Ghosts Camping

My artwork’s idea actually came from AI. I was playing around with Stable Diffusion and thought of a ghost couple camping:

The AI ignored the “camping” part; it sometimes doesn’t know what to focus on.

But I liked it. With my animated short done, I wanted to unwind. So, I decided on this as a week-long project.

Layout/Blocking

I used Light Painter initially for the sky, but Blender’s sky texture is too bland for this. So I used the Physical Starlight and Atmosphere add-on instead.

I initially chose my ghosts to turn their backs on the camera and face the darkening sky. It was similar to the AI, and saved me the need to make faces.

But it wasn’t interesting and clear enough what they were. After feedback from my wife, I changed them to face the camera and campfire. I’m glad I did.

Landscape

To instance trees and grass, a simple geometry node group spawned variations of low-poly assets. The particle density was based on a vertex group. That way, I could weight paint foliage growth, filtering out unseen areas with nView.

With the tent, I did a simple triangular prism + some sculpting for the folds.

The fireplace is a free-to-use VDB sequence I found online, added a few sticks (which were just smaller instances of the log the ghosts sit on).

Character Design and Animation

I based the ghosts off of Pac-Man so they were recognizable. I used rounded cylinders and slid a few of the edges around to make the folds. I added a three-bone armature so one could lean on the other.

For the eyes, I made a simple eye-shaped meshes. The ghost materials use Fresnel to make their edges glow more.

Incidentally, my wife asked if the eyes could just glow without seeing the meshes. I turned off the ray visibility of the meshes from the camera, and the eyes’ glow now bounces off the rest of the ghosts!

After giving the ghosts a simple looping animation, rendering it out in an hour, and color grading in Davinci Resolve, it was ready to go.

Check it out on my Artstation for a widescreen looping animation.

What are your thoughts on using AI in your art? Let me know!