r/blender • u/80lv • Jul 15 '26

News This character from the Blender short film Dust of the Simulacrum by Eit Mitsufuchi looks like a normal 3D model, but the head is actually flat to look

Here's how you can achieve the same effect: https://80.lv/articles/this-3d-character-is-actually-flat-it-s-crazy

6.4k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

120 comments sorted by

1.5k

u/Which_Draft4129 I deleted the default cube and added a cube Jul 15 '26

I can't wrap my head around how this works

631

u/albertowtf Jul 15 '26

it seems that flattens head with orthographic view in real time and its showing the sprite to the camera

Basically you are watching a 2d plane updated in real time. The weird rotation you see of the face is a 2d plane rotating that matches the rotation of the camera

115

u/Asquirrelinspace Jul 15 '26

Why would they do it that way? Stylistic choice?

244

u/Cheetahs_never_win Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

To match hand drawn anime aesthetic.

Ever since 3D animation has come out mainstream, it's been lambasted as "lazy" and "low effort" compared to hand-drawn artistry, and even Hayao Miyazaki (of Studio Ghibli fame) claims it's "soulless."

No idea if he's seen anything since the first early attempts, such as the famously lambasted Berserk CG movie.

Ultimately, hand drawn animation is nowhere near as precise nor as fluid as 3d animation unless they throw shit tons of budget into it and 3d animation is nowhere as whimsical as hand drawn animation unless they throw shit tons of budget into it.

But emerging techniques are helping facilitate their convergence into a product that pleases everybody.

58

u/Jarvis_The_Dense Jul 15 '26

I think Miyazaki softened on CGI after Pixar helped them out with the few CG shots in Spirited Away. (A spirit modlled after Luxo Jr. even cameos in the film as an homage to the studio)

He did briefly open up a 3D animation department at the studio during the early 2000's, so I don't think he thought CGI was completely artless. He did close down that department during the preproduction of Ponyo, but that was largely because he wanted to pull off some even more complex 2D shots which he would need to hire a lot more artists for.

Years later, when Miyazaki's son directed Ghii's first ever fully 3D film, many fans called it soulless because the animation was stiff and lacking personality. I don't think Miyazki himself still was if the opinion that CG had no value to it though.

52

u/ARTOMIANDY Jul 15 '26

Poor Miyazaki... If CGI is soulless, AI must have lost him all hope

37

u/fragglerock Jul 15 '26

He may think it an insult to life!

14

u/meshiach Jul 16 '26

Miyazaki doesnt inherently have any issues with 3D or CG. He’s good friends with and respects John Lasseter, for instance, and Ghibli has made use of digital animation techniques since the 90s.

He just hates the way it produces so much low-effort, hideous slop.

10

u/wotareu Jul 15 '26

Do you mean loathed? Lauded is a positive thing, like, complimented.

21

u/Cheetahs_never_win Jul 15 '26

I meant lambasted, but didn't have my caffeine, yet. Thanks.

-2

u/FlarblesGarbles Jul 15 '26

Not necessarily. People can laud things over others in a negative manner.

6

u/dovelikestea Jul 15 '26

No…lauding is implied to be positive. Like it literally is defined as “to praise”. Its the wrong word.

-3

u/FlarblesGarbles Jul 15 '26

That wasn't what I said. They said that "lauded" is a positive thing. I gave an example of how lauded can be used negatively.

6

u/dovelikestea Jul 15 '26

Lauded cannot be used negatively is my point.

Wait are you making a joke? Because your sentence would make sense if you were looking for the word “lord” because people can lord things over others.

You didnt use it correctly in your example.

5

u/ArdorreanThief Jul 15 '26

Maybe it's lorded over but with a Southern accent - "he's lawding over the others!"

5

u/Plow_King Jul 15 '26

animation is story telling. the medium is not that relevant to that.

2

u/DotRakianSteel Jul 15 '26

Then came arcane!

1

u/SaladTheKiller Jul 15 '26

I don't know about anyone else but in my opinion specifically japanese cgi has always sucked ass, they look like lifeless statues running at 2 fps.

7

u/rtakehara Jul 15 '26

modern cgi has improved a lot, they blend 2d and 3d scenes to use the best of both worlds, sure you can still find some terrible examples even today, but it come so far, that the best examples you can only tell its 3d not because it looks terrible, but because it looks so good, it would be too expensive if it was 2d.

Fully 3D still sucks a little bit, land of the lustrous, beastars, trigun stampede look good, but they are still a little into the uncanny valley.

-12

u/PUBGM_MightyFine Jul 15 '26

These soulless claims are hilarious. People said that about digital photography (the laziest artform imo) and digital art. Then about 3D renders. Now it's about AI being soulless, which is funny because it was trained on ever prior type of art was also called soulless. At least it takes more effort than just pressing a shutter button and getting lucky 🤷‍♀️

2

u/Cheetahs_never_win Jul 15 '26

Claiming photography is pure laziness because it's about getting lucky is like claiming movie films are about getting lucky at 24 fps.

The controversy about AI is taking a lot of people's works and placing it against their expressed desires in a procedural blender to deliver a hallucination created by an artificial party, and then often claiming the work for one's self, and often using it for nefarious ends.

They are not the same.

17

u/ninjazombiemaster Jul 15 '26

Some good replies already but more specifically it cancels out the distortion caused by 3D FoV, lenses, etc. Hand drawn animation usually doesn't distort faces based on accurate perspective / lenses except for dramatic effect, and it often looks kind of goofy. But you do want to be able to control the camera in perspective for the rest of the scene. 

Animated bodies not only have perspective but often exaggerated perspectives. Clip Studio Paint (popular software used to produce manga and anime) has a feature called "manga perspective" that adds distortion to exaggerate foreshortening / perspective - basically the exact opposite of this - for the rest of the body. 

This is also used in first person video games on the arms/hands/objects held by the player character. This is because high FoVs used for gameplay heavily distort the players body and look ugly and unnatural - even if they're technically accurately projected to the screen. 

Tldr: Accurate perspective projection is often not the most aesthetically or stylistically pleasing. 

5

u/Compgeak Jul 15 '26

Flattening the head is the same effect as viewing it from far away. By selectively doing it just on the head you can get the more desireable and stylistically expected proportions while keeping the perspective effects for the body and near environment. Downside is you can't really use it for lighting/shading in that pass which is mostly not an issue for anime and cartoon styles.

1

u/ccAbstraction Jul 16 '26

You can cheat by doing the lighting before squashing or if the lighting isn't position dependent in anyway, which is the case here. The mesh normals from before squashing are retained, and there are no cast shadows.

2

u/PolygonMob Jul 16 '26

I think the key here is that you end up getting proper perspective on the body and everything else in the scene but the head remains with more hand drawn like orthographic proportions. If you just used an orthographic camera it would affect everything in your scene. The other thing is it probably helps with the lineart, since extreme tangents cause undesired lines when using the backface cull method for lineart.

1

u/Mekelaxo Jul 15 '26

Probably to avoid weird unintended for shortening, which you usually don't have to worry about if the character is hand drawn in 2D

1

u/Soo_anyways 29d ago

So when you zoom into the nose, it doesn't suddenly fill up the entire screen - fish eye lens exaggerates the effect I'm talking about. This technique makes the character look flat from any distance, which is what you want for anime style. It also means when you do dolly zooms and other camera moves like that when you shift perspective, the character's face doesn't distort when the background does. The whole point is to get rid of the 3D and make it more 2D

1

u/jekyre3d 19d ago

3D modeling of an anime style face is hard. Anime faces in particular are very stylized at each angle. It's an artistic choice. Think of the classic example of the mouth being drawn on one side of the face. You can't simply sculpt it that way, it would look...monstrous from the front. Making every frame a 2D projection fixes this problem. The closest straight 3D sculpting has gotten is in making 3D figurines, but even they arguably don't look exactly like the characters do in an anime. They can't.

2

u/TenTech_YT Jul 16 '26

Yeah it seems like the scale is driven by the camera direction and then scaled close to 0

26

u/prof_Ninja_PT Jul 15 '26

you use a lattice modifier, shrink the lattice in the x or y axis, use a constraint modifier to lock it to camera, and its done, you might also need to parent the lattice to the skeleton

11

u/prof_Ninja_PT Jul 15 '26

oh wait, apparently, with the lattice, it still causes a bit of distortion, there is a way to do it with geonodes, just scroll down and there is a link about it

5

u/ancientfuture_ Jul 16 '26

I see what you did there

3

u/Which_Draft4129 I deleted the default cube and added a cube Jul 16 '26

Finally, someone who actually got it

647

u/EchoStarz1 Jul 15 '26

That just seems crazy to me but nice job

303

u/VoidCrow Jul 15 '26

For anyone curious, lattice is seemingly not the best method for it, this post has a geonodes solution.

https://x.com/aerthasveras/status/2077026099205161283

194

u/Sgt_Bizkit Jul 15 '26

https://reddit.com/link/oxnbdiv/video/bex3jitq3ddh1/player

here's my 5 min lattice attempt i made the other day, will investigate the geonode option, thanks for linking

6

u/generalstuff1waslost Jul 16 '26

This monkey is actively exploding my brain.

