LogInSteve Salmond detailed his approach.
Steve Salmond has been experimenting with combining Procreate art and Blender to create projection-mapped painterly backdrops for 2D animation like this one. In the video above, you can watch a rough timelapse of the process, and the artist also offered a brief seven-step overview of the workflow:
- Create a rough scene layout in Blender and render it out with flat colors (using cryptomatte is one way to do that);
- Import into Procreate and use a flat color map to quickly select different objects as you paint;
- Create a group for each "layer" you want to have in the projection mapping later on. From roughly back to front, I had layers for the sky, background foliage, ground plane, robot head, hands, foreground foliage, etc.;
- Export the various layers as PNGs with transparency;
- In Blender, create a material for each layer you want to project onto the scene. You can see shader graph examples in the process video. I used the ProjectionNode from Camera Blender extension to quickly create projection mappings for each layer. One thing to note is that if you want to move your original camera, create a duplicate of it and do the projection mapping from the static camera instead;
- I ended up adding some extra planes and projected foliage onto them to help hide the transitions between the robot head/hands and ground;
- Once everything is mapped, you should be able to start animating your camera. The amount of motion you'll be able to get away with will probably depend on your specific scene layout.
Here's another great example of projection mapping in Blender by Faiz Azhar:
Procreate is an incredible tool that keeps getting more powerful, and we love showing off what it can do. Take a look at how well it works for hand-painting 3D art, check out this stunning 2D hands animation, and get a brush that perfectly mimics pencil drawings:
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