I’ve written before about my admiration for the animation studio Gainax and their highly creative work. This time I’m curious about a very particular element: The starfield background art of 1988–1989 OVA Gunbuster.
The original backgrounds were probably painted with Nicker Poster Color, an opaque watercolor similar to gouache. The stars were likely dotted-on with a brush (or sprayed-on in case of nebula).
Mostly the stars scroll with the background, but a few times they parallax. My guess is a transparent sheet was used.
The interesting artistic choice is how colorful they made it. It’s psychedelic, using intentionally imperfect sphere, and close too breaking the illusion of a night sky.
When recreating this this art digitally, the challenge isn’t covering a canvas with blobby particles. It’s in re-creating the artifacts from the analog pipeline (Lenses, Cameras, Film) that gives it a soft and organic look.
Zooming into a high-resolution capture and compressing the tonal range reveals some of these optical characteristics. Blues tend to shift right, reds bleed outward. There’s also a noticeable amount of film grain and haloing.
Even with digital artifacts, we can deduce a lot about the analogue pipeline.
Using blurs, chromatic aberration, a fake noise grain, some film filters we can get pretty close.
Three.js was used for rendering, lil-gui for the control panel and Claude helped me write the WebGL shaders. When everything was set up it was a matter of dialing in the value to match up with the references.