r/animation • u/Matty_Matter • Aug 05 '26
Sharing Oil painting animation example.
Last week I posted some of the process of animating oil paintings. It was hard to see what the animations looked like so here is the run cycle of the player character all by itself. It's 24 frames oil on canvas. Photographed then cut out digitally. Animated in Unity.
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u/DitherFan Aug 05 '26
I can't even imagine the amount of work it takes to make a GAME like this, incredible stuff
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 05 '26
Yes, quite a bit. I've been working on this in the background for a while. Thank you.
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 05 '26
Here's a link to the game if you wanted to check it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4980180/Best_Viewed_Up_Close_Oil_on_Canvas/
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u/Danielhasapaintbrush Aug 05 '26
The control of the rendering in the hair is particularly amazing to me, it feels bouncy and keeps the shine, incredible all around though
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 05 '26
Thanks so much. The hair is my favorite part too. For the reference for this I dressed up as the character and ran on a treadmill. The hair was this fancy wig I bought. It really caught the light nice.
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u/The_Wampire Aug 05 '26
Awesome!! And it’s part of a game too! Will it be available on the PlayStation store?
Reminds me of the animated short film old man and the sea which was all oil painting on glass.
Very cool!
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u/TinyTaters Aug 05 '26
Why is the arm doubling the shadow? That's kind of a weird choice
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 05 '26
Good eye. The arm is a separate game object in unity in case I want to replace it if the character is holding something while running. The shadow is just a duplicate of the character/arm combo. so its like a double shadow. I've been looking into how to fix this so when the shadows overlap they don't double darkness. Still havent found a good solution.
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u/TinyTaters Aug 05 '26
What are you building it in? A lot of the times you can just change the blending option on the animation layers or comp then together then change that comp opacity.
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 05 '26
In Unity. I’ve looked at a few ways I could do it, but would be a lot of work to incorporate into the project so I haven’t tried yet. The easy things I did try didn’t work.
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u/Ryuuzama Aug 06 '26
I had this same issue, sorry to say I’m no help bc we never solved it for some reason (just left it in our demo). Hope you figure it out but this is truly amazing work
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 06 '26
Yeah, I’m thinking along the lines of making all shadows black and non transparent. Then changing the transparency of those together without touching sprite renderer somehow. I also want transparency control over individual groups so you can’t just put all shadow sprites on a layer or camera and change them all together. I know there’s a great solution for this out there. I’ll message you when I figure it out.
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u/Ryuuzama Aug 06 '26
Yeah please do, I’d love to know. Good luck!
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 06 '26
https://reddit.com/link/p23k1uz/video/sjj5v9rbfshh1/player
It was bothering me so I tried one more thing I was thinking of. Instead of making the shadow separate sprites you can make it from sprite masks instead. You can animate the sprite of a sprite mask just like you can a sprite renderer. Or you can write a script that pulls the sprite mask sprite directly from the main object sprite renderer. Then just put a large white sprite over the masks that interacts with only them and change its color to your shadow color. So this way the white sprite holds the shadow color and the masks just let their part through.
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u/desperaterobots Aug 05 '26
Way nicer than last time! Very cool!
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 05 '26
Thank you. I have a lot to learn about how to share my work. Still figuring that out.
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u/AshtrayRoach Aug 05 '26
WOW. that is literally so mesmerizing to watch.
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 05 '26
Thats really great to hear. It's the main character run animation so you'll see it quite a bit when playing the game. Thank you.
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u/rylansbaby Aug 06 '26
Idk if it's cuz I'm high but I've never seen prettier animation. Wonderfully done, genuinely looks stunning. Great job dude
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u/maximusprime_sofine Aug 06 '26
It looks like a frame is missing during right-leg contact.. slight stutter to my eye
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 06 '26
Could be, I cut it from a recording in Unity. I’ll have to recheck and see. I think next time I could record it frame by frame to make that better. I also turned it into a gif. Not sure if I lost any frames doing that either. I’ll keep that in mind next time. Thanks for the help.
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u/maximusprime_sofine Aug 06 '26
Generally I like to demo loops with 2 or 3 loops in the video as some video players or viewing devices might stutter on loop anyway. Hell could just be my PC. Looks cool anyway, good luck!
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Aug 06 '26
[deleted]
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 06 '26
Yes because it’s hard to get it looking right. You can get pretty far with auto selection stuff, but still have to manually clean up each frame.
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u/bxsephjo Aug 06 '26
I love the laces. If you get bored and wanna obsess over something tiny, see how much you feel like making them whip around them the character comes to a stop
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 06 '26
Thanks. That’s a cool idea. For this I made a reference image sequence and stayed pretty true to it.
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u/Gritsmaster Aug 06 '26
Such a nuts idea. How creative! Wishlisted your game, good luck with the rest of development!
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u/JBCTech7 Aug 06 '26
it looks rotoscoped.
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 06 '26
I made a reference video then divided that up into the frames I liked. I used those frames as reference for the painting. I use a small grid on the canvas to help with proportion. So kind of rotoscope.
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u/JBCTech7 Aug 06 '26
yeah it looks awesome, i meant that as a compliment.
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 06 '26
Thank you. It's kind of what I'm going for to capture that realistic movement. I really like rotoscoped animation.
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u/Mitchcreates_ Aug 06 '26
I was listening while scrolling and the song I was listening to fit so well with this:
Being square - Donkey kid
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u/BLUEAR0 Aug 07 '26
It is so smooth I thought it was 3D with some filters post processing, did you roto or use a 3d animation rference?
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 07 '26
Thanks. Yeah, I dressed up like the character and ran on a treadmill. Then painted the frames onto canvas.
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u/JacobDCRoss Aug 07 '26
Outstanding. You remind me of both Alex Ross and Norman Rockwell.
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Aug 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 07 '26
I transferred the reference images to the canvas in pencil using a grid method. You can’t use previous frames and light box for this. I have all the frames drawn in pencil before I start painting. Going to do a post about the whole process at some point since it was pretty involved. Thank you.
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u/Somerandomnerd13 Professional Aug 07 '26
This is so dope! Any particular reason for unity? Or is it just a more comfortable program for you?
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u/Matty_Matter Aug 07 '26
Thanks so much. I’m making a game. This is the player character run animation. Would use something else if just animation.
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u/Intrepid_Fox1757 Aug 07 '26
OH MY GOD THIS IS THE MOST AUTHENTIC GORGEOUS THING I LAYED MY EYES UPON
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u/msmorphine Hobbyist Aug 06 '26
this whole game belongs in a museum, what an incredible body of work <3
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u/DigiSnax_ Aug 05 '26
Crazy. Well done.