Painted CGI

Done by computer and in style!

A form of hybrid 2D/3D animation which uses CGI animated models as a base, and adds stylized effects in 2D on top of it, generally with the idea of making the animation look more like traditional art. Often used to mimic specific traditional styles, such as anime, comic books, or paintings.

This can take several forms:

• Flat colors or Cel Shading, common in Anime and Animesque examples.
• Shading/texturing styles that imitate brush strokes or similar imperfections on surfaces, giving the impression of a moving art-piece.
• Adding outlines to characters, making them look sketched-over or more like drawings.
• Flat special effects like motion lines, drawn-on particle effects, or Written Sound Effects.
• Stylized coloring and highlighting techniques, such as Blush Stickers or crosshatching.
• Deliberately distorted character models, so their silhouettes and features more resemble 2D figures, along with the use of techniques like Cheated Angle or smear-framing to preserve the posing and movement style of the same.
• A lower frame rate; 3D animated films and shows are usually animated on 1s (i.e., a new "drawing" every frame), but a lot of these works will have character movements or other elements animated on 2s (new pose every two frames) or more, to make the movement have a flow and impact closer to traditional 2D animation (the money saved by doing this is a nice bonus).

This is in contrast to more conventional All CGI Cartoons, which generally attempt to mimic real-life shading, lighting and camerawork, making the animation look like a real camera filming animated people. Compare the inverse, 2D Visuals, 3D Effects. Compare Cel Shading, a Sub-Trope of this, and Rotoscoping, drawing over a live-action base. Related to Medium Blending and Painting the Medium.

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Examples:

Anime

• Beastars's animation style consists of flat colors with outlines drawn over CGI models. It also incorporates other hand-drawn special effects, such as trailing colors, smoke, and painted-looking objects.
• A very strange example from EX-ARM. The main characters and backgrounds are in Cel Shaded CGI with outlines drawn on, while minor characters are traditionally 2D animated. Many special effects are flat GIFs or drawn on after the fact, though the animation is so disjointed that it's hard to tell if this is a style or a Special Effects Failure.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The opening credits in the first three and sixth parts of the series are done in cel-shaded low-framerate CGI with some 2D effects. Mostly averted as most of the actual anime is done in 2D with some 3D visual effects.
• Land of the Lustrous uses flat colors, outlines and cel shading over 3D models, intended to look more like traditionally animated 2D anime. However, all the jewels and gem-like aspects are given fully rendered lighting and shine effects, which makes them stand out and look a bit more otherworldly.
• Pretty Cure: The All-Stars movies starting from Spring Carnival used stylized cel-shaded 3D models and rendered outlines to mimic the coloring of the show it spins off from. The anime had used animation of this style in some of the regular series' ending sequences, leading to it fully being embraced for the films.
• In most Studio Ghibli films, 3D CGI assets are usually given hand-painted textures to better blend in with the 2D backgrounds. Said textures are usually not painted digitally and were painted on paper before being scanned on computers to be mapped as textures for 3D models. Even more impressive as Studio Ghibli has been using Painted CGI techniques since 1997's Princess Mononoke.
  • Their All-CGI Cartoon Earwig and the Witch, while going for a Stop Faux-tion style, had hand-drawn animation for the magic particle effects, giving this impression.
• Star Wars: Visions has both "Sith" and "The Duel" using this to respectively resemble and painting and a manga.
• Trigun Stampede was made with a concerted intent to recreate old anime shortcuts and style hallmarks in 3D, such as giving the characters Cheeky Mouth by warping the geometry of the face to slide around and always face the camera.

Fan Works

• HYPERLINK, a Deltarune fan-animation of the fight against the Chapter 2 Superboss Spamton NEO, utilizes a low framerate, hand-drawn elements, and a diverse colour palette to make its 3D models seem like 2D drawings. The video also uses subtle tricks to sell 2D illusions that would be difficult to pull off in 3D, like ensuring that the sway of the boss's hair always faces the screen or hiding the characters' eyes in shadow to replicate the look of their in-game sprites.

Films — Animation

• Babylon 5: The Road Home: The film's art style combines this style with an Animesque look, utilizing a lower framerate in some scenes, while some backdrops, such as spacecraft and planets, are entirely CGI.
• The Bad Guys also uses a similar 3D style with outlines drawn on top, as well as flat effects such as motion lines hand-drawn into scenes.
• The real-world sequences of Bolt are designed to have a painterly feel to the backgrounds, though the characters are rendered more conventionally. This effect would be used in more extensively in later Walt Disney Animation Studios films such as Tangled and Frozen.
• Klaus is a bit of an inversion. The film is fully animated in 2D, but uses CGI lighting and shading effects to grant the film an unprecedented level of visual depth and texture, with the stated goal by the creator being to avert Detail-Hogging Cover.
• Using a similar technique, the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King (1994) was animated using Pixar's Renderman computer graphics technology, but colored by hand with Pixar's CAPS technology, which was used by the rest of the film.
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines has painterly textures and outlines applied to the CGI models to make the human world more imperfect when compared to the sleekly designed machines. The filmmakers' goal was to make the final film look as much like the concept art as possible. Some scenes also have animated versions of Katie's doodles superimposed on top (dubbed "Katievision") to show her state of mind.
• Used briefly during the song Shiny in Moana, when Tamatoa turns bioluminescent.
• NIMONA (2023): The film has a cel-shaded look to it, akin to a storybook, befitting the film's deconstructed Fairy Tale theme.
• The Disney shorts Paperman and Feast look almost as if they were cel-shaded but noticeably different; the animation looks traditional, but they are also akin to a CG film. The animators actually drew lines by hand on top of the CG models to achieve this look.
• The Peanuts Movie: The film uses four separate art-styles; 3-D props and character models that use Cheated Angles to follow 2-D animation conventions and to keep everyone as close to their designs from the strip as they can be. 2-D effects are used when someone shouts, blushes, falls over, or just with Pigpen' dust mites (for obvious reasons). There are several 2-D black and white Imagine Spots that replicate the strips' art style at numerous points too, and it all takes place in a world with realistic backgrounds and lighting. It is also largely animated on two's to match the classic TV specials (and it released at a time when this was unusual for films to do so); In fact, The Peanuts Movie is often considered one of the first theatrical film releases to use Painted CGI to make deliberate contrasting use of two or more art-styles for effect.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: The shading is done in a "painting-like" style, including sometimes visible brushstrokes, and many of the effects such as fire and magic have blocks of flat colors in them. Especially prominent in scenes with the Wolf, which are also animated on twos.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is credited for popularizing this trope for theatrical film. In order to look more like a comic book, shading often uses effects such as screentone or stippling, and the 3D models have hand-drawn outlines to them to give a comic book feel, as well as the use of 2D effects and textures. This trope extends into its sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, naturally, with a wider range of visual styles and influences applied to the individual worlds and their characters.
• The tree surfing scenes (and most other 3D backgrounds) in Tarzan are 3D with a painterly style. Possibly the Ur-Example, as the film was released in 1999 and said effect was intended to blend into the otherwise 2D-styled animation. Later films such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet would later use this technique, called Deep Canvas, much more extensively.
  • Even before Tarzan, Disney already experimented with doing such an effect with implementing early CGI effects in their last few xerox films such as The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver & Company, and The Little Mermaid (1989). The process involved tracing the CGI to paper by a computer, before being xeroxed into cels and then painted in by hand.
  • Wish (2023) fully embraces this style. As the trailer shows, the backgrounds feature a painterly look while the character models have faint outlines.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: The film has a deliberately sketchy style, inspired by notebook doodling, with visible scribbles in the smoke and around the characters.
• Turning Red: 2D style graphic window streaks were applied to nearly every piece of glass in the film. Artists introduced color pooling to the character designs that mimic the look of paint that would settle along edges and in crevices of a newly painted object that was wiped with a cloth. It can be seen along with characters’ noses, for example, as well as on garments where stitching shows.
• The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run's CGI is in a frame rate where everything is animated every two or so frames in most places to mimic how the 2D SpongeBob SquarePants show is animated.
• The Wild Robot (2024): The animation in the trailer has a painted quality to the environments and the animals, very similar to Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.

Films — Live-Action

• Discussed in Look Both Ways (2022) when aspiring artist Natalie applies for an assistant job at an animation studio. She mentions that she studied both 2D and 3D animation to help her chances at employment. Though her dream is to become an illustrator, she notes that working with 3D isn't devoid of that and cites Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Paperman as examples.

Literature

• An interesting example In-Universe in Remnants— the characters travel through a huge holographic world based on the famous painting of the Tower of Babel by Bruegel the Elder. The 3D holographic world looks like a painting, down to the landscape having brush-strokes and the river looking more like shifting paint than water.

Video Games

• The works of Arc System Works, despite being 3D, invoke the feeling of hand-drawn animation due to the various stylistic choices; cel-shaded materials, lowered frame rate, all objects having outlines, VFX being hand-drawn, etc.
  • Dragon Ball Fighter Z: The game emulates the made-for-TV animation style of the Dragon Ball Z.
  • Granblue Fantasy Versus: The game emulates the painterly-animesque style of Granblue Fantasy.
  • Guilty Gear:
    • Guilty Gear Xrd: The game that popularized this approach for the developers.
    • Guilty Gear -STRIVE-: This game builds on the foundation set by Xrd by blending more of the 3D and 2D aesthetics for a
• Bendy and the Ink Machine has sketched outlines on all of the models to give them a "classic cartoon" look.
• The Borderlands series: Borderlands used black outlines and textures with penciled-in lines to give the game a stylized Comic Book-esque look, but the lighting and shading were done realistically. Borderlands 2, however, used a combination of real-time filter and specially crafted textures to give the in-game world and characters the Comic Book-esque look, but had the lighting and shading exempted from the filter — this allows the characters to look comic book-esque, but keep lighting and shadows realistic, at the cost of high GPU load [1]. Gamers have found that turning off the filter (by tweaking the .ini file) reduced the comic book-esque effect to almost nonexistent, but it does make the game run smoother on lower-end GPU hardware.
• Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves uses 3D models like SNK's newest games at the time, such as The King of Fighters XV and Samurai Shodown 2019. As displayed in its first gameplay teaser, everything has a filter applied giving the impression of an inked illustration, similar to SNK artist Shinkiro's signature style.
• Heroes of the Storm: The trailer for the MechaStorm event depicts an impressively animated high-octane fight scene as Mecha Tyrael and Mecha Rehgar square off against Xenotech Abathur. Unlike the game's other trailers (which use either in-game models or traditional 2D animation), the MechaStorm trailer uses cel-shaded models animated in a low framerate, combined with dynamic camerawork and a plethora of hand-drawn effects to replicate the look of a 2D anime.
• Life Is Strange has realistic 3D models combined with hand-painted textures and sketch-like UI overlay, which makes it feel somewhat cartoony.
• Following the Street Fighter IV trend, SNK did the same with the 2019 return of Samurai Shodown as a Soft Reboot, also adding ink effects to hits and outlines to characters that makes the sensation that they were drawn instead of being 3D models.
• Street Fighter IV has a sort of inkbrush look but does not use actual cel-shading.
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder has graphics that are noticeably more stylized than the ones used in the New Super Mario Bros. series, featuring a number of effects evocative of older titles' 2D artwork. Among other things, backgrounds and objects have textures that make them look more like paintings, and characters are lit and animated in a "3D imitating 2D" style, including heavy use of key frames, Cheated Angles, smears during rapid motion, and textures that look as if they were painted on.
• Super Smash Bros. was an early pioneer of this technique, mainly through the character Mr. Game & Watch. Game & Watch is a 3D model that is completely flattened on its Z-axis, has a prominent outline, and is mostly unaffected by lighting. Combined with his deliberately primitive animations (being around one frame per second), it looks identical to a sprite from his own games.
• Tiny and Big has a visual style made to resemble comic books, and makes use of thick outlines for that purpose. The lighting itself is rendered as normal before being overlaid with a set of hand-drawn shadow textures that take the place of traditional color-based shadows. The developers call their solution the "hatch shader," and explain the rendering process in greater detail here and here.
• Many games running on the Unreal Engine use outlined models, such as Trendy's Dungeon Defenders, SUDA51's Lollipop Chainsaw and Borderlands. The models may be outlined, but the shading is realistic (more so on Borderlands — Lollipop Chainsaw, uses a more stylish shading technique.)

Web Animation

• Dinosauria: The animation is heavily cel-shaded 3D CGI, with a limited color palette, giving the series a distinct, stylised, painting-like visual style instead of photorealism.
• The 3D models of hololive's talents use painted techniques and shading to make them fully match their 2D avatars.
• The Rhino and the Redbill uses this and a combination of Cel Shading in order to give it the style of animated shows made by Nerd Corps Entertainment.
• Tales of Runeterra uses a painted style, with visible brushstrokes and block colors, plus select flat effects, such as smoke and explosion flashes being drawn as solid colors.

Western Animation

• Arcane is shaded to look like the characters are painted, and almost every background and special effect you see is likely to be hand-painted. Many stills from the show could be mistaken for a digital painting.
• Blue Eye Samurai uses mostly-flat shading and outlines, along with painted-looking backgrounds, over 3D models for the characters.
• The Dragon Prince: The show blends together 3d models with painted textures and backgrounds. The first season utilised slower framerates to help with the effect but it was nixed for the following seasons due to it coming across as "choppy" to a number of viewers.
• Entergalactic combines 2D and 3D elements, and every texture was individually painted in Photoshop.
• Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai: The character models’ hair and eyes have a painterly aesthetic to them, and certain effects such as magic are rendered in 2D.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021): Despite primarily being a 3DCG cartoon, effects like smoke and energy beams are hand drawn 2D animation that blends with the poppy visuals. This is best seen in the intro, which also adds 2D impact frames.
• Love, Death & Robots: "Suits", "Blind Spot" and "The Tall Grass" are animated in this style. "Blind Spot" even features some rat-like creatures that are entirely hand drawn animated.
• Olive, the Other Reindeer is CGI that is stylized as if it was a paper pop-up card. Released in 1999, it's one of the earliest examples of this style.
• Star Wars:
  • The Clone Wars, Rebels, The Bad Batch and Tales of the Jedi all use textures designed with digital brushes that replicate the look and grain of hand-drawn and hand-painted art, giving the show a general oil painting-style appearance.
  • By contrast, Resistance uses Cel Shading, giving it a very different look to the other shows.
• The South African cartoon Supa Team 4 has a slow framerate and some 2D effects during action scenes, making it look like a comic book come to life.
• Transformers Earthspark: A lot of background is shaded in a paint-like fashion. Also, certain effects like explosions, electricity, energy blasts, fire, water, smoke and dust are depicted using 2D animation.
• TRON: Uprising: This was an early example of an entire CGI show that "looks" 2D, but isn't, disguising the 3D nature of it with a dark colour palette, a strong cel-shading system, heavy usage of shadows, and a low framerate. The only thing that really gives it away are the faces, and even those tend to be obfuscated in shadow to keep up the look.
• What If…? (2021): The art style for the series includes cel-shaded characters and environments with a painted feel to give the show a look resembling that of the works of early American painters.
• The Wingfeather Saga: The art style invokes this to make it look like a painting with impressionist elements.

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