hi. been watching tarzan a lot lately and something struck me kind of odd about the background and camerawork. i did some research and came up with this - Deep Background. it is disneys technology to have a 3d world which kind of has either an overlay or simulation of brush strokes. so it looks like a 2d world (not something awful like cel chaded spider man)
i have project under way where this would have been awesome. but after some experiments flopped due to lighting etc and the whole thing looked off with the charcters. (mabe wejust suck)
anyone have experience with this? is it a software or a renderer or something? is it possible to purchase it? or short of raiding disney i got no chance in hell?
here is an article bout it
http://cgw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=Archives&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=50479
thanx ape. thats what we did. just go traditional, do all the layout as needed. we actually did make a 3d mesh but the problem always was how to get the look rather than the actual construction of the layout. i let it go in terms of work but mentally i just couldnt (needed to know coz it felt like it could be done)
it sux you cant just buy the filter or get the render. but quite a neat little bit of technology that. funnily enough they only used it for 10% of the movie...
cheers.
Thanks for the article. That technique has really beautiful results. But WHEW! I'm pretty good with 3d but a bunch of that was a bit over my head! Thank goodness for TD's!
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You can think of Deep Canvas as Painter but with an added z-depth. In Painter, each brush stroke is saved as a piece of information (coordinates, brush type, color, etc). What differentiates it from a regular 3D textured surface, however, is that the brush strokes float in space and extend off of the canvas surface instead of wrapping around it, giving the edges more of a painterly look. It doesn't seem like it would be THAT hard for some industrious programmer to create. But that's easy for me to say.
You can SORT OF rig this up with Maya Paint Effects. I tried it in an early version of PE with mixed results, but it might work better now.
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Wow deep canvas is cool
Is it possible to make the 3d background and camera movements in Maya or other 3d software’s, render it with available rederers to TARGA sequence or something, and then apply some filters on each image, with some image editors to achieve this kind of an effect. The characters still have to placed on top of it… or have to be edited to go through the backgrounds… still the camera turning to corner can be achieved… I hope
thats what id like to know. i thought this would be old hat being around for almost 5 years.
Can you do it? Yes. Will it look like Deep Canvas? I have not seen any paint filter that didn't look like a paint filter. So I'd say no, it would look like something, but not DC.
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it wont work. here is why. the touch up work will need to be super meticulous and will have to be the same throughout. you cant mess up with it or be even slightly inconsistent.
the amount of work this would take you would be better off with regular hand made/digital layouts.
we tried even cel-shading to see if it would work but even that looks quite crappy. thing is the BG looks very different from the character. youd have to work the situation according to the BG and not the storyboard.
also i got an email from a lady who covered this development when Tarzan came out (YES, i really want it :))
and it is Disney Proprietary.
enuff said.
Just out of blatant curiousity, how much would you pay if she'd said it were available?
pending a proof of concept - not more than $10k.
That article was very insightful, thanks for sharing. I was not aware of this 3d technique, I do know that toonboom opus has this 3d space, but is restricted to the "turning around the corners" thingy. Very innovative, glad its here :)
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The disney site used have an indepth film thing on the technique. I played with the idea a couple of times, but I am with you Skinny, I just couldn't make work. But it's phenomenal.
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Deep Canvas is a propretary software that the Disney guys developed. It looks really cool, but it costs a fortune which is one of the reasons why they haven't used it since Tarzan. At least from what I've heard. As for your project, can't help you other than to advise you to storyboard it in such a way that it'll look good with the technology that you do have. Good luck.
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