Approaching backgrounds?

[EHEBrandon]

Okay this isn't a question on "How do I make backgrounds" but this is more of a question for every animator on how you approach backgrounds. Right now I'm working on a animated series. The characters are completely 2D animated in Moho but the backgrounds are done 100% in 3D to give a Gumball/Roger Rabbit feel. So I'm wondering when you guys approach backgrounds or for any professional productions do you usually make the backgrounds as you go? Or do you fully map out your fictional area? Or do you only map out key locations and fill in everything in-between as you go? Right now I'm wondering if I should invest time into fully mapping out the area and modeling the whole city or only do key locations up to a certain radius and just fill in the gaps as I go.

[Greenlaw]

How the backgrounds are created is usually dictated by what's in the storyboard. And how much background is shown in the storyboard is dictated by the budget or time available in the production.

Some productions will economize this by making only one or two very large backgrounds that can be pushed into on or panned over with the camera for multiple scenes. A really well considered background might even work for an entire sequence, and make it appear you've created several unique backgrounds. If the background is layered out, you have even more flexibility by moving element around (in 2D or 3D space) to change perspective. Or you might swap out an element like the 'wallpaper' in a room to create a 'new' location, or swap/recolor the sky layers to change time of day.

I can get a nice '3D' look by placing 2D elements inside Moho's 3D space. But when I really need a full 3D set to move around in, it's better to use a real 3D program. Then, I'll place my 2D Moho animations inside the 3D program.

Hope this helps.

[mrc]

But when I really need a full 3D set to move around in, it's better to use a real 3D program. Then, I'll place my 2D Moho animations inside the 3D program.

Do you happen to have an example for this at hand?

Marc

[Greenlaw]

There are scenes in Boss Baby: Back In Business and Dawn Of The Croods where we set up environments in a 3D program (LightWave in this case,) with the 2D parts created in Moho or Harmony. Of my personal 'Moho' work, Scareplane has a few scenes like that. This 'hybrid' technique is pretty common and I've used it for many years in my VFX work, long before I started using Moho. In short, you just map the 2D image sequence or photo to a polygonal 'card' and place it in the 3D scene. If you constrain the card's orientation to face camera the effect can be convincing without betraying its 'flatness'. (You can do this in Moho too but Moho's 3D options are pretty limited and harder to use.)

More often, I'll do this in compositing (Fusion and AE have 3D environments,) but sometimes it makes more sense to do this in a 3D animation program, like when the 2D characters have to interact directly with any 3D animation or effects.

Which reminds me, I wish there was a good way to move camera and other data from a 3D animation or compositing program to Moho and vice versa. That's one advantage with compositing programs: it's pretty easy to transfer 3D camera and some object data to compositing programs. (With Fusion I use FBX and with AE I just click a 'Send to AE' button in LightWave.)

[slowtiger]

The most important step is to have a really strong storyboard. Nearly 30 yrs ago it was my task to optimise a storyboard by another artist which asked for much too many backgrounds, and doing the layouts for those new sequences. I was able to cut down the number of BGs to a mere quarter ...

Do your best storyboard, then determine camera positions and viewing angles on a map, then you will know which part of the scene you need to fill with detail.