Animation Day 2; inking, animating, etc

Yesterday was mostly side tracked with "how best to ink drawings" in Illustrator so that I can import them in to Toon Boom Studio (TBS).

Well, the time crunch is a factor here and I realize I'm not the most experienced artist, or have a very steady hand/arm to do this stuff... so I think I'm going to fall back to consistent line width and using the pen tool to ink everything.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for using a tablet and going that way, but for this project, I don't have enough time to get really good enough to make it "good" looking.

The obvious issue here is that I can't really do good line art in TBS itself without getting TB Harmony or something crazy... or using the eraser tool and getting all obsessive over how my lines aren't lining up, being overshot, can't zoom in far enough to round things out good enough, etc... hence why we're starting out with Illustrator in the first place.

I have the power to line up my vector art accurately and consistently.  I can mess with strokes and utilize all of the tools Illustrator gives me.  This in and of itself was a challenge to learn and get used to, but at the end of the day, I decided to use strokes (instead of fills with the blob tool) to ink everything.

On the note of coloring, this will likely be an after thought, but I've done some small pet projects to see how it works so I don't accidentally shoot myself in the foot if I can go down this road some day.  After some experimenting, the "easy" coloring option was to use Live Paint, but this was its own issue when importing to TBS (it left weird lines around the edges of the painted areas)... so Live Paint was out.  I ended up resorting to making a layer under the line art, using big blob tool to paint in areas, then cleaning up the overflows with some pathfinder magic and using copies of line art to "clip" away the excess.

This definitely isn't the only way to do it and I'm sure there is a better way out there, but again, more time and ambition will lead to me finding these options.

It is today's hope that I will finish up the first 4 or 5 storyboard cards for my animation project in TBS.  With that said, Animate day 2, begin!

I don't know yet if I'll be posting my work as I get it done on the blog or not.

Character Model Design (drawing)

As a fair warning, I'm a fairly novice art person.  We are doing a very short animation and as such, we designed a story and some characters.

Below is one of the main characters.  First, I did about 6 sketches, which resulted in throwing out the first 5 simply because they didn't look... acceptable.

Anyways, I scanned in the original pencil sketch, but as expected, it was really difficult to see anything, so we went ahead and inked them on paper, then put them up here.

This is, more or less, the design for this character model.

We'll be sending these over to Illustrator next and drawing this young lady in a whole lotta frames and getting her ready for animation in Toon Boom Studio.  If I have time, I'll do a color skit and try out various colors, but due to time constraints on this project, that will be one of the last things I do.

Naturally, she'll start looking more refined (in the cartoony way of course) as I get better at drawing this over and over again.

Line drawing in Illustrator

This took me a while to figure out the "best way" to do... but I eventually stumbled on to this blog:

http://danidraws.com/2007/01/08/creating-line-drawings-in-adobe-illustrator/

Good stuff.

Basically...

1) Take your hand drawn sketch, scan it in
2) Place it on a new Illustrator document
3) Turn it to a template
4) Make a new layer (this will be the inking layer)
5) Use brushes and a drawing tablet to "ink" the lines, don't worry about over-shooting lines
6) Use pen tool to add anchor points where lines intersect and overshoot each other
7) Use direct select tool to delete the overhanging parts

This is very useful because importing vector art in to Toon Boom Studio is how we're doing things on our end.  Drawing in TBS is nice, but really awkward correcting my line art.

Oh, and if you don't know how to import AI files in to TBS, you have to save your Illustrator art as CS2 format otherwise TBS can't read the data.  This information is current as of TBS version 7.1

Storyboarding, scripts, oh my!

Part of my studies in to animation requires the use of storyboards.  It makes sense, how do I know what to make and how to present it... and in what order?

Needless to say, my original "rough draft" outline for a quick story was totally redone after I ended up writing the script for it.  The basic ideas stayed the same, but actually focusing on how cameras move around, zoom, which characters are animated, things fading in and out... yea stuff changed.

I was asked today how my animation is coming along... my answer was "animation is the last thing I'll be doing".

Intro to Animation Endeavors

So, this blog has been mostly about programming, game development, design, smart phone stuff, technical rants, and stuff like this... and has been idle for a little while again.  Well, a small and somewhat crazy offshoot to all of this has been all about visual things that look pretty.  Worse yet, pretty things that move.

I've been learning more about how cartoon animation works and some of the software that powers these pretty cool things.  The adventure led me acquire Toon Boom Studio and take a related class or two at the local community college.  Ideally with the lofty goal of implementing pretty, moving things in our games and heck, maybe even do some of our own animation work!

I found a couple random blogs that really helped me out in addition to the classes.

Of particular note:
http://animationcraft.blogspot.com/2007/04/toon-boom-studio-learning-track.html

This guy is clearly an industry veteran with very helpful articles.

I also came across John K's blog (yea, one of the guys that did Ren And Stimpy back in the day).

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/

To get this party started, we had done various assignments for our classes, but with all things, it usually takes a wiping of all your old stuff before you feel somewhat confident enough to actually feel like it is going anywhere.  At any rate...

Here is my *second* ball bouncing animation that turned out pretty decent.