Hey there, just want to show you some stuff. In my last post I showed you an application called Google SketchUp. Since it’s an incredible tool to develop three dimensional models of whatever you want, I thought it would be a good idea to use it as an aid in the creation of two dimensional backgrounds for animated shorts. I’m still working on the outside shots I showed you before (I’ll post how those turn out in another post) but I’d like to show you how SketchUp is of great help when it comes to drawing perspective. You don’t even have to think about vanishing lines and what not.

We start off with a fairly simple Sketchup cube and with the push/pull tool we create a two wall room (or set). After that we pay a visit to the 3D Warehouse we populate our room with a suitable bed and a nightstand (although here I just modeled this “placeholder” as nightstand). Don’t forget to punch a hole in the wall for our window. We paint everything white, move our view around to get the best shot, and snap a picture (export an image). I’d like to point out that SketchUp is full featured software, so it is capable of much more than these simple things I’m doing. I want to keep the models simple because afterwards, the painting portion will take up most of our time. We end up with something like this:

We then import our image into our drawing software (in my case, I’m using Toon Boom Animate) and put it on it’s own layer. After that, it all becomes about “imaginative tracing”. Use your SketchUp lines as guides and make sure you keep every drawing in it’s own individual layer (you can group things afterwards). How about we start with the footboard. You can color as you go, or you can color everything when you’re done.

Now some courtains…

Now the bed and we improvise a nightstand using our SketchUp placeholder as a visual aid (don’t mind the shadows; that step comes afterwards, but I forgot to take snapshots without them ).

And we finish with our walls and the window. At this point you can color everything. Your aim is to accomplish a certain atmosphere. After all, we’re trying to tell a story…

Make sure you build up a nice atmosphere with every layer you paint.

I’m falling in love with SketchUp more and more. It’s an incredible tool that can save you a few hours. You should give it a try. How do you like our final product?

Leave a comment.

When I started with this hobby, I didn’t think doing backgrounds for my animated shorts was going to something to worry about. After all, they were the portion of the whole thing that didn’t (generally) move, right? Plus, I considered myself kind of artsy and I had done a few paintings, so I thought to myself: “How difficult could it be?” I didn’t expect the answer to be “FREAKING HARD”.

As it turns out, creating backgrounds for a short is no walk in the park. It’s not that you have to learn about color, or drawing, or composition, or even effects (which you have to do, though, sorry). The problem with them can be summarized in one word: consistency. That’s right, if you want your backgrounds to frame your animation effectively, you have to be consistent, and as I soon realized, that is one difficult thing to accomplish. When I was a kid, my dad (a civil engineer) taught me how to draw two-point perspective and since then, that has become a bit intuitive for me. However, if my camera looks at the same scene from a different angle and I have to draw that, everything gets screwed up, because it is very hard for me to get the layout right from a different view. I end up with a coach that lies at twice the distance from a coffee table, for example, in comparison to the first shot.

ENTER: Google SketchUp

SketchUp is a 3D modeling application that you can download for free from our friends over at Google. It has many capabilities, but what drew my attention is how easily you can get seemingly complex models done, with just a few clicks. It’s tools are not very intuitive, but the learning curve for them is ridiculously short. With the instructional videos from screen name: SketchUpVideo and 4sketchupgo2school on YouTube you’ll be able to do very nice things with it in a couple of hours (make that three). Some animated series like Futurama, use 3D sets rendered with toon shaders that make their three dimensional objets look like 2D drawings. That’s certainly a nice way to use 3D, but an expensive one, and not the one I want to try out.

You see, I want to draw my backgrounds myself, but I’m going to get SketchUp to tell me where everything goes, and as a bonus to help me out with the perspective. My project takes place near a well-known church in the city where I live, so I want it to be present throughout the short. Unfortunately there was no model for it on Google Earth so I had to create it myself. As I wrote before, it is not complicated at all, once you get the hang of it. The two tools/techniques I used most in this case were the “Push/pull tool” for extruding every structure up from basic shapes drawn on the ground and the “Follow me tool” for mouldings and spheres. Here’s a panoramic view of what I created:

This took me a little past three hours to complete,
including the time it takes to learn basic SketchUp.

In a 3D space where you’ve made a mock-up of your set, and marked with big blocks where your buildings, nature and props go, you can quickly move your camera to explore what shots work best for your project. Not only will you get the correct layout, but you’ll also get your perspective right in every shot. A nice feature of SketchUp is that it lets you apply a photograph as a texture to any surface. In my case, that lets me visualize more clearly what I want as an end result. I browsed through flickr and found some façades that give me a better idea of the direction I’ll take. Let’s take a look at a nice establishing shot:

Which is based on this original rough sketch:

What if we climb on top of the chapel or take a look across the street?

What next? You can’t use these pictures for your project. No matter how cool it was to craft them, they’re still a long way from finished, so the next step is to take these and import them into your image editing application and paint your scene on top of them, using the blocks as reference for the position of all your objects and using the lines as perspective guides. However. we’ll explore that in a different post. Hopefully, this technique will ease up the process of drawing consistent backgrounds. Have a great day!

Leave a comment.

Over the past week I have been discussing how hobbyists like myself tend to omit certain steps, professional studios are obligated to take in the process of creating animated stories, because they feel that everything is in their heads. I certainly followed that logic, and it brought me nowhere, since I didn’t give my characters a chance to develop correctly, which ultimately lead to very inconsistent character animation. It was so bad, that it looked as if the character that started the motion slowly transformed into a completely different one (and not on purpose). You see, the animation process became stagnated, due to the fact that characters weren’t properly taken out of the crummy piece of paper they were conceived on, and put on a nice model sheet that could serve as a reference throughout the entire project, before the actual work started.

From my Rezadores de la Recolección original concept art.
(Click on the image to see the other side of the paper.)

After reading a lot about animation, it became clear to me that I had to adhere, more or less, to the workflow that studios have used since the first half of the twentieth century if I ever wanted to finish my little project, as I stated in a previous post. It’s a proven formula that just works. It was time to put my money where my mouth was. We’ll, I’ve been doing my homework, and it is turning out nicely. I thought I showed you a bit.

Inspiration hits you in the most unusual places. I was at a conference on climate change when the idea for the look of my characters flooded my mind. Luckily for me, they handed out little note taking blocks for the event and I was able to get a couple of poses drawn before the Q&A round. This past week, in an attempt to get this project going, I pulled the little piece of paper (which you can see by clicking, either on the picture above, or here), scanned it, and decided to make a nice model sheet out of it, to be consistent with what I previously discussed about character development. It is nowhere near finished, but it’s a start. Here’s are the steps:

1. Take the character’s measurements. It’s a good practice to think about your character’s size in multiples of its head. That way, no matter where you draw it on the screen you’ll always know if it’s dimensions are right, just by counting “how many heads tall” it is. This was a good time to correct my character’s original measurements, since I wanted him to be exactly five heads tall. No matter what program you use for your animations, make sure you do every step in its individual layer. That way you have more control over the entire process. Here I just drew a couple of horizontal lines marking the head’s superior and inferior edges, copied them and pasted them down the page as reference. A couple of red lines delimit what would be an imaginary sphere embedded inside his head, which is useful for drawing him rough.

Notice how I drew lines that represent its height in “heads”.

2. Rough it out, and draw a half or a full turnaround. This is the time to start figuring out how to quickly draw your character in various views. Make any adjustments to your original sketch here. Don’t forget to use a new layer for this. Block the rest. You don’t want to mistakenly ruin something. In the following image the original bitmap layer is turned off, but you might want to keep it on while you draw on top of it. At this point, keep it simple. You just want to learn to draw your character in various poses and get its dimensions right.

Look for simple shapes that will help you draw your character faster.

3. Clean it. In a new layer, take the pencil or pen tool (something that will give you same width lines, no matter the zoom) and cleanly outline your character. You can take your time with this step. Use your software’s tools to edit the points or nodes that make up the lines. You’ll end up with something like this:

Be very careful with this step.

4. Color it. Our model sheet is starting to look good. Now it needs some color. You can copy and paste the contents of the clean lines layer onto a new one and color your character there. That way you’ll have both versions in case you need to revisit your lines (say, if you’re writing a post about them ). Document what colors you are using. If your software doesn’t have color palette management functionality, make sure you know the RGB values for all of your character’s colors. You might (and probably will) need them later. Just write them down.

This is a nice picture you can tape to your wall as reference for your project.

Our model sheets are on the right path now. A couple of expressions and some action poses would be in order, and seem like the next step. What do you think of my process; any suggestions? Tell us all about it in the comment section of this post. See you next time!

If you have read some of the posts I have written here, then you already know that I have delayed the completion of my animation project for a couple of years. But during that time, I have found myself procrastinating in great ways. Yes, in not doing what I was supposed to do, I ended up learning one or two cool things, and I have to admit that I love to waste time animating effects.

Click on the image to see it in motion.
(Be patient; it takes a while to load sometimes)

Water is one of the most entertaining things to animate. It is very difficult to get right too (and I probably haven’t yet). I became interested in water animation after I first came in contact with Adam Phillips’ Brackenwood shorts. I could not believe they were done in Flash. I had to find out how he had done them. Fortunately enough, he wrote a post on his blog about ActionScript camera effects in Flash, and he posted a small waterfall scene of Prowlies At The River to illustrate his point (I tried to find the original post to give you a nice link, but I had no luck). The camera was a nice feature indeed, and I used it a lot, but I was amazed by the waterfall itself. It was in that file; all of its frames. I felt as if I had struck gold.

What drew my attention is that the final result looked wonderful and everything was accomplished with only six drawings and a hold for each of the waterfall’s elements; meaning it was done “on two’s”. He was still animating at twelve frames per second at that time (He animates at 30fps nowadays, I think). I tried to replicate the same principles with the fountain you see above these lines and I ended up with a nice result. I didn’t know I was developing a useful skill, which solely landed me all of the freelance gigs I’ve done.

There are other animated effects, besides water that never stop amazing me, like lighting effects, smoke, fire, and moving sand. The thing is that, even if they are important skills to master, they should come last in your list of things to learn, since there’s no effect that can outshine a good character animation. Character animation is the soul of your piece and it is the only thing that will say whether a story is good or not (or finished in my case). What I’m trying to say is… “stop reading and get back to those characters!! Are you done with your model sheets?” But before you go, share your thoughts about animation procrastination in the comments.

When someone is doing an entire animation on her or his own, there’s a tendency to avoid taking some of the preparatory steps that studios often cannot ignore, such as creating character model sheets, among other things. “After all”, one thinks, “it’s all in my head”. Wrong!

Image courtesy of yashrg.

Character development is a crucial step that often gets neglected by hobbyists such as myself. We might see the character in our minds and think we’ve got it all covered. We probably drew our character on a napkin for the first time and it looked excellent. Our buddies thought it was “awesome”, and the girls all thought it was “so cute”. You’ve got a winner… until you start animating.

Your first frame requires your character to be in an entirely different position than the napkin’s. So you rough it out and voilà; instant Picasso. Your drawing skills are more or less solid, you think, but your drawing of Little Timmy doesn’t look like him. He looks awkward. “Hmm, it’s something about the nose”, you think. Okay, you erase him and start over. Another piece of abstract art flows out of your wrist. “Damn it”, you get angry, “I can’t tweak each drawing for 30 minutes. I’m never going to finish like this”. And you’re right.

As it turns out, character model sheets were invented for a reason and they can help you speed up the animation process if done right. Their purpose is to give your animated character a consistent look throughout your project, regarding not only its features, but also its dimensions and colors. A good model sheet should have images of your character in various positions, and looked at from different angles, so that you’re able to compare every drawing you do to it, and judge whether you are “on model” or not. But how do you make one?

1. Dimensions. You need to know how big its head is, in relation to its body. Are its arms long or short? How many heads tall is it? On a blank page (or frame, if you draw it directly onto the computer) draw horizontal lines spread apart by multiples of the head size and draw your character standing in a full 180 degree range of drawings, meaning you will draw it facing front; a quarter left; full left; three quarters left; and back, all next to each other, and then flip them to have their right counterparts(unless its sides are different, because then you would have to draw the others too).

2. Facial expressions. Under your full turnaround, draw as many facial expressions as you can.

3. Sitting poses. Fill the blank space with a couple of drawings of your character in a sitting position.

4. Action poses. On a new page (or frame) draw him in active poses, such as running, walking, or things your character would typically do. Does it play basketball? Does it eat frantically?

The purpose of this is to practice building your character. Drawing him or her should come naturally to you and model sheets are an excellent practice. Keep it simple. Your character’s main structure should be made with simple shapes such as circles and cylinders. Add details last.

Tomorrow is animation Tuesday for me. I won’t animate though. I’ll be going back to model sheets, because my character’s face cannot stretch anymore. It’s all over the place. Wobbly, wobbly, wobbly. He’s starting to look like plastic man. Learn from my mistake and just start with a nice model sheet for each of your main characters, before you do any of what I mentioned in point 1. of my previous post.

Do you experience the same consistency problems I do? Let everybody know in the comments.