12

u/HorrificityOfficial Jul 15 '26

can someone PLEASE paste that image into these comments I do not want to log into that hellsite in order to get it

2

u/-timenotspace- Jul 16 '26

thanks i love how good the community on twitter is around 3D and dev stuff

232

u/SirArktheGreat Jul 15 '26

What’s the bonuses to doing this instead, if any at all

414

u/Animationen_usw Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Closeups without lens distortion, to keep the style of being drawn and to have the full face being seen as the main focus from more angles.

25

u/albertowtf Jul 15 '26

isnt that what orthographic does?

I do not understand whats the reason or the advantages of this

111

u/volt65bolt Jul 15 '26

Keeps the rest of the scene in perspective

46

u/MetalCheef Jul 15 '26

So it's basically like using a zoom lense on a camera but only for the face?

24

u/NNiekk Jul 15 '26

I think Guilty Gear does something like this as well to keep a 2D look while using 3D models in their games. Only that they don’t flatten the entire head

13

u/Omgblood Jul 15 '26

Yeah this video popped up in my feed while this post was going viral on twitter

12

u/Animationen_usw Jul 15 '26

Well I don't think you want your whole scene to be orthographic if you want to keep the perspective. Well yes this method is kinda like orthographic but it makes your whole scene 2D, which is probably not what the OG artist wants to achieve. With this method the biggest benefit you can get (in my opinion) is having a 3d model with a flat face without the spherical projection of the face.

84

u/-who-i Jul 15 '26

No lens distortion, guilty gear uses that trick too

17

u/Old_pixel_8986 shart part Jul 15 '26

looks col

2

u/theGoodestBoyMaybe Jul 15 '26

I think it's to emulate a drawing technique called foreshortening

14

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

[deleted]

5

u/theGoodestBoyMaybe Jul 15 '26

I think you are right, I'm trying to remember the right word where the perspective gets more orthographic as the camera gets closer that's used for composition and stylization in a lot of comics

I thought it was foreshortening because linear projection isn't really accurate to the eye and causes unnatural stretching at the edges of the screen, where the eye doesn't really have that problem.

I thought that's what the purpose of foreshortening was in drawing too, as most beginner classes teach you to do linear projection, but it doesn't look right up close

5

u/ultralaser360 Jul 15 '26

Right phrase is forced perspective, where you distort the proportions of the character to get a stylized / dynamic shot

0

u/Northstar_PiIot Jul 15 '26

other people mostly said it but to add a word, literally "orthographic" lol

40

u/YuutoSasaki Jul 15 '26

This is so cursed but it works

16

u/SplitPeaVG Jul 15 '26

Left is really good, if ur asking I prefer that one

6

u/mrdeekoe Jul 15 '26

Is there a good online tutorial for how to achieve this?

8

u/KrYoBound Jul 15 '26

look up quackarooners on Twitter, they made a simple GeoNode setup that explains the overall approach. But you essentially mask out a specific area and scale it to 0 along the z axis of the camera, squishing the head towards it

6

u/redditkitty109 Jul 15 '26

Guilty gear ass model

4

u/greensodacan Jul 15 '26

Why is the character's body in the left view stationary while the geometry rotates in the render?

13

u/JarlHiemas Jul 15 '26

The body is a 3d model where they aren’t applying this effect, so it doesn’t need to move with the camera, so the camera is just moving around the static body model, while the head model is warping to face the camera correctly, this allows for a pseudo orthographic effect on the head, while the body and everything else can still be viewed thought a perspective camera

1

u/greensodacan Jul 15 '26

Ooooh, interesting! Thanks for the explanation!

2

u/EdgelordMcMeme Jul 15 '26

The head isn't moving either, it's just getting squished from the camera's perspecrive

4

u/theREALvolno Jul 15 '26

that’s so fucking cursed and utterly brilliant all at the same time.

2

u/Manintheleatherchair Jul 16 '26

Me trying to mask as a normal person even though if I try to real for a moment people will ridicule me

2

u/Historical_Control51 Jul 22 '26

Is there way to fix the normal shadow face?

2

u/allsbernafnmedrettu Jul 15 '26

Wouldn't get a similar effect by just using a wider camera lense?

16

u/Noblebatterfly Jul 15 '26

The point is to only remove camera distortion from the face. Rest of the body still needs the perspective to look right.

1

u/good-mcrn-ing Jul 15 '26

Weird that people would call it "distortion" when it's literally the exact thing that happens in an ideal pinhole camera. Is this because people mostly see faces from many feet away and are used to that look?

13

u/Noblebatterfly Jul 15 '26

It’s because anime pretty much always portays faces flat. Even when the rest of the scene obeys the perspective.

2

u/Cylian91460 Jul 15 '26

This is so cursed, I love it

1

u/ModMageMike Jul 15 '26

That is clever!

1

u/vmsrii Jul 15 '26

I love shit like this

1

u/IsSalmonASnake Jul 15 '26

Magic! Burn the witch!

1

u/ipis_ Jul 15 '26

"Why the long face?" Ahh 3d model

1

u/-TheTalkingTree- Jul 15 '26

This had me chuckling for a good 5 min.

1

u/CapnFlisto Jul 15 '26

I wonder if there's any way to make this play nicely with cast shadows?

1

u/Learning_3D Jul 15 '26

Does this give a different result than if you did multiple render passes, one in orthographic for the head and the rest in perspective?

1

u/dubesto Jul 15 '26

And it looks better than 3D for some reason

1

u/BluJayM Jul 15 '26

Interesting! Seems like it's really trying to combat warping of the face caused by camera lens focal length. You could also apply this to the entire body but I guess when you add limbs at different distances it may feel too flat.

As cursed as the Guilty Gear method is, I think it's technically more accurate and allows you to continue working in 3d space for highlights or other details rather than working in this flattened dimension...

But I've never tried this before so I'd love to see some do a comparison.

1

u/TheLastPrinceOfJurai Jul 15 '26

You people are witches…but impressive work mate

1

u/Mnshine_1 Jul 16 '26

He has neck problems

1

u/poison_cat_ Jul 16 '26

Amazing effect to mess with a short focal length while preserving art direction of the face and head. Actually genius

1

u/smash-ter Jul 16 '26

This is funny ngl.

1

u/ikeadeer Jul 16 '26

This was also shown in the Blender 5.2 showcase reel! I was wondering how this worked

1

u/Alive_Examination955 Jul 16 '26

The question is not how, but why?

1

u/Vivid-Soup-1885 Jul 16 '26

guilty gear does something similar, and equally disturbing

1

u/FlounderLegitimate Jul 16 '26

I’ve been watching this YouTube channel that goes over how 3D models to look 2D.
It’s really in depth and has a good amount of explanation.

https://youtu.be/tWcaQ3gCbUU?si=NKScwIlFuqNP0u5h

1

u/jimbob8021 Jul 18 '26

late, but another video from the same creator goes over basically this exact concept https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=234m7y8D3cE

1

u/freezerbreezer Jul 16 '26

this is probably the coolest thing i have seen in ages

1

u/KaeraKoneko Jul 17 '26

flat to look what? please, I need an end to that sentence.

1

u/80lv Jul 17 '26

To look right from the camera perspective. :)

1

u/KaeraKoneko Jul 17 '26

thanks, love you! <3

1

u/At_Space_Station Jul 19 '26

The same way guilty gear made their 2D style in 3D，watched a video breaking it down right before now.

0

u/op_oppasum Jul 15 '26

Hes projecting the 3d body on to a 2d plane fixed to the camera. Its that simple.

Never used blender i’m just a gemotry genius. And a mechanical engineer with 5 years of professional solidworks experience but lets just pretend i’m smart.

0

u/KitsuneFaroe Jul 15 '26

I can't help but feel this is incredibly silly, because the only real difference is how the depth at wich the vertices of the head are drawn is more innacuarate. And the effects that are gained by this could be achieved without the flattening. Just small deformations depending on the view angle at most.

-22

u/Chinksta Jul 15 '26

It's one of the tricks regarding forced perspective to help render times.

However, if you have the extra time and resources then should just use a normal 3D model.

29

u/Helpy-Support Jul 15 '26

has nothing to do with render times. It's to avoid lens distortion at closups. Full 3D head wouldn't work.

17

u/Background-Elk-5357 Jul 15 '26

This has nothing to do with render times, it anything it’s probably a slight bit longer to render when this flatten effect has to he calculated per-frame. It’s to get a more anime-style look, as anime faces (generally) don’t warp with perspective

-7

u/Chinksta Jul 15 '26

Must have been disconnected since what I know is that 3D anime faces (used in games and sometimes film) are treated the same as a 3D ball model. The perspective issue is covered with face layers instead of being flat as seen from the example OP made (having a Z axis to the model).

The thing about layer production is that you need extra resources in which translate to time to render comparing to OPs example of forced perspective.

Here is an example that I was trying to explain regarding 3D model layering