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"I humbly confess that many a time I have aspired to imitate Mignola's mysterious style in the design of my films, especially the cold, velvet backdrop of darkness from which his characters emerge. Alas, his hyper-expressionistic lighting is - I've found out - almost impossible to reproduce in a 3-D world."
- Guillermo Del Toro, 'Conqueror Worm' introduction.
"It is always going to be near impossible IMO to get any three dimensional thing (be it sculpture or whatever) to look just like Mike's artwork."
- User on the
Comic Book Resources Forum.
Anung Un Rama! Bored with photoreal In 2003 I was really bored of the 3D packshots and photoreal work I had ended up doing, I wanted to do a little fun animation in my spare time. I am a huge Hellboy and Mike Mignola-fan - and with the new Hellboy movie coming in 2004, I thought it could be cool to go back to the comics and try to imitate Mike Mignola's drawing style in 3D. I could only work occasional evenings and weekends, but after three to four weeks I managed to do this short animation. It was great fun to do, and it was amazing for me to actually see Hellboy animate and move in glorious 3D! I am looking for time to continue my Hellboy model, I promise this won't be the last Hellboy from me!
As for why I did this (besides the obvious reason, being a fan): Mike Mignolas artwork is very sculptural to me, so I thought making Hellboy in 3D was just a logical thing to do. I also imagine that doing a short film in this style would make for a more consistent and uncompromising look than, say, classical 2D animation would (hard to elaborate on this with my limited english, but please bear in mind that I love 2D animation). Kind of like Sin City was the blueprint for the Robert Rodriguez movie, I see the cartoon panels in motion each time I read Hellboy. The staging and layout is there, you just have to time it.
This project won a CGTalk Choice Award in 2003.
Hellboy is (c) Mike Mignola.
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This is probably my most visited page in the entire site, so I thought I should share some details on how it was done.
Above you can see the first test, done after a weekend of playing around in 3ds max and Brazil r/s. The proportions were quite off, and the colours were neon, but when I saw this my mind went: "F**king hell, this could look cool!" After doing some comparisons, I found this too close to the old Hellboy (Wake The Devil), however I wanted proportions more like the recent comics (Conqueror Worm).
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I scanned in some drawings and finely adjusted every vertex and edge, making sure they lined up to the newer Hellboy novels. Above you can see my 3D Hellboy rendered from the front and the side. As you see, he's modeled to look nice from all angles, and not to be a one-angle wonder. When I got this far I only planned on doing a 360 turnaround on him. I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to do his coat or not.
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Pretty much my state of mind while working on this :)
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A later test. I felt real good about this, so I added his coat and gun. This was when I started to realize that I could probably do a story-based test-animation and not just a turntable. The gun could definately be the 'center' of the animation. There were some shading problems, and I still had some detail work left. When you're doing something that has these sharp edges (check the back of his head), you can get some weird zig-zagging when a sharp edge shadows another sharp edge. I had to make sure that wouldn't happen in my animation. There's no subdivisions on him for that reason, so that I could control every single line on his body accurately.
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Above you can see some stills of how my Hellboy looked while I was animating. The green circles are my animation rig, and the yellow graph-looking thing represented my (then unknown) background. I did animation tests with and without handheld camera, just to see how something 'real' would look combined together with something this stylized. I went with the handheld camera, since it gave a much more 'live' and dynamic feeling to the animation. I also based the animation on a video I shot of myself grabbing a cardboard gun and breathing heavily. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think motion capture would work great on this character.
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I thought long and hard about what to put in the background, but I decided to go for a blazing inferno and nazi zombie experiments. Both are frequent in the Hellboy comics. I should have done something more complex, I guess. But at least it was fast to do, if I had more time I would definately have done something more moody and expansive. Finally, you can see some colour tests I did to try and find a palette for the animation.
As mentioned, I have plans on expanding my 3D Hellboy universe in the future, so keep watching this page :)
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All the images on this website are (c) copyrighted Rune Spaans and their respective owners. Any use of the materials on this site other than for private, non-commercial viewing purposes is strictly prohibited. If you want to use some of these images for promotional or editorial reasons, please contact me. | |
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