Patreon Peeks 30: Progress on an Animated Mascot (Patreon)

Hello! This week, I published a little test of rendering a 2D-looking hand illustration in Blender. I was using this little mascot character as a reference, from my behind-the-scenes video... I've been thinking that it'd be neat if I could fill in some space in my videos with this character, if the scene ever called for it!

Obviously the character looks 2D, and uses abstract, minimal lines. But if I were to rig them in 3D, it'd be neat to still have those lines convey depth and perhaps interact with 3D objects. So, I created a test that shows the hand occluding a can of soup.

The hand is really there, in 3D space, even subtly casting a shadow on the can, but only the outline of the hand is visible, the volume is not. This is even the case in other backgrounds: it's a transparent material called Holdout. Holdout shading in Blender makes the material default to nothing, or whatever the absolute background of the image is.

To do this, I had to create a 3D curve object in Blender (the white outline) that I could deform in a cartoonish way, and then fill the "space" in between the fingers with Holdout material. I'm convinced there's a more animatable way to get it done, but I at least proved the concept to myself. Here's the rig so far:

Like the Pan-Pan spaceship I created a while back, I'm once again using the Hook modifier for each finger, allowing me to stretch them and rotate them in ways that do not preserve their original volume: this makes it look more like they were quickly sketched, like in the original doodle. The geometry for the Holdout material in between is still pretty janky, that's the next problem to solve when I iterate on this again. But this is not the last you'll see of a sort-of-3D, sort-of-2D animatable Scruffy!