Norageki - Futuristic Space Journey Created with CINEMA 4D

An innumerable number of different series are produced each year to at least partially satisfy the insatiable appetite the Japanese have for these comics.

More series, more work, and less time in which to complete this work – no wonder studios are using CINEMA 4D more often in order to better meet their deadlines.

ne cat, three men and two women are locked in a strange prison that turns out to be a damaged space station. A scenario that can accommodate a great deal of action and mystery, which is supplied by screenplay author Hiroshi Sato, a successful screenplay author of numerous successful anime series. The project was directed experienced Hiroaki Ando, who is also a veteran in the field of anime. The project was created and produced by SUNRISE Ogikubo Studio. Founded in 2000, SUNRISE Ogikubo Studio has also worked on Katsuhiro (Akira) Otomo’s ‘Steamboy’, in which they included a great deal of 3D CG.

For Norekagi’s production, the studio made a dedicated decision to use CINEMA 4D because many of its features are unmatched in the 3D software industry. Modeler Yuuki Yamada values the intuitive and easy-to-use modeling tools. He has very exact specifications when modeling: “I try to create 3D models that offer good results for cartoon rendering. Corners and edges have the same relevance as the coherency of lines on surfaces or of an outline. In this respect, CINEMA 4D is very helpful because Sketch & Toon can be used as a preview renderer during the modeling process. This helps in the creation of a character just as much as when modeling technical details!”

CINEMA 4D also proved to be very flexible in the creation of the characters’ facial animations. The animators considered the ability to continuously edit points within a given Morph Target as particularly helpful and time saving. This made it possible to add all necessary facial expressions, e.g. for the mouth, to a character for which a Morph Target was used to partially close its eyes. The fact that additional Morph Targets could be applied and that individual points could be edited made CINEMA 4D even more beneficial to the project.

In addition to work on characters, CINEMA 4D was also used for creating backgrounds. Generally speaking, two methods were used to create backgrounds: First, the team created backgrounds using the traditional brush and paint method and then projected these onto geometry using camera mapping. The second method was the reverse of the first, in which models were first created for the backgrounds, which were then used as a foundation for painting fitting textures.

The fact that CINEMA 4D made it possible for the team at SUNRISE to work directly in the actual camera view used for the film, sped up workflow considerably. This, in combination with CINEMA 4D’s modeling capabilities and Sketch & Toon, are features that were not available in other apps used in production and features that made completing the project much easier for SUNRISE Ogikubo Studio.

Client
www.bandaivisual.co.jp/e

Studio
www.sunrise-inc.co.jp