Cartoon & Comics Art: Direct and Indirect Stylization, Presented in a Flipbook Format. Enjoy full-screen mode using the bottom toolbar. Click toward the corner of a page to flip through the book.
The FlexRap Rendering workflow leverages Unreal Engine and V-Ray-based rendering to achieve optimal time and quality. It’s versatile enough to handle challenging scenes, including skin subsurface scattering, hair, numerous light sources, relatively noise-free dark regions, vegetation, and complex environments. While most DCC applications have similar capabilities, they often take significantly longer to render intricate details of hair, skin subsurface scattering, and detailed environments.
I’ve experimented with many rendering solutions, and my favorites are Maya V-Ray and 3Ds Max V-Ray. The first image below was rendered using my FlexRap Rendering workflow, which took 5 seconds. The second image was rendered using Maya V-Ray (CPU 12 Cores) alone, taking 15 minutes and 46 seconds. The third image was rendered using 3Ds Max V-Ray (CPU 12 Cores), which took 15 minutes and 42 seconds. All images were rendered in 4K wide resolution (3840 x 1920, Univisium 2:1 aspect ratio).
The characters were created from the Reallusion CC3+ topology model. Reallusion provides Auto Setup for character shading in various applications (Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, 3Ds Max, and Omniverse). For Maya, at the time of this post, I had to set up shading manually, resulting in a slightly different appearance in Maya compared to 3ds Max. Additionally, color management in 3ds Max differs from Maya. The environment was transferred from Maya to 3ds Max using V-Ray Scene (.vrscene), based on Chaos Group’s concept of building once and rendering anywhere. Both the Chaos Group’s V-Ray Scene format and Reallusion’s Auto Setup tools are significant time savers when replicating environments and characters in multiple applications. The USD file format worked well exchanging between Unreal Engine and Maya with V-Ray.
V-Ray includes filmic color grading within the V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB), enhancing the render’s visual appeal. Following the same principle, the FlexRap Rendering workflow utilizes a secondary application for film-like color grading. Adjustments can be made if the colors appear too vivid for your taste or your existing footage.
With FlexRap workflow, the sunlight source can be unlinked and more intricate lighting can be linked with the character. The male Sci-Fi characters were rendered with FlexRap Rendering.
Looking at the three female headshot rendering, they produce slightly different images, noticeable in a side-by-side comparison. However, the render time difference is significant. Rendering one minute of content at 30 FPS requires 1,800 frames, making the 16-minute vs. 5-second render time per frame, comparison quite impactful. Most productions require at least two rounds of full-resolution rendering to allow for at least one review, which doubles the render time.
Online render farms estimate costs ranging from $800 to $18,000 for rendering one minute of 4K content with DCC applications. These costs vary based on scene complexity and the required processing speed. Fortunately, the FlexRap Rendering workflow helps to mitigate these concerns.
Rendering realistic films, commercials, or stylized animations is a critical part of production. While major production companies and studios can afford expensive hardware for Render Farms, small studios and freelancers need innovative solutions to achieve high-quality content within reasonable timeframes and budgets.
Even though renting hardware on Render Farm websites is an option for small studios and freelancers, it remains costly and significantly raises production expenses.
The Flexible Rapid (FlexRap) Rendering solution utilizes both Unreal Engine’s near-real-time rendering and DCC applications like Maya and V-Ray to deliver 4K or HD resolution with speed and quality that rivals large production companies. Some of the most challenging aspects of rendering include handling complex scenes, skin subsurface scattering, hair, vegetation, numerous lights, and noise-free dark regions. The rendering examples below demonstrate impressive results, with quick rendering times (under 10 seconds per frame) and Kodak 2838-based color grading to achieve a cinematic look. This color grading helps create vibrant, true-to-life images that evoke specific emotions and convey meaning.
Rendering in under 10 seconds per frame is incredibly impressive when producing minutes of content at the common frame rate of 30 frames per second (FPS).
Maya and V-Ray-based environment, vegetation and character texturing, shading, lighting. Rendering with atmosphere effects, physical-based cameras, and true depth of field. Some of the advantages of the combination of these tools are:
The disadvantage is that, without expensive render farms, it can take 5 – 12 minutes to render a frame.
Rendering with Light Mixer adjustments, atmosphere effect, HDRI background with V-Ray Sun, Filmic Tone mapping to create daylight and sunset variation with a single render. V-Ray Light Mixer allows tuning the dynamic range of front and backlighting in real-time. Color grading and stylized, cartoon or comic book styled rendering.
V-Ray based 3D product, and packaging visualization, including modeling, UV mapping, texturing, lighting, realistic, and stylistic rendering, using Blender for modeling and Maya for rendering.
Hard surface and organic modeling, UV mapping, texturing of hero objects (espresso, tuna plate, éclair bun), products, and packages. Rendering and lighting in an environment with V-Ray, with true Depth of Field (DOF) physical camera.
UV mapping improvements, and alignment for shader evaluation. Procedural shading in V-Ray or Substance Painter automatically recognizes edges, and cavities and adopts to the surface. Decal application allows breaking up surface patterns. Various ways of cartoon shading: outline, sketched shading, and multi-color shading
Body and face animation-ready character design and shading with Flexible Rapid (FlexRap) pipeline.. Character, face, speech animation, and environment production with Flexible Rapid (FlexRap) workflow and pipeline. Multi-layer, non-destructive face textures, and dynamic wrinkle deformation. Decoupled non-destructive blend shape system. Character animation rendered in 4K resolution with detailed environments. Keyframed and nonlinear animation.
Body and facial animation-ready characters or avatar creation with FlexRap workflow. From concept to 3D.
Art of Level Design blurs the line between game level design and filmmaking The technology used: Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), NVIDIA Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA), Quixel, Twinmotion Plugin, Substance 3D… and DaVinci for video editing, compression and sound editing.
Lost Bay Music Video Technical Highlights:
• Underwater shading in large-scale environments.
• Real-time Global Illumination and ray tracing (Lumen).
• Dynamic lighting with animated sunset.
• Procedural vegetation creation of trees, palm trees, and flowers, allowing the creation of variations quickly.
• Configurable wind setup for vegetation for wind or float animation.
• Terrain creation.
• Multilayer landscaping, applying various materials to landscape sections.
• Procedural road creation.
• World Partitioning and Data Layers to overcome computer resource limitations in gameplay or Movie Render Queue rendering.
• Virtual Texture Streaming to use detailed textures for objects.
• Runtime Virtual Texturing to blend underwater objects with the ocean floor sand.
• Directed fracture creation.
• The scene is playable.
• Camera Sequencing.
• 1440P (3440 x 1440) resolution 21:9 Wide aspect ratio rendering. (Configurable to 21:9 or 16:9.)
Large and small-scale environment content creation and look development (Look Dev) for games, cinematics, entertainment, and education. 3D visualization and Previz with real-time or near real-time rendering, with thousands of ready-to-use 3D assets. Daytime, nighttime, wilderness, factory, city, indoor, outdoor, and FX lighting.
Super speed 3D rendering of 3D graphics. using Unreal Engine. Groundbreaking real-time 3D graphics from my music video project:
The 2160P Quality playback setting shows the least amount of video compression noise effect as the best representation of the rendered content.
This technology opens up a new chapter in 3D entertainment and visualization:
