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Pibborando San posted:So I'm working with a guy to do a short psudo-trailer for his webcomic. It's going to be 2D animated in the traditional fashion (keyframes, inbetweens, moving plates) but all done digitally. Here's a short graduate film I helped out on (I colored the dog animation in Photoshop) using roughly the process I just described. I can give you more details if you like. The animation was done on paper and scanned though, so if you're planning to do it digitally, the process might be slightly altered... But After Effects will handle pretty much everything after the coloring stage. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBGACBGenG0
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Aug 21, 2010 23:07
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This isn't nearly so impressive, but I thought I'd share anyway. It's an Earthbound music video in progress that I started as a summer project. Just a fun little exercise to practice using Flash which I've been learning for the first time at my internship. I'm more of a storyboarder than an animator, so the character animation is pretty functional, but it's been fun. (PS Crank it up to 1080p!) FLAVOR TEXT: As someone mentioned, the guy who did that short went straight to Pixar's animation department after graduation since they needed animators for all the dog scenes. I visited him up at Pixar HQ last summer when he was working on Toy Story 3. This year I got shortlisted for a Story internship there, but didn't quite make it; I'm actually kind of glad because I kind of wanted to relax after the busiest school year of my life, and I can always try again next year. They did just open up a Canadian studio too, which is another option I suppose. Pibborando San posted:Wow, that was really well done. The line quality looked a little "rough" similar to old Disney movies like 101 Dalmatians when they were photographing the animators' pencil lines directly to cells. Is that similar to how this was done, or did they "ink" over the scanned drawings in Photoshop? neonnoodle posted:Can you talk a little bit more about paper->Flipbook->Photoshop etc workflow? EDIT: You might also ask Hinchu as it looks like there was a fair amount of AE in that mouse short. AJ'S RIDICULOUSLY COMPLICATED-SOUNDING GUIDE TO ANIMATION, THE PAINFUL, UNINTUITIVE, BUT SADLY EFFECTIVE WAY STEP 1: CHARACTER ANIMATION. The character animation was done classically, both roughs and clean-up in pencil on animation paper, using a light disc and peg bar. One difference though is that the guy (I'll call him V- his name is prolly in the credits) did his roughs in red animation pencil and then cleaned up with dark graphite directly over top on the same sheet of paper. This saves paper and there's a way to get rid of the red after in Photoshop later. ***The ONLY thing we used Flipbook for in this case was pencil testing, i.e. a quick and dirty way of seeing how our rough animation was looking so we could fine-tune it. Some people use it for compositing and coloring but eff that noise. I did color in FB for my 3rd year film but I'm going to focus on how V did his film. You'll notice there's some cel-shading being done in that short. The shadows were done on separate pieces of paper and consisted mainly of a single line on each frame in red pencil. I'll talk about that later. STEP 2: SCANNING. All the penciled frames were scanned into the computer using a pretty fast industrial-sized flatbed scanner. Funnily I remember watching 101 Dalmations while I was scanning. You tape a peg bar to the scanner WHICH SHOULD NEVER BE MOVED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES or else the frames will be out of synch with each other, and even if that happens to one frame it will be a major pain to correct. You might as well do the whole thing over if that peg bar goes crooked in the middle of scanning frames from the same scene. I think 300 dpi was the resolution used, but it depends sometimes on the field you're using. Also if you're coloring in Flipbook, it can't handle filesizes that are excessively large. One dangerous trick that V taught me was to just keep scanning into Photoshop until all your frames are in the program, then Quit Photoshop and just hold down Enter when it prompts you to save. You'll cycle through all the open files and end up with a huge pile of Untitled PS files with chronological numbers on the end. Use Adobe Bridge to Batch Rename everything to fit your project, like dogmovie_sc04-fr00001.psd onwards or something. STEP 3: CLEANING THE CLEAN-UP. Here's where things get subjective. You gotta familiarize yourself with Actions or you'll go insane. Open a random frame and use it to calculate an Action to, say, adjust brightness and contrast, remove the red rough pencil lines from under your clean-up, get rid of speckles, crop if needed, get rid of the white pixels so only the black lines remain on a transparent background, etc. I won't go into everything in detail unless asked specifically, but here's some helpful tips: -There is a free PS plugin called GHOST that turns all white pixels transparent as well as any shades of gray, so that your lines will remain intact while everything else disappears. You can download it a bunch of places and it's not hard to Google. I think it was programmed by Flaming Pear, and it's bundled with a bunch of other free plugins on their site. -If you used a colored pencil to do your roughs (red seems to work best for this), go to Hue/Saturation and select Red (or whatever color you used) from the drop-down menu and set up your parameters accordingly with the color sliders. Then just crank the Lightness slider up to max and watch those rough lines disappear! Then you can probably Desaturate everything and Adjust Levels and whatnot to get rid of any remaining gray bits. After you figure out the steps to making that one frame look as good as it can get for coloring, you can use Batch Processing to apply all those steps to every frame in a specified folder, thus saving you a buttload of work. Always remember to keep the original files in case something goes wrong the first time, which it almost always does. There is a lot that goes into this step but I'm just glossing over it for the sake of brevity; feel free to ask questions after. STEP 4: COLORING. Now while our teachers always tell us to color in Flipbook, I find the results to be kind of hideous if your clean-up isn't pitch perfect. I've colored in both programs, and Photoshop definitely allows for more precision, although it is much slower. First of all, you have to get all your frames in one PSD file with every frame having its own layer. I'm guessing V made an Action for that as well, or some kind of fancy Importing technique. Anyway, every scene should be a single PSD file with every frame being its own layer. You'll want to sort out your palette ahead of time. An easy way to block in color is to use Actions to, say, select the area outside of the drawn character with the Wand tool being clicked in an area of the frame where no animation in the entire scene will go, then Invert the selection and Fill with some common color on a layer underneath the linework. Blah blah, it sounds complicated but I'll go over it in more detail if people are curious. Suffice to say that you have to think like a computer and tell it in excruciating detail what you want done for the Action tool to be effective. Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy though. Once you have color blocked in, you pretty much have to go in by hand and fill in all the nose parts in every frame, eyes, ears, etc. THIS IS WHERE HAVING GAPS IN THE LINEWORK WILL BITE YOU IN THE ARSE. V had his share of these and I'd have to correct the frames by hand, which is just something you're going to have to do. There aren't too many shortcuts for this part. It's essentially click and fill, click and fill, etc. STEP 4.5: SHADOWS. So those red pencil lines I talked about earlier. They pretty much just acted as a guideline; you slap them over top of the corresponding frames of animation, then click and fill with a darker shade of the color underneath. Then you scrap them afterward. I don't remember the specifics but I'm pretty sure it was simply that every other layer in the PSD file was a shadow line. So it would be something like layer 1=animation frame 1, layer 2=shadow line for frame 1, layer 3=animation frame 2, layer 4=shadow line for animation frame 2, etc. It just alternated back and forth. I used the Animation taskbar to turn them all off when I didn't need them... Oh the Animation taskbar... that's a whole other story entirely... STEP 5: EXPORTING PNGS. Once everything is colored, you gotta export every frame as an individual PNG. I don't remember the exact steps for doing this but I think it's pretty simple. As long as you make sure the area around your animation is transparent (in Adobe lingo they call it "alpha channel") and that sort of thing. So you've got this massive stack of PNGs... Whaddya do with them? (NOTE: From what I recall there is a step in this process that involves doubling every frame that is supposed to be on twos. Those who know classical animation should know what that means. Because AE is going to treat every frame as a frame held for 24th of a second, if you have frames on twos, you need duplicate PNGs of that frame. Once again I don't recall exactly how I managed to do this for my projects, but it involved some planning and concentration on my part. Maybe I'll ask V for clarification. Anyway, heads up on that. STEP 6: AFTER EFFECTS. Time to combine your animation with your BGs! Your BGs should all be PNGs too. Everything you do with Premier and AE will likely be PNGs. I don't have the software running so I don't recall the exact steps, but you have to import your animation as a PNG SEQUENCE. Look it up; it's as simple as selecting the first file in the batch when importing and checking off a box that says PNG Sequence, or selecting all the files and checking off a box, or something. It's super easy. Basically it takes your PNGs and treats them all like a single element instead of a bunch of different frames. So in AE, you can just move it around, re-size it, etc. instead of manually changing every frame to match the others (an impossible task). If you want to move out of your house, you put things in boxes to make them easier to relocate. Same principle. AE is pretty easy to learn if you know Premiere. Now all you're doing is compositing the scene, the ease of which depends on how well you planned things out at the beginning. Basically you're putting the puzzle pieces together in a very logical manner: Background elements go in the back, maybe you have some poles moving in the foreground, that's all a matter of setting up two keyframes and motion tweening the rest. There's not much I can say that a good tutorial won't tell you, but you can try to ask me something if you really have no experience with it. Flash operates the same way with less flexibility. STEP 7: PREMIERE. You basically repeat Step 6, except instead of exporting just your animation as a PNG sequence, this time it's your entire scene, BGs and all. Pop that sucker into Premiere with the other scenes and slap sound over top, and you're done. Simple! Now it's time to give up animation forever and become a sheep farmer. I could go into more detailed versions of each step but there's only so much I can talk about a technical subject like this. I'm still pretty much a greenhorn, this is all based on observation and personal experience. I myself don't know nearly as much about AE as I'd like. In the end I personally prefer to wing it, which is why so much of the above stuff sounds so messy. Necessity is the mother of knowing which button to press. I basically glossed over everything, but it will give you an idea of the hell that is one man making a four-minute animated short about a dog who wants his doll back. Again, questions are welcome, though my helpfulness will probably be limited if I can't be in the room explicitly pointing to what menu to click on... And probably someone here knows a way easier way to do some of this stuff. Automatic Jack fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Aug 24, 2010 |
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Aug 24, 2010 02:30
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A Frosty Beverage posted:Automatic Jack, would you possibly have a high rez picture of that scene with the camera panning across all the Threed baddies I could use for a background because that picture is just too awesome. As for clean-up, fun fact: Glen Keane never cleans up his own stuff. I don't know if he could if he tried. Clean-up is an art in and of itself, so your question as to whether it's basically tracing or adaptive, I'd say definitely the latter. Line quality is probably the biggest problem I see with student work; bad clean-up will KILL good animation, no matter how nice the roughs looked. If you're trying to show off animation for a portfolio piece, it's almost always better to leave it rough. If you're actually doing a film though, either have really good clean-up artists, or figure out a process to make up for it like cleaning up digitally or something. Aside from everything Chernabog said (all good advice), I had a bunch of online resources, some from old Disney masters, on the subject. I'll see if I can't dig up the links, but sites like Animation Meat and such are probably where they are now. For a perfect example of clean-up taken to the extreme, check out the slow-motion horseback sequence in The Thief and the Cobbler where the wounded warrior is riding away with all the arrows sticking out of his back. Now, to make something go in slow-motion in hand-drawn animation, a normal person would probably put each frame on twos or even threes, fours or sixes. But Richard Williams insisted that EVERYTHING was to be one ones, even the horse moving at five times reduced speed, so the poor clean-up artist had to divide her lines down to a hair's width to fit in all the in-betweens.
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Aug 26, 2010 18:26
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It's a must-see for animation enthusiasts, but the production problems are excruciatingly obvious and the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's still pretty incredible from a technical standpoint, though. Oh, for the guy who asked:  Click here for the full 1024x768 image. Also downloadable here. Still not as up-rezzy as it could be, but maybe someday.
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Aug 28, 2010 02:03
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Remember back in 2008 when everyone was scared that CERN's particle accelerator would cause micro black holes to consume the universe? Three years later, I explore this idea... But only as applied to Toronto. (Nothing against Toronto, but I felt like Canadian cities needed to be fictitiously destroyed more often.)spicybackpain posted:Hey gang, just dropping some more spam for my latest cartoon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISvNI7uZsdc  <- Me during the ending
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Jun 2, 2011 17:19
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