Designing Animation Backgrounds Using Blender & Photoshop Tutorial from Gnomon Workshop

The 9-chapter video course is recorded by Castlevania's former Background Design Supervisor Jose Vega. 

 

The Gnomon Workshop has released a video tutorial on designing animation backgrounds using Blender and Photoshop. The course has 9 chapters recorded by Jose Vega, Senior Concept Artist for Magic: The Gathering and former Background Design Supervisor for Netflix's Castlevania.

The chapters include:

  1. Animation Backgrounds – Pipeline Breakdown
  2. Introduction to Blender
  3. Blocking Out a 3D Scene in Blender
  4. Lighting Exploration in Blender
  5. Color Thumbnails
  6. Finishing the 3D Scene in Blender
  7. Rendering Setup in Blender
  8. Digital Painting in Photoshop 
  9. Creating Animation Backgrounds – Final Thoughts

In the 4.5-hour workshop, Jose shows how 2D animation backgrounds can be created with 3D assets, how to match a perspective and block out a scene in Blender before adding details and establishing the lighting with photo-bashing and digital painting.

The artist also covers how to incorporate 3D assets to quickly populate a background design. He teaches his techniques for isolating individual elements from larger models in Blender to create mini-assets to help populate and customize your scene further.

Then, he proceeds to master a fully rendered scene complete with reflections, fog, and ambient occlusion, sharing his thought processes and techniques. Finally, he discusses his personal approach to using render passes generated from Blender to create alpha channels that aid the final polishing work done in Photoshop.

At the end of the course, you'll have project files including Jose’s storyboards, work-in-progress images, and his final, multi-layered Photoshop document.

You can access the guide by subscribing to the Gnomon Workshop for $49/month or $490/year. Check it out here and don't forget to join our new Reddit pageour new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

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