The Adventures of King Stanley
is an animated short that I produced back in 2006. It was animated and rendered using Maya 3D, but it's not your typical 3D production. Everything you see on the screen was hand-drawn and hand-painted with Black ink and watercolors. The technique used here is typically called 2.5D
In a nutshell, I take my drawings and cut them out in Photoshop. Then I project them onto individual polygon planes and stand them up in my Maya scene like little billboards. By doing this I create the illusion of depth and if the camera moves we achieve a nice parallax effect. The animated characters are rigged like traditional 3D characters except that there is no rotation or movement in the Z plane. Everything is limited to the X and Y.
