Moho Forum

Thought I would provide a status report on rotoscoping.

In our last episode, our loveable but lazy anime-slacker was offloading as much as possible of the grunt work onto his software.

The outstanding question was whether raster to vector conversion would give a steady moving image, or whether, instead, slight changes from frame to frame would result in a fluttery video.

The following snap shows how more filtering further simplified the footage, which was dumped into a filmstrip grid by GIF Movie Gear (an inexpensive, well-designed, powerful application that I enthusiastically recommend.)

What you're looking at is actually the filmstrip vectorized in Illustrator CS2.



Here's a short test generated by loading the first 11 frames into AS.



This demonstrates the kind of flicker we would have expected... but at least it's not intense, like a flock of mosquitoes.

NOte in passing that the head movement and the eyeblink were created by a canned character motion sequence that came as content supplied with iClone. This tiny snippet, of course, fails to do it justice.

Also note that the rectangular background from Illustrator was converted into a floppy pillow shape by AS. I assume that I was expected to go in and alter vertex curves to points if I considered the rectangles important.

I hope to add some further conclusions about the utility of all this in another post... meanwhile, your observations are welcome...

Just a question don't hit me on the head...

Is the goal to get the best (easiest) results or just do it with the tools you have?

For instance, Flash has vectorization built in. Years ago (before Flash got the cool video codecs and movie player gizmos) people would actually convert video to vector using Flash.

(also, don't use the background from Illustrator for each frame. Just do the face and put in ONE background layer in AS. Save some trouble.)

This is an example I did YEARS AGO from Poser output. This is FLASH VECTORIZATION... NOT Poser Flash export (the poser output at the time was crap):

http://www.lowrestv.com/vw/motion/walk.html

I loaded in an image sequence into Flash and vectorized one frame at a time. The moving background I faked in Flash.

-vern

Well, it seems there is a huge difference in quality between your results and mine.

Actually, since I haven't used Flash (I use everything else, it seems), I had no idea it would vectorize.

Thanks for enlightening me.

I think the trick would be a two step process.

Simplify the image using a paint program, then use a dedicated vectorizing tool like Flash or something similar (I think they have tools dedicated for this).

One nice thing Flash has is a slider for how much detail. You could eliminate those funky specks in one go.

As it is I think what you are attempting is going to take ages and ages and loads of work (nothing wrong with that). Unless it is just a one time short (very short) animation.

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The software used for Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly was specifically designed for that look. It was suppose to be easy for anyone to learn and use. It is rotoscoping software but it was a specialized program to make the process much faster and easier for a non artist.

In Waking Life the idea was to use different artists with different styles for each segment. They were taught the software and allowed to go on their own. Some of the artists never used a computer before and were reluctant to try it but were able to get the hang of it. Each segment has a unique style. Waking Life was more of an art film...

... A Scanner Darkly was completely different. It was suppose to have a consistent look throughout. During the making they were hiring people "off the streets" (cab drivers, hairdressers, homeless people, whatever) to do the animation and the learning curve was slowing down production and also there was no consistency in the look of the film.

Things went south quickly and the creator of the software was fired... or quit... So they had no one to fix problems with it and had to do things quite differently. This might be why it took so long. Without the creator of the software available for patches and updates some scenes couldn't be done exactly as intended and lots of hoops had to be jumