Animation styles can take many forms. Paper has been used for traditional cutout animation in work as varied as Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974) and the South Park pilot, but one animator is winning a lot of fans right now with his contemporary paperlike animation in 3D.
His scenes, like the animation of the horse running below, look like origami in motion, but they were created in Maya, our pick as the best 3D animation software.
The 3D generalist Marvin Büte's latest piece was inspired by the song Run Run Run by Yeah But No. A horse gallops through woods and over sand in an animation that looks like paper come alive. The trees and the horse resemble 2D cutouts placed in a scene with 3D depth.
Marvin says he wanted to explore how he could achieve seasonal weather with flat cut-out paper structures. In a making of video on his website, Marvin explains that he created each state in the horse's running cycle as a separate mesh, using MASH to cycle through them. The shot is one loopable set, and almost every object is a planar surface, Marvin says.
Another one of Marvin's animations in the same style features a bear catching salmon as they leap up a paperlike waterfall, for which he used Bifrost, the visual programming environment in Autodesk's Maya for creating procedural effects.
You can see more of Marvin's work on Instagram.
If you're inspired, see our guide to the best laptops for animation. And for more animation news, check out the adorable Dunkin' Christmas ad.
