Fusing 2D & 3D For Stylized Candle Animation In Blender

Introduction

Hi there, dear readers! I'm Mica, a 3D Artist and aspiring animator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. My journey with 3D began around a year ago, when I was struggling to find a job related to my degree, Sport Management. Not wanting to get stuck, I decided to (at least) spend my time doing something valuable, and that's when I took up 3D as my new hobby.

I started, like many others, watching Blender Guru's tutorials, and I quickly got a liking for procedural texturing and Geometry Nodes. Now that I think about it, those areas are the ones that drive most of my projects, which is amazing.

With time, I tried different things and styles, learning valuable skills project by project. When learning, I make it as simple as possible: if there's something I certainly like, I try my best to recreate it using my current skills, and in my style. Nowadays, I'm more interested in developing tools, animating, and implementing 2D elements onto my 3D work, which brings me to this project.

Getting Started

This candle animation began as a little demo project to showcase the dithering effect I developed for my Blender Compositor effects pack, the Compositor Style Toolkit. I wanted to build a simple piece that allowed me to utilize the effect, without making it obvious, complicated, or even salesy. For me, it was more about evoking something and using the effect to push it further, rather than making it the star of the show. It was the perfect opportunity to implement some new techniques I had been learning.

Inspiration came from some animations I saw on social media, which had a painterly look of some sort, and mixed 3D and 2D. With that in mind, a simple candle was a great choice because the object itself would allow me to integrate all of those concepts. The references used were entirely for the flame, to aid in the animation process.

Workflow

Modeling was the first thing I tackled. The goal was to achieve an interesting shape while keeping a lean topology. Lighting came second, as I usually do. Nothing fancy here, just setting the general direction of light, as the texturing would do the heavy lifting.

As for texturing, I used the Shader to RGB EEVEE approach, which achieves a 2D-esque look. With that as a foundation, I texture-painted a brushstroke map that, combined with some other basic textures, helped me blend the colors better and give them a bit more personality. The final touch to achieve the painterly look I was after consisted of diffusing the edges, subtly blending the candle and the background. I used a Layer Weight node and a Transparent BSDF for that.

Then I moved to Krita to handle the flame animation. Once I had the rough pass done, I worked in layers to color it, using different colors to give more depth to the flame. The trick was in introducing slight variations in movement on each layer. Once everything was done, I exported the animation as an image sequence and went back to Blender.

With a bit of tweaking in color, I used the image sequence on its own to create a sort of "ghost flame". At the end of the day, it's all about the tiny details.

The piece finally came together after rendering when I applied the dithering effect from my Compositor Style Toolkit to get the pixelated retro look. After that, all that was left to do was go through some color correction in Resolve, and everything was done.

Conclusion

It took me around 8 hours over 3 days to complete this project. My challenge was getting the animation right. Haven't done anything like this before, and being able to convey a proper flame movement was tricky, but I'm happy with the result.

And what did I learn from this? Definitely new and exciting ways to texture my models, along with novel processes with which I can incorporate 2D into my workflow for future projects, which is something I really look forward to.

If you're new to the Shader to RGB, toon shader workflow, this tutorial helped me a lot:

And if you're just starting with 2D animation, or animation in general, I would totally recommend Alex Grigg's YouTube channel. He's a great teacher and you'll get the basics right away.

Thanks for reading!

Micaela Sanchez, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford