Lollipop Shaders - Atomic Cartoons Lego Marvel Avengers

Atomic Cartoons approached us for their Lego Marvel Avengers project: the goal was to take their existing final renders and recreate them to an artistic style. Atomic completed the shots in their Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Lego style and wanted us to match their artwork more closely and move away from the standard Computer Graphics (CG) look.

Intro Trailer (video link)

Setup
For this project, using our renderer agnostic workflow was ideal since the passes were already rendered: we developed these tools exclusively within the Foundry Nuke compositing software to work with existing rendered data. It consists of various applications of Cell Shading, Linework, Illustrative Hatching, and a variety of Painterly options.

Challenges
The restrictions and goals given by Atomic Cartoons were an excellent opportunity to show the power of a compositing workflow with our custom tool set:

• Take the existing CG shots and apply Stylized NPR treatments based on 3d data
• Do all treatments with our Nuke compositing custom tools
• Hit desired artwork for look

Goals

• Match the desired artwork for the look
• Apply the artwork to already rendered animation sequences
• Limit the compositing tree for clarity
• Go beyond the artwork with the painterly and hatching tools

When working with these kinds of projects, it is a pleasure to have a clear direction. In this case, we had the artwork from the Lego Jurassic World project we did a couple of months earlier. Transferring this artwork to an existing data set of already rendered images was the real challenge.

Concept art provided by Atomic to recreate orginal render into

Compare: Original render vs Art goal on animated sequence (video link)

Compare: Original render vs Paintery + Line Experiments on focus regions (video link)

Level Of Style

Instead of the typical CG Depth of Field (DOF) getting blurrier in the distance and extreme foreground like we see on every project, the goal was to design a Level of Style, where there are deliberate style designs at each level.

Typically, clients like it based on camera distance to mimick DOF in a different way, and it works great for that. It does get more interesting as well when applying the different levels of style to things like light & shadow areas, or even story driven: for example a certain character could be a "level 3" with simplified shapes and brush strokes, even when they are at full frame in the camera, where the other characters have "level 1".

Level Of Style on artwork Hi-res

Original Render - typical CG DOF

Level Of Style on render Hi-res

Split Screens

Original/Painterly on Depth

Halftone Lighting/Painterly on Depth

Conclusion

The tools we developed in the Foundry Nuke compositing software work well with existing rendered 3D data. During the production, when the correct data is added during the PBR render passes, the style possibilities are very flexible and fast due to GPU support. And they keep this flexibility until the very end of production.

Credits

Ernst Janssen Groesbeek - Look Deveopment
Christos Obretenov - Shader Development

Special Thanks

Tim Llewellyn
Steve Grover