TMNT Animation Diary 02 - Background work

Here's the second update of my big animation project! Now, the first and most important news is that I reversed my decision on making these posts only available to tiers above the $1. Since then I figured, it would just punish the wrong people and so I have retroactively changed the accessibility to the first post so it's now open to all tears. You can read it HERE!

Now, since all the character work had been done a lot has happened. I have lost my fear of the rigging process, thanks to a wonderful Blender addon called "Auto Rig Pro", which just by testing it with the models a couple of time already provided me with everything I need and basically made me save a huge chunk of time that I would have spent working on rigging each individual character.

So I figured, before I would go any further, I needed to deal with the other elephant in the room: The background. My animation takes place in the ninja turtles' lair & home for the majority of the 2003 cartoon series. It's a pretty iconic location and one I always liked because it had a cool design to it. So I set out to recreate it in 3D with Blender.

I realize of course, that the background in a porn animation is as important as music in a porn animation. But since my goal is to stay within the style of the cartoon series, I wanted the background to reflect that. Sure, I could have easily grabbed screenshots from the series, photoshopped the characters out and just put a plain image behind each scene, but where's the fun in that?

So here's what my goal was:

 The first thing that I noticed from taking a lot of reference screenshots and looking at images online was that artists of the original series had taken a pretty liberal approach when it came to the logistics of it all. They had an elaborate design to work with after all and 2D art can be tough to keep consistent. At first I wasn't even 100% sure that the entire room was circular, until I found this scene:

 So after seeing that, I realized I could break the entire room down into circle segments and then build my way up from that. So I started with one segment of 15° and mirrored that to 30° to create one of the six arches. After that I just duplicated them and had the entire room. After that it was just a matter of adding things and filling the lair with life: Once I began to add the various areas of the lair however, I ran into problems. The issue is: In a hand drawn 2D cartoon series the camera is static most of the time, so backgrounds will usually be drawn with just the scene in mind and not with an eye for design consistency. And even though the ninja turtles series is pretty good at keeping things roughly the same shape, the problem becomes apparent when you are trying to transport a 2D design into the 3D world where things have to be consistent shape, size and dimension. Here are just a few examples from the show, that demonstrate what I mean:

 It made it difficult for me, because I had to improvise and sorta find a median of what I wanted every aspect to look like. Again, in the grand scheme of things, this probably doesn't matter, but there is a little voice in the back of my mind that goes "If you don't do this, people will notice." So I couldn't help it. x3

Another challenge was the realization of various elements. As you can see, the lair houses a small lake in the middle. Usually that lake is just colored with bright green water, with now great detail put into it. At first I was under the impression that I could get away with it, but again that voice in my mind figured, people would complain about it if the water looked static. So I actually had to dive in (pun intended) and learn about geometry nodes in Blender. They are a handy albeit at first complicated work method to generate various procedural effects. After finding a good video tutorial on how to make toony water waves, I managed to put this together:

 And I gotta say, I'm kinda proud of myself for pulling that off!

As I progressed on the lair design, I stumbled upon one scene in the series, that proved to be invaluable. There is a point where Donatello notices his security measures have been breached and views a map of the lair:

 Since I couldn't find any official design documents or similar, this little overview provided me with all the information I needed on where rooms where, what shape the lake was and the general layout. I adjusted a few things after finding this to make it match up to this little map.

Which then brings me to the direct comparisons of the final lair design between my rendition and the original show. Enjoy!

TV area:

Donatello's lab, a bombed out subway car:

(Here I struggled a bit to put the camera in a similar position because the column was in the way. One of the concessions about having persistent 3D objects)

Look into Splinter's Room: 

 As you can see Splinter's Room is considerably larger, because it would have been just too small for a scene with him and Asyr in it.

The cobble stone floor, which is existent in later episodes also presented me with a challenge, that I was able to solve thanks to geometry nodes.

Wide shot of the lair:

 Now, this is the final result. Of course I couldn't reach 100% accuracy for reasons I listed before, but I still am quite happy with how it all turned out. The texture work and drawing on outlines on floor and walls was particularly rewarding because I didn't have to use any textures. Instead all is generated purely by coloring in the corresponding 3D model and the shader does the rest of the work.

Now the last thing that I needed to do, was to build the "sewer slider", a vehicle the ninja turtles use on occasion. I had foolishly written it into the script and no way to undo it, so I had to spend some extra time on it:

One cool thing the car does in the series is to bend its wheels and fly:

So of course my car can do that too:

So yeah, that's about it! It was a LOT of work to get to this point. When I started, I was honestly under the impression that working on the background wouldn't require this much time. But in the end I am glad I put all this work in, because it allowed me to learn a lot of new things and instead of just having bits and pieces to use for the animation, I have an entire fully realized set, which allows me to move the camera around and see which scenes work best from what angle. It will definitely pay off when it comes to animating!

Next time, I'll be talking about rigging and then things will get interesting!