'School of Cats' 2.5D Blender process overview
- Pat Marconett
- Feb 23
- 3 min read
Hello, for this project I took a digital painting and turned it into a Blender 2.5D environment!
1) I started with a layered digial painting done on the ipad in Art Studio Pro. Although most any art app will work as long as you have layers.
2) Use fSpy app & blender plugin to setup your scene. This app is free, and will generate a file that you can import into blender and it will setup your scene's camera to match the perspective of the image.
https://fspy.io (windows, mac, linux)
https://github.com/stuffmatic/fSpy-Blender (blender plugin)
download and up fSpy
drag a jpg of your background into the file
match red lines to the right Vanishing point & green lines to your left vanishing point
save as
Import > fSpy > yourfile
your file is now setup!
3) Block out your scene using simple geometry to match the image.
take your time. There will be a lot of tweaking geometry to get textures to look right so be patient.
4) Setup UV's
make sure you are in the locked camera view
select your object, go into edit mode and select all faces
UV > Project from View
(later if your textures look warped, come back here and subdivide your mesh)
5) project textures.
be prepared to redo step 3, 4 & 5 over and over!
Download the UCUpaint plugin. It may included in blenders later versions, but if not fine it here: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/ucupaint/
With your object selected, hit 'quick Ucupaint node setup' in the Ucupaint tab.
pick 'Emissions' shader
click the '+' sign under layers and 'open file'
You'll often get something kinda weird and crude looking like this. It really takes a lot of time, patience and tweaking. And figuring out what should be included in the image, or separated and projected individually.
5) As mentioned, the more individual items you break out and project seperatly, the better resutls you'll get.
Go into your layered file, only turn on only object your targeting and export as a transparent PNG. Its important the full frame is included in the PNG so that it projects properly.
When you import using the same Ucupaint settings your may get this result without the transparency:
If you know your way around the texture settings you can change it to transparent, but my brainless cheat, is to go Add > Image > Mesh Plane. Make sure shader is set to 'Shadless' and 'Alpha' is checked.
You'll notice it imports nice and transparent, so next we can steal the node info
Go into the Shading panel, and I just copy all the nodes plugged into the Material output
and paste them into the bus object. and just connect them to the Material Output and delete the old nodes.
And then you'll have a nice transparent projection!
6) For smaller items without a lot of depth, image cards are really effective. These transparent PNG's we want to crop off to just the object since they are cards, and not projected.
We already did a card when fixing the bus transparency, but here we go again...
go Add > Image > Mesh Plane. Make sure shader is set to 'Shadless' and 'Alpha' is checked.
Then just move, rotate, and transform into place.
7) Adding animation.
Animation sequences can be added in a very similar way.
Select all the frames of the sequence and make sure 'Detect Image Sequences' is checked
Then if you hit play the images will animate. (You could also import a stationary loop, and animate the card moving as well)
8) A final note on cameras.
You want to keep your 'fspy' camera. you will need that if you even need to project a new texture.
However, you may want to add a camera move as I did in mine. For that you want to add a new Camera.
Tap the camera icon to switch between camera's when needed.
To animate the camera just select 'auto key framing' and move the camera, advance the position on the timeline and move the camera again, ect..
THE END
