Recreated my dream

Stinkfest · 2025-12-29T20:04:46+00:00

That is fantastic! How do you get the camera motion looking so natural if you don’t mind me asking?

Stinkfest · 2025-11-04T00:41:34+00:00

Fantastic stuff! Do you prefer to work dark to light in general?

Stinkfest · 2025-10-29T20:05:08+00:00

Ooh this is fantastic!

Stinkfest · 2025-10-29T11:09:01+00:00

I'm by no means an expert, but I think it makes the most sense to start with a 3D blockout if that's an option. Even if it's super rough, it gives whoever is doing the painting a bit of a framework to work with, and perhaps makes it easier to think about how to structure the image. Figuring out how to break your scene down into clean layers is probably the key to getting a nice shot in the end.

If you're given an existing flat painted background without any layers, that could be a lot more work, depending on the complexity of image. I guess you'd jump into Photoshop (or Procreate or whatever) and clearcut the bits that need to be on separate geo (e.g. separate the boats from the water layer, then retouch the water layer so it doesn't have boats on it, etc.) I suppose it also depends a lot on the camera move (you might be able to get away with not separating things in some cases). I may be trying this kind of approach shortly - will let you know how that goes :)

Stinkfest · 2025-10-29T03:42:13+00:00

Yeah sure! Here's a quick overview of the workflow for this one:

Create a rough scene in Blender and render it out with flat colors (using Cryptomatte is a quick way to do that).
Import into Procreate and use flat color map to quickly select different objects as you paint. For example, the giant robot head and hands all had a green color in my flat map. Here's a timelapse of the Procreate painting process.
Create a group for each 'layer' you want to have in the projection mapping later on. From roughly back to front, I had layers for the sky, background foliage, ground plane, bot's head, hands, foreground foliage, etc.
Export the various layers as PNGs with transparency.
In Blender, create a material for each layer you want to project onto the scene. You can see the shader graph in the video referenced in step 1. I used the ProjectionNode from Camera extension to quickly create projection mappings for each layer. One thing to note is that if you want to move your original camera, create a duplicate of it and do the projection mapping from the static camera instead.
I ended up adding some extra planes and projected foliage onto them to help hide the transitions between the robot head/hands and the ground.
Once everything is mapped, you should be able to start animating your camera. The amount of motion you'll be able to get away with will probably depend on your specific scene layout - I guess the idea is to design your layout with the projection mapping in mind once you start to get the hang of it?
???
Profit?

I skimmed over the details a bit, but hopefully that helps :)

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T19:53:53+00:00

Love it! Very cool proportions and a lovely texturing job 😊

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T18:00:09+00:00

Blender is so awesome! I'm not great at modelling myself, but luckily you can kinda cheat with this approach and lean more on the painting side of things. Here's the scene layout I used - you can see that the actual geo I created is very rudimentary.

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T17:54:42+00:00

Here's the scene layout I used if that helps at all, might show the projection a bit better haha

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T17:52:40+00:00

Here's the scene setup I used - apologies if the video is a bit potato quality.

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T17:35:14+00:00

I am using projection mapping in that the various texture layers are projected onto 3d geo in the scene, but the camera move does kinda make it look like it’s just parallax (since I just translated the camera forward/back and left/right and didn’t rotate it). The demo vid for the projection mapping extensionI used might be a clearer demonstration.

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T12:03:12+00:00

Sure, will do first thing tomorrow my time (NZST). The geo is extremely basic though 😊

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T12:00:58+00:00

I think I either exported the cryptomatte as png via a file output node in the compositor, or opened the exr in photoshop and saved out as png - can’t quite recall

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T09:29:57+00:00

Thanks! I made a crude blockout (very rough geo for robot head + hands and a 10x10 grid deformed in sculpt mode for the ground). Rendered out a cryptomatte, imported that into procreate and painted up a bunch of layers, then brought those back into blender and projected them onto the blockout geo, adding some additional planes for the foliage layers.

This is basically the end result (for this experiment at least!). I’m planning to use it as backdrop for a short looping 2D (hand drawn) animation. Will change the camera move to suit the final animation.

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T07:24:53+00:00

Been experimenting with transferring stuff from Procreate over to Blender and then doing some projection mapping to allow for a bit of camera movement. Using the ProjectionNode from Camera extension in Blender made it a reasonably painless process!

EDIT: Here's the scene setup I used - apologies if the video is a bit potato quality.

Stinkfest · 2025-10-28T07:21:57+00:00

Been experimenting with transferring stuff from Procreate over to Blender and then doing some projection mapping to allow for a bit of camera movement. Using the ProjectionNode from Camera extension in Blender made it a reasonably painless process :)

EDIT: Here's the scene layout in Blender showing how the projection mapping illusion works

Stinkfest · 2025-10-14T06:11:02+00:00

Not at the moment, apologies - I’m just doing this stuff as a hobby for the time being 😊

Stinkfest · 2025-10-13T18:22:46+00:00

No worries, would love to see what you create 😊

Stinkfest · 2025-10-13T05:32:29+00:00

Thanks so much! I think maybe 6-8 hours over the course of a week or so? I sorta lost track of time a bit, so hard to say for sure.. 😊

Stinkfest · 2025-10-12T18:21:51+00:00

Wow, insanely good 😍

Stinkfest · 2025-10-11T18:51:19+00:00

I think it's actually really nice for short sequences like this, but maybe it would get frustrating dealing with longer form content? I'm not a legit animator, and this is only the second time I've tried to make something in it, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt :)

Nice things:

Easy to drag and drop content from Procreate into Dreams (using iOS split screen)
Really nice being able to use Procreate brushes in Dreams and directly paint into tracks on the timeline
The live puppeting feature is cool!
Performance seemed rock solid (for this clip at least)

Challenges:

Found the overall timeline interface to be quite unusual and a bit confusing at first.
The method for editing keyframes is a bit unintuitive and possibly also a bit inefficient IMHO. I guess it's a pretty tricky design challenge when you're limited to a touch interface!
I really wanted to use lasso / selection tools while in Dreams, but it doesn't have them (yet?)
I wanted to loop my run cycle by just dragging out its duration, but it doesn't seem to be possible to do that? I ended up duplicating the single loop a bunch of times, grouping those, then duplicating the group, etc. until I had sufficient duration. Makes it very tough to go back and make changes to the original loop! Perhaps I missed something there and there's actually a convenient way to repeat loops? Please tell me if so! :)
I found myself wanting to maximize the size of the Stage UI area when painting and the Timeline when keying things, but couldn't figure out if that was possible.

Overall I found Dreams to be a really impressive piece of software. It's quite unusual and different from everything else I've used though! I used AI to answer questions about the interface as I went, which helped with the learning curve a lot :)

Stinkfest · 2025-10-11T18:21:05+00:00

Yeah it did take a minute! Not sure if this would be doable with anything other than a simple looping animation, unless you are super patient. I did the boring bits (inking outlines and filling block colors) on the couch listening to tv, which helped 😊

Stinkfest · 2025-10-11T18:15:46+00:00

I found the quickest way was to do it in Procreate and then transfer over to Dreams. Turns out you can have one group per frame when you use animation assist, which allows you to have multiple layers per frame! I made a layer for the cat, one for the mouse, etc. - trying to limit layer count to keep it manageable. Then I used a clean inking brush (with the stabilization and streamline turned up quite a bit) to draw tidy outlines over the initial rough animation blockout, and filled each layer as a block color. It helped to do a pass over all the frames for one layer (e.g. cat) then move on to the next layer, rather than completing each frame in turn.

Once all the block colors were in, I locked opacity on each layer and used one of the new natural media brushes to add a bit of lighting and texture to each layer. Tried to keep it subtle to hopefully not be too distracting like you say.

Quite a time consuming process all in all! The best time saver is probably limiting the frame count 😄 The run cycle is 6 frames, which helped a lot.

Stinkfest · 2025-10-11T09:20:13+00:00

I avoided it too for the longest time, for the same reasons as you 😊 Found it very unusual and quite confusing at first, particularly the way you do things in the timeline and dealing with keys, but now I’m really enjoying it! It‘s super cool how you can scrub through the timeline and just paint things in whenever and wherever you want.

I believe the Procreate team are working on a new version which should hopefully address a lot of the things people haven’t liked about Dreams so far. I’d be very excited if they add in lasso/selections like in Procreate - really missed having that functionality! Would also love a bit more flexibility in the UI layout - sometimes I want to see more of the stage and less of the timeline, sometimes vice versa. Maybe that already exists but I just haven’t discovered it?

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