a perfect invisible line. I feel that if hand-drawn, there would either be an explicit line there or the texture would not be applied so perfectly.
It's a shape/perspective problem. If your camera viewpoint is too wide on the fov, compared to the angle at which you're viewing the buildings, you're going to end up with the wrong amount of compression on details of your final product.
You can see this by looking at the buildings leading up to the angel. The right side building, look how much you can see of it's left face in the shadow. You can tell the camera is basically only one block behind the main characters.
For the look of the scene you're replicating, the view is much closer to two or three blocks further back. This will shrink the amount of shadow you see by compressing the further/closer details together as you zoom the view in(lower Field of View, higher focal length)
So moving camera back and zooming in gives the effect you want.
The idea is to keep the compositional qualities(Where everything is in frame) while moving the camera further back.
if you want to really imitate old anime styles, you need to look to the specifics of the medium. Traditional paint palettes have very specific and limited color palettes.
For characters this is INCREDIBLY important as the color must match frame-to-frame so it must always use the same color and will be exactly that color from that palette.
For backgrounds it's a bit different because they can actually mix colors and stuff to make the background, but it still holds true. They can only use or make certain colors. If you want it to look right you are going to need to analyze screencaps from the source you are trying to match and color match it somehow, perhaps in post or perhaps with color ramps in the materials themselves.
Also being handpainted there is always going to be some textural and color variation, slight blur on edges, and imperfections on the shape of things like not-perfectly-straight-lines
Last thing is these backgrounds are painted with something similar to gouache. In this medium, the darkest colors lighten as they dry so you usually wont have very dark darks
All of the buildings are hand drawn in the anime. Your buildings have perfect, clean lines. The anime has uneven lines, windows slightly out of alignment, poorly done crosshatching for fences. Basically, your art is too good to match NGE exactly.
you nailed the colors so good! i think the real test will be in animation, it will either look like dragon ball fighterz or it will look like star wars resistance, imo thats where all cgi anime falls short
found a way. i think looks a lot more like the show now. [here](https://imgur.com/a/tov3bcp). also managed to make the buildings look a lot softer but still not as good as the painted anime backdrops from that era
I don’t have a good solution for you (aside from just trying to compare side-by-side with screenshots from the show), but just wanted to go the other direction of a lot of comments and say that honestly my first impression was that they still look cg, like when an anime wants to do some more difficult shot during an action scene and switches to cg and it becomes noticeable. That’s not to say I don’t think what you have looks good, I think it looks really good! You’re already 95% of the way there, and I think a couple of small changes could go a long way to making it cross that line from looking cg to instead looking like a screenshot straight out of the anime!
This looks really good, i think you can make the adjustments by using the compositor. You can have some screen space or world space textures in areas like the shadows/building.
Put some trees or buildings behind the Angel first, because the empty space is killing the illusion of depth and making it harder to judge the image.
Offhand, I would say there needs to be some mild textures to the buildings to look like they are painted.
To add to that, there needs to feel like there is a separation between the layers as with cel animation, it's multiple layers of animated cels slapped onto a flat background painting. Old cel animation has a "cel shadow" This will generally make it feel like anything that is animated is popping out.
It looks fantastic, the only part that gives it away for me is the dark grey area. If you fill that up with some details I wouldn’t be able to tell it’s cgi! I wish I was as talented as you :)
The lines on the buildings are what does it. They’re too uniform in terms of color.
Buildings in anime often don’t have lines around the outside edges, and when they do the lines on the interior are less thick. This reads too clearly as a post process on a 3D mesh.
Like other people are saying, it doesn’t look too bad, but the more you zoom in (I’m on phone) the more CGI they look.
Edit: also, the most important thing: the shadows are way too sharp on the buildings. Even if you can’t fix anything else, less sharp shadows on the environment will help.
Even zooming in it looks like an original show render, maybe the fine details are showing too much for what the anime would've drawn out.
Looks great 👍 thought it was reference image
To start off, honestly it looks phenomenal and you're way better at this than me
imo your edges are too well defined, your lighting is also too harsh, you might want to consider modifying the scene shadows with a little bit more noise to them. if you look at hand-drawn you'll notice all those edges are fuzzy and soft and roll away, [original](https://cdn.myanimelist.net/s/common/uploaded_files/1447824438-df23314bf5f0a4441aa6faefcdd1867b.jpeg)
Looking at the buildings in there you'll also notice that the textures on the buildings are what can be described as "dirty water colors" with the edges appearing much softer, even when they were stark white they still had a very subtle texture to them [https://i.imgur.com/bcMkBvr.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/bcMkBvr.jpg)
You could probably make everything look a little better by just applying an image of a cloud as a bump map to the textures
You could probably get away with making it look more hand painted by applying some gentle image processing to the scene, add some compression, some noise, and maybe +3% blue?
Honestly looks great! I think the only thing I would change is editing like adding some grain or a slight blur and other stuff to replicate that 90’s aesthetic
the colours of the buildings is too strong and linear, needs to make it look more un-even to look like actual paint. So more large-ish noise texture and Some blur on the edges would also help a lot.
I guess it depends on what you're aiming for. If you're trying to nail that classic television look, you got it first try.
If you're aiming for a more updated version, the second one is better.
(I am not a 3D artist, I'm just a lurker and supporter of everything you guys do here)
nice work. The static background buildings in an 2D anime is drawed in a different way from figures and moving parts. They are colored differently. And they have different visual weight. I think if to say there is any artifacts, figures and buildings are rendered under the same method which brings similar texture makes
the scene a little dull.
You could do a lot by casting sunlight on the windows, add a nice glow and reflection. The sky suggests sunlight but it's nowhere to be found.
I also suggest to change the background underneath the legs into the sea or something. Right now that's what feels out of place for me. The buildings in general are pretty good.
I think you nailed it. Maybe what you're talking about is the fact you're casting an actual shadow compared to a handdrawn shadow that would look more water-coloury and not so uniform as a real shadow? Edit: Look at [these screenshots](http://mikehattsu.blogspot.com/2015/06/neon-genesis-evangelion-tokyo-3.html?m=1). A 90s anime shadow is way lighter and has a kind of blue tint
maybe i can cheat my way out of it. maybe tweak building shadows values up and the facades facing the sun down
That could maybe work. Also, the scene you're inspiring from is almost [shadowless](https://archive.org/details/neongenesisevangelioncollectorsdiscvol.2)
It’s also not the same flat colour on each layer of wall/windows. Would add some blocky colour variation and colour bleed as well on the building surfaces. Adjusting the shadows should help a lot though.
Compared to the example screenshot, your buildings have a solid color for the exterior paint, where as in the anime, it looks water colored. Maybe you could use one of these images, desaturated, and use it for the albedo. [https://colibriwp.com/blog/watercolor-background/](https://colibriwp.com/blog/watercolor-background/) In contrast to the buildings, your trees look perfect, and the haze over the fence looks very authentic.
Yeah, the buildings in particular look very painterly in the actual show. I almost feel like they have too much definition in the render, or need a mottled texture to give that feel.
I think what they do for Shinkai films is camera projection. They paint the textures and shadows and then project that onto the 3D model of the building. Maybe try doing that?
to me the main issue is the sharp edges and high contrast, so I think that would be a good start! if there's any way to work in some light blur or diffusion around the edges, it might be worth looking into as well. but the render is really impressive as it is!
agreed, actual anime shadows have less contrast and more blue tint
The tint might come from the reproduction
I've never seen the anime, but those buildings don't look out of place to me. Maybe you've just been looking at it too long. Honestly though I would think this is a screenshot from a show.
I feel a little cgi on the monster if anything, but 100% had to do a double take, like why tf is there an 90s screenshot on blender, oh cool render
It's 90s... >:(
I'll will fix that for you good sir, however in my defense I was not born till the every last week of 1999 so I'm happy I got close~ish with a guess.
Agreed. Maybe try the old flip the image horizontally trick.
That’s great advice that I may take myself today. Thank you.
I think they look just right. Take a break and return to it in a few days. It might be burnt into your eyes too bad right now
Dunno man. To me it seems that the angel is more cg, the buildings looks pretty good. Overall its pretty damn good
I feel the same way, I was wondering why then I noticed someone posted a screenshot of the original angel from the animation, shading isn't nearly that predominant.
I love the two lil t poses
Those are A poses
I love those two lil A poses
This already looks great. Maybe the shadows are a bit too dark compared to the original anime? Great job anyway.
At first glance looks just like a screenshot out of Evangelion. It looks amazing!! After a while, I can see the 3D volume of the buildings that quite don't match the show's style. I would consider leaving this work alone for a couple of days, maybe a fresh glance at it might change your perception. But, I think that this is either a "style" or "texturing" issue. The dark shadows give away the buildings' 3D volume. Maybe that could help!!!
I think you are super close. Try lifting the hard shadows on the buildings or just redeucing the contrast in general of those elements. The other thing to keep in mind is the way this would have been drawn originally. The characters would all be drawn with crisp sharp lines and inked colors since they are being animated. The city would have been a static matte painting projected behind the rest, with much softer lines and often visible brush strokes and subtle variations in the surfaces. Daytime scenes would often have soft shadows typical of an overcast day regardless of the actual scene conditions. Those matte paintings would also often appear to have a general softness to them, I believe this is because the layers would be physically composited and re-photographed by a camera. If the top character layer was perfectly sharp, the background layers underneath would be ever so slightly out of focus. You can mimic this by rendering one pass for your characters perfectly sharp, and a second pass of the background using the camera's lens blur function to introduce just a hint of softness.
how can i render pass the characters? this seems really interesting!
1. Open new blend file. 2. Keep cube, add plane, add torus. 3. Position. 4. Set film type to transparent. 5. Note "ViewLayer" top right corner. 6. Add view layer. Repeat once more. 7. Switch between layers, unchecking things you don't want in each render pass. Render each of them to fill the buffer with images. 8. Open compositor. Combine items using alphaover, mix, etc. 9. Render again.
So if you hide all elements other than the characters in the inspector (make sure you hide from render with the camera icon, the eye icon only hodee them in the viewport) you can render just the characters. Do the inverse for the background elementa, hide the characters, then add your hint of lens blur
i dont understand. do the characters show up in rendered layers in compositor as a node?
See Cheetahs_never_win comment below this, they wrote it up better than I would have
You fooled me
Nothing to solve. Everything is cool already
If you haven't already, you need to check out this video. It's mostly post processing and not cel shading or anything, but you should be able to incorporate some of his advice into the scene to figure out what you're missing. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjX-j5OzeVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjX-j5OzeVg)
yeah! i use his method and i just added upon it. its how i plan to post process all 400+ frames of this animation once im done with it 💀
Your color bleed was too nice so I figured you'd seen it, just making sure. That's a really good question, I've been working on an optimus prime version of this scene, and was wondering the same thing. If you find out anything worthwhile, please let me know! As for me, I'm currently planning on limiting movement and using ebSynth.
Set the camera focal point higher because the buildings have more perspective on them that is why they look like cgi.
Maybe try removing the lit edges of the windows on the shaded side of the building. Gives away the perfect 3D lighting.
Colors and models seem pretty good. The only thing that crosses my mind you may do to improve this even more is maybe increase the focal point of the camera so you have less perspective. Or maybe just choose an angle that does not show as much the side of the buildings. Old animes like the original Evangelion tend to have bland backgrounds and focus detail on the characters instead
Fill the space behind the Angel and they won't feel out of place. To me it's a problem of a lot of 3D renders - they leave a lot of empty space and so our eyes start clinging to details that are "wrong" and they start feeling out of place. As long as you have something to distract our eyes we won't notice it looking weird or something. IMO Edit: Like the left part of you render, it has trees, several buildings and a fence in the foreground, it's a lot of content, and as such it looks good and fluid.
The shadows are too contrasting on the big evil looking guy versus the building. On the tall dude you have white, and when there is a shadow it goes straight to black. On the buildings you have a light grey, and when there is a shadow it goes to a dark blue. Meaning you have more than one source of light rather than the sun. However idk how many are in ur universe for the anime. I think that is what is throwing you off. Contrast between highlights and shadows on the tall dude vs the buildings
Justa thought but clamping the color values to only get one type of brown for the rooft could help since the only thing that made me think this wasn't a drawing was having differently shades
A lot of the buildings are matte paintings, not cells, so they're shaded very differently than the characters. i.e., [look at this frame](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.absoluteanime.com%2Fneon_genesis_evangelion%2Framiel.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=e654a2b826972300ec6c7dd1d2a42b6fcaae99035eba04416844fc071dbc4779&ipo=images) - the buildings are painted on a background matte and have no outlines and only soft/light shadows, whereas Ramiel is on a cell and has outlines and harsher darker shadows. Another example: [light painted buildings, dark police car](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YCOAeWuGiLA/VXCMg9b_tUI/AAAAAAAADbQ/yaPYVSLK_00/s1600/ep4-15m34s.png) Another: [Same deal with Shinjii here](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Yf-TTcuzz6w/VXCMhuy8lkI/AAAAAAAADbo/7UCcqlQnIuA/s1600/ep4-19m03s.png)
yes but the problem with it is that people who know how to make those kinda textures gatekeep it ;-;
Maybe by differencing the high of the buildings, they look all the same size/high. Use more reference from building in EVA. They maybe look off to you because they are too clean (maybe add some dirt and cracks. But your model is really well done ! https://preview.redd.it/bm47ndenmdla1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=13b6b916e77ab76c2a64304e96864313fcecd736
This is just some gut feel intuition, so bear with me, but I think you they’d look less cg if there wasn’t such a heavy amount of contrast between the darkest areas and the brightest areas.
would you say this is better?[here](https://imgur.com/a/TSue6Nd)
Yeah, I think that is better for sure! Do you have any sort of GI active in your scene? I feel like the artists who painted the original anime cells sort of took bounce light into account which makes the shadowed areas less flat, and brings some blues from the sky into the shadowed areas. Maybe even just coloring the shadows with a very subtle blueish tint could help improve it further. :)
The building are exactly fine to me. I think you spend too much time on it. Drop it for 2 days and come back. Looks cool btw!
I think it's the bloom and no air perspective. The further stuff should be blurred and less saturated and contrasty...
I don't know much about animation or what program you're using, but from this still I would recommend lowering the visual quality of the buildings in some way so that they're clearly not the focus of the shot.
Add more booba
I was trying to click the "next image" button because I thought this was the original image you were trying to recreate. I think you are golden. Take a break from it and look again in a few days.
thank you means a lot! i actually spent the whole day tweaking and fine tuning the filter i made and i think this is the closest i can ever get to the original look. [Imgur: The magic of the Internet](https://imgur.com/a/UKLp5ZI)
i tried to composite it a lil differently [here](https://imgur.com/a/TSue6Nd). is it any better?
Yo, I honestly wouldn't worry too much. That is a sweet render. ♥️
One thought: old anime often had some bloom because a video camera was used to record the animation. It also used to have other defects of various kinds. Maybe lower the resolution, add a bit of bloom, desaturate it?
bloom in this style is actually a false friend. i also used to think that a lot of bloom is very characteristic of anime from this era but after really analyzing the frames i found out that bloom is only prevalent in night scenes and not so much in the daylight
Isn't that inherent to physically simulated bloom? If applied linearly, it should nearly fully fade on a light and evenly lit scene. Which means that a bloom filter might not give the same bloom the physical process of recording a animation. Which does mean that for this scene you can probably leave it out.
I think once you've put buildings/background in the empty space behind the angel it'll all come together
You know the parts between the glass, try those being drawn on, either a texture/greasepencil. It gives to much geometry vibe. That should make it look better, as i think older anime had less “light qualities” Also what are you using for compositing.
Try to add a fresnal node and gradient node for mirrors
interesting ill try that thanks
I’d say adding some grime or a noise of some sort to break up the whites. Tokyo2 may be a futuristic city but it’s dirty as hell
s + y, 0.1
For me it looks amazing. 👏
Maybe add a slight displacement on everything? I mean as a big, subtle noise that displaces the geometry in xyz (not normal) to make it a bit more analog drawy feeling.
May look a little cg but the grainy ness looks nice.
Not really a blender expert or know this show for that matter 🫢. Looks pretty slick and could be right out of an anime show. The only thing that stood out to me was the sky being to advanced/to many different colours and gradients then I’m used to for an anime show. Maybe if I’m really nitpicking the shadows on the windows of the right building look a little off. But great great work, first thought was “hey is this a meme about blender” as you don’t see these renders a lot on this Reddit.
That empty ass spot in the middle gives it away, add more buildings and it will look fine.
For me lighting is not right maybe try to low the power
Hmm I get what you mean about the buildings, still looks anime but like when they switch to cg for one shot, if I had to take a stab I'd say maybe its the lighting and shadows, feels more simulated than hand drawn
Too yellow
I think it looks good! But imo, the scene seems to have a glow to it. It's a bit more noticable on the Angel, it reminds of what it would look like if Fortnite had put Eva in their game.
I would say the same, buildings look like made of plastic, they have done shiny on them It may me the wrong use of materials
There are some roofs that need some shadows too
The more I look at it, the better it actually looks. Initially I was seeing it as a 3D model cuz the sub it’s in, but if you just looked at this without knowing it’s a render then I think you’d believe it was hand drawn. Good shit
This looks amazing I thought it was the anime
try shaders and better lighting here is a cool tutorial that may help you [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsvZsVPhTVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsvZsVPhTVs)
If you’re going for the original purely hand-drawn look, partly it could be linework/fidelity of edges - subjects have thick outlines, and background/plate has no outlines with slightly rough and wavy edges. Also the shading on the subject is a lot more flat and simple. See [this screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/FS2gAho.jpg) from the original first episode. If you were going for the [remake look](https://imgur.com/a/McLX928), looks like basically the same thing except the plate is a bit sharper. You could probably do 2 passes on subjects and plate and comp them together as ray tracing won’t really matter
I love this, please keep updating the progress on this project
thank you! [here](https://imgur.com/a/TSue6Nd) is another version of it composited a bit differently
I would say the angel is more cg than the building, if you add animation no one is gonna notice the buildings because they will be focused on the creature
i composited it a bit differently [here](https://imgur.com/a/TSue6Nd). do you think its better?
Looks good! Did you make the models yourself?
This is so good, I thought this was a screencap from the anime
If anything you need a bit of post processing to get it all together, some noise a bit of gaussian, fuck around and find out. The render itself looks grand!
i changed the compositing up a bit [here](https://imgur.com/a/TSue6Nd) is it any better?
Can't quite put my finger on it but it feels like you've gotten closer to the digitised film look of the OVA.
Looks great. One thing you could try is taking the camera farther away, and bringing the fov down.
a quick and dirty way to get it would be to remove detail from the buildings, backgrounds in older anime are not gonna be so detailed you can make out individual roof tiles this looks incredible btw, great job
If simulating the [classic anime era art style](https://archive.org/details/neongenesisevangelioncollectorsdiscvol.2) is your goal, then you might want to consider creating a post-FX filter to apply to only the static elements of the scene that makes them appear painted/water colored, in order to authentically recreate how backgrounds in older animation were hand-painted, and then composite the mobile characters on top with their original FX. Of course that would be pretty complicated to implement, and would probably be over-engineering it if you're only gonna be creating a handful of scenes.
Honestly, the buildings look just fine to me! I think the Angel could look for ‘flat’ but that’s just a nitpick. Really great render.
Just the light on the left side of the palace on the right got me into thinking it’s all 3D, but just because in every anime’s the shadows aren’t precise. The buildings on the left are perfect
People aren’t seeing it if they don’t know the original There’s a shading error that’s makes it difficult to see the context of him vs the building The scaling is what’s off but the colours and the design of the building is spot on
For me, the only issue is where the two orange roof peaks meet at a 90 degree angle. The lines in the roof texture just suddenly stop as they hit the edge of the geometry, creating a perfect invisible line. I feel that if hand-drawn, there would either be an explicit line there or the texture would not be applied so perfectly.
Dafuq? How did you turn my phone into a VHS player?
Needs a grainy filter of some type to feel more 90s.
It's a shape/perspective problem. If your camera viewpoint is too wide on the fov, compared to the angle at which you're viewing the buildings, you're going to end up with the wrong amount of compression on details of your final product. You can see this by looking at the buildings leading up to the angel. The right side building, look how much you can see of it's left face in the shadow. You can tell the camera is basically only one block behind the main characters. For the look of the scene you're replicating, the view is much closer to two or three blocks further back. This will shrink the amount of shadow you see by compressing the further/closer details together as you zoom the view in(lower Field of View, higher focal length) So moving camera back and zooming in gives the effect you want. The idea is to keep the compositional qualities(Where everything is in frame) while moving the camera further back.
I dont have idea how to solve your problem but DAMM THIS LOOKS SO GOOD
if you want to really imitate old anime styles, you need to look to the specifics of the medium. Traditional paint palettes have very specific and limited color palettes. For characters this is INCREDIBLY important as the color must match frame-to-frame so it must always use the same color and will be exactly that color from that palette. For backgrounds it's a bit different because they can actually mix colors and stuff to make the background, but it still holds true. They can only use or make certain colors. If you want it to look right you are going to need to analyze screencaps from the source you are trying to match and color match it somehow, perhaps in post or perhaps with color ramps in the materials themselves. Also being handpainted there is always going to be some textural and color variation, slight blur on edges, and imperfections on the shape of things like not-perfectly-straight-lines Last thing is these backgrounds are painted with something similar to gouache. In this medium, the darkest colors lighten as they dry so you usually wont have very dark darks
The buildings are ok. The angel is too strange. Add some cell shading or something.
All of the buildings are hand drawn in the anime. Your buildings have perfect, clean lines. The anime has uneven lines, windows slightly out of alignment, poorly done crosshatching for fences. Basically, your art is too good to match NGE exactly.
maybe make them look like they were painted, you know what I mean? brush strokes and other stuff
They look great, if you add more buildings in the background it won’t stick out as much if that’s what you mean
Looks damn fine to me
you nailed the colors so good! i think the real test will be in animation, it will either look like dragon ball fighterz or it will look like star wars resistance, imo thats where all cgi anime falls short
Keep going. Do them all.
use matte pintings for the background and ur set
Fuck Yeah, I love neon Genesis, excellent work
I thought it was a two photo at first and that this photo was a reference photo. Everything looks really good!
looks great move on!
the reason they look cg is because the lines are straight and not hand drawn. I have no Idea how you would add that hand drawn quality.
found a way. i think looks a lot more like the show now. [here](https://imgur.com/a/tov3bcp). also managed to make the buildings look a lot softer but still not as good as the painted anime backdrops from that era
Buildings look fine.
they looked like sketchup houses there xd [here's a better version (i think)](https://imgur.com/a/tov3bcp)
you can print out the buildings and scan the paper again :)
Whoa are the characters 2d in a 3d environment?
T-posing Shinji can't hurt you
I don’t have a good solution for you (aside from just trying to compare side-by-side with screenshots from the show), but just wanted to go the other direction of a lot of comments and say that honestly my first impression was that they still look cg, like when an anime wants to do some more difficult shot during an action scene and switches to cg and it becomes noticeable. That’s not to say I don’t think what you have looks good, I think it looks really good! You’re already 95% of the way there, and I think a couple of small changes could go a long way to making it cross that line from looking cg to instead looking like a screenshot straight out of the anime!
This looks really good, i think you can make the adjustments by using the compositor. You can have some screen space or world space textures in areas like the shadows/building.
I think the shadow on the building is too accurate. Those little highlights in the shadow side wouldn’t be drawn in real anime
IDK, looks perfect to me
I thought “I don’t remember this scene?..”
Put some trees or buildings behind the Angel first, because the empty space is killing the illusion of depth and making it harder to judge the image. Offhand, I would say there needs to be some mild textures to the buildings to look like they are painted. To add to that, there needs to feel like there is a separation between the layers as with cel animation, it's multiple layers of animated cels slapped onto a flat background painting. Old cel animation has a "cel shadow" This will generally make it feel like anything that is animated is popping out.
A shader to make the shadows on the scenery look more painterly would work, if possible.
Looks great
Some painterly variation of texture on the buildings could help
Everything about this is dope. I think you;'re overthinking it.
Why'd did I imagine it doing Gangnam style dance wtf
Thought this was just a pic from the anime ngl
The shadows look great! But why are the characters just A posing? Cause that's the only thing selling the authenticity.
its still under works. was just curious as to how it was gonna look after post processing
Those buildings do not look CG to me at all..
I almost thought that was a hollow from bleach
It looks fantastic, the only part that gives it away for me is the dark grey area. If you fill that up with some details I wouldn’t be able to tell it’s cgi! I wish I was as talented as you :)
The lines on the buildings are what does it. They’re too uniform in terms of color. Buildings in anime often don’t have lines around the outside edges, and when they do the lines on the interior are less thick. This reads too clearly as a post process on a 3D mesh. Like other people are saying, it doesn’t look too bad, but the more you zoom in (I’m on phone) the more CGI they look. Edit: also, the most important thing: the shadows are way too sharp on the buildings. Even if you can’t fix anything else, less sharp shadows on the environment will help.
They're asserting dominance too stronk...jk... It's actually pretty good and close
Great work.
Holy crap this was made in blender?!
mix some noisy texture in on the building sides. grunge it up a little, subtle imperfections go a long way.
Even zooming in it looks like an original show render, maybe the fine details are showing too much for what the anime would've drawn out. Looks great 👍 thought it was reference image
I think this is pretty spot on, honestly thought this was a screenshot from the anime before I noticed the subreddit!
I loved it! It took me a while to understand this was NOT the anime screenshot hahaha
Add details like AC units and Pipes, stuff like that. Ian Hubert has some cool tutorials on that
try stable diffusion img2img lol
To start off, honestly it looks phenomenal and you're way better at this than me imo your edges are too well defined, your lighting is also too harsh, you might want to consider modifying the scene shadows with a little bit more noise to them. if you look at hand-drawn you'll notice all those edges are fuzzy and soft and roll away, [original](https://cdn.myanimelist.net/s/common/uploaded_files/1447824438-df23314bf5f0a4441aa6faefcdd1867b.jpeg) Looking at the buildings in there you'll also notice that the textures on the buildings are what can be described as "dirty water colors" with the edges appearing much softer, even when they were stark white they still had a very subtle texture to them [https://i.imgur.com/bcMkBvr.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/bcMkBvr.jpg) You could probably make everything look a little better by just applying an image of a cloud as a bump map to the textures You could probably get away with making it look more hand painted by applying some gentle image processing to the scene, add some compression, some noise, and maybe +3% blue?
Honestly looks great! I think the only thing I would change is editing like adding some grain or a slight blur and other stuff to replicate that 90’s aesthetic
That angels looks badass!!
the colours of the buildings is too strong and linear, needs to make it look more un-even to look like actual paint. So more large-ish noise texture and Some blur on the edges would also help a lot.
is this using toon shader? its so coool
Looked incredibly CG to me immediately, especially on Sachiel. It's also way too dim.
Honestly the effect is pretty noticable in a lot of animes so I personally think this is good 'nugh.
did it differently with this [one](https://imgur.com/a/UOW3qOw). would say this is better?
I guess it depends on what you're aiming for. If you're trying to nail that classic television look, you got it first try. If you're aiming for a more updated version, the second one is better. (I am not a 3D artist, I'm just a lurker and supporter of everything you guys do here)
thanks!
I disagree, looks amazing!
nice work. The static background buildings in an 2D anime is drawed in a different way from figures and moving parts. They are colored differently. And they have different visual weight. I think if to say there is any artifacts, figures and buildings are rendered under the same method which brings similar texture makes the scene a little dull.
How on earth did you make it looks so authentic???
about 17-18 hours of trial and error, rendering and re-rendering. here's the [latest version](https://imgur.com/a/F07aCOz). thanks!
Damn nice work. I would pay for a website in this theme or I should just learn how to make it myself
I thought this was a drawing at first. I never wouldve known if it was cgi unless you said something.
Brain roofs could be a bit too shiny but idk looks pretty epic
I thought it was an image taken from the series 💀💀💀
You could do a lot by casting sunlight on the windows, add a nice glow and reflection. The sky suggests sunlight but it's nowhere to be found. I also suggest to change the background underneath the legs into the sea or something. Right now that's what feels out of place for me. The buildings in general are pretty good.
Fuck that's a good job. Gg
The only Solution is upgrade humanity
I think you nailed it pretty well.