Handdrawn(?) animation

[Zackiz]

Hey everyone! I have some questions about handdrawn animation or I hope it's called that. That same type of animation as in Curse of Monkey Island.

1. Is it drawn at all on paper first or do one draw it directly on the computer?
2. If it's drawn on paper first, is there any special paper used, special scanners?
3. Can one draw one concept on paper and animate it on the computer? Which types of software are capable of that?
4. Are there any good sites on this matter?

I've googled around a bit but haven't found anything of interest.

Sorry if my English is bad but it's not my native language. I hope I've put this topic in the right forum.

[Babar]

Weird...There was a post on just this topic a few days ago. Seems to have disappeared....



Edit: or not. Here it is.

[SpacePirateCaine]

Hi Zackiz,

Welcome to the forums - glad to see another aspiring creator joining the ranks. Handdrawn is a perfectly acceptable term. A lot of the time you'll also hear it referred to as High resolution (or hi-res) 2D animation. In the case of Curse of Monkey Island, the characters were hand-drawn like traditional animation, then scanned and colored digitally, as far as I know. There are plenty of techniques to get this done, really. A lot of the hi-res artists on the forum do their concept work on regular paper, then scan and rework it in a high-end digital art tool, like Photoshop or the GiMP.

I'm actually more of a low-res animator, so I couldn't really offer much insight into what programs would be best for doing animation in hi-res, but I believe you may want to take a look at a program called Pro-Motion. Flash is also a useful tool for this, and has been utilized by some of our forum members in the past. Your other option of course is to do each frame individually and import them into the AGS editor one at a time, but that has the potential to get messy.

You can do it as professionally (i.e. painted clear cells on a special animating scanner) or bootstrap (Printer paper and a regular scanner) as you like. The end result is all contingent on how talented you are as an artist/animator.

The thread Babar linked above is more of a theory discussion, but you may learn a few things. Please feel free to join in the discussion!

[Zackiz]

Thank you very much both! I'll right to it and I will definitely have more questions later

[Layabout]

As I mainly concentrate on pixel art as well, I am not 100% sure on what technique is best.

That said...

I have in the past done rough animation using a wacom and photoshop. I just use a relatively hard brush, use blue (an animators favourite colour) to roughly sketch out the frames. For a walkcycle, usually one would draw the CONTACT, RECOIL, PASSING and HIGH-POINT poses first and then draw the tweens (in-between frames). For other animation, a similar process is used. You draw the main poses and inbetween. I'm not going to go THAT deeply into animation techniques in this post to be honest, just some basic info.

How many frames a walkcycle should have is up to the animator. Too few will look jerky, too many will be toooooo slow. AFAIK, most agser's use between 8-12 frames for each direction, not including the standing pose.

Ok, I kind of went off topic there, but hey, it's all helpful.

If you are planning on using 'traditional hand-drawn' animation for your game, I would recommend you either use a light-box and a scanner, combined with a wacom tablet, using flash and photoshop (or equivalent). When flash exports to .png it will automatically generate an alpha channel, which ags can use for antialiased edged sprites. EG. they will look nice.

Alternatively, you can skip step 1 and draw directly into the computer using a Wacom and Flash (using a layer for your base).

I personally find drawing on paper easier than drawing directly, but it is up to you and up to what you feel most comfortable with.

As for the scanner, unless you decide to go professional, any all-in-one inkjet printer will have a scanner. The dpi is not perfect, lines aren't as crisp, but since you are going to draw over them in flash anyway, you are really just using the lines as a base.

Another thing you could do is animate on paper using a lightbox, ink over your drawing, scan, then convert the line-art to vector in Flash then colour.

A current example of a game that uses the hand-drawn technique is Emerald City Confidential (ok so it's not out yet...). I think the artist used Flash for the animation in that.

What should be avoided is making a character using separate limbs and just animate those limbs. There are advanced techniques for covering this up in Flash, I sort of know how to do this, but I'm not even 50% sure of the best way.

I'm sure someone like loominous would be able to suggest ways of doing this.

Quick question, have you animated before?

It may be worth your while doing a lot of practice and perhaps giving pixel art and exercise book flip animations (my teachers hated these! Oh the violence!) a go before you try anything as complicated as traditional animation.

As for references, try The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. It is known as the Animators bible, and for a good reason too. Even accomplished animators refer back to it from time to time.
http://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284

Great Walkcycle tute here as well. Probably the best.
http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml

[Zackiz]

Wow, this was really helpful. Im going to build a lightbox today and start practising. I've never animated for real before so I will take every advise I can get(an I mean EVERY advise). I have done some small things in a notebook before, but that's long ago now so it probably can't be counted.

Why blue color on the pens BTW?

[Layabout]

Light blue doesn't scan or photocopy well. That's why.

[Zackiz]

Wow, I've now read all the info and links I've got and I must say I'm really excited Im in the process of buying stuff to build a lightbox. Been drawing some concept character now and can't wait until the new scanner arrives(don't have any) Will be posting some as soon as I can, hope you are willing to help me learn more