Toy Story 2 Redialed

About this project

Toy Story 2 Redialed is an animated collab from Dial-up Studios. The goal was to re-animate, re-voice, and re-score Toy Story 2 in style inspired by likes of Shrek Retold.

WesMakowski invited me to the project after seeing some of my animations on Newgrounds. I joined the project fairly late, so I had to choose from the scenes that hadn't been done yet. I animated scene 325 which shows Woody running along the tops of an airport cart thingy. I wound up going with this fun pixel aesthetic, and I'm mostly happy with the final product.

Process

I'm writing this a long time after I worked on it, so I can't exactly recount my thought process in cronological order for this one. I'll try my best though, and I'll write this as if I'm completely confident in how everything came together.

For reference, here is the clip that I was going to be adapting:

My intention was to make something aesthetically close to the HD-2D games from Square Enix.

Of course I wasn't going to be able to match that fidelity, but that was the look that I had in mind. I started by modeling the cart with atention to the proportions. I had to make sure the size of the faces would line up nicely with pixel textures. The imaginary voxel size I went with ended up being pretty big, but I'm happy with it.

I had to make Woody very low res to at least somewhat match the voxel size I went with. I made a 3-frame run animation to keep things really simple. I also needed this funny standing pose for one of the shots.

These were all seperate image files at 16x16 resolution made in Aseprite. I did a similar thing for the worker driving the cart.

I should mention that most of the other textures thus far were made with Photopea and edited in Blender. Editing textures in Blender helped a lot on this project. For the airplane, I started with a model of a real airplane I found for free. I don't have this model or pictures of it anymore unfortunately. I basically 3d traced it in lower quality, but I didn't care much about the proportions or topology this time around because I was in a rush to finish the project. I made and edited the airplane texture in Blender. I used the texture paint mode to draw directly on the model. The result is far from perfect, but it was good enough for the job. I also made a seperate emission texture to make the windows glow.

The ground texture started as a random picture I found online. It should be royalty free, but I don't know where I got it from anymore. I had my brother edit it into something more usable for me while I worked on the rest of the project. The lines were seperated so I just had the lines on a transparent background.

These lines were placed on top of an asphalt texture I made. The asphalt has a roughness map so that the reflection of the light is more interesting.

The skybox was made in Aseprite. There are two additional seperate builing layers on top of it. The full enviornment looks really cool.

The rest of the project is really straight forward. Everything was animated on one timeline with the camera skipping around at the end of every cut. Mostly just animating planes and objects moving. The carts have a simple rig for the wheels to turn.

And here's a test render from near the end of production. Most notable feature is probably the roughness texture on the ground.

The audio was added in later by WesMakowski. Overall very happy with this project considering I managed to get this done really quickly while also working on a seperate animation project at the same time. I'm still making stuff for Dial-Up Studios so hopefully I get to make another article like this for a new project soon.

Related Links

The full collab is available to watch at the following places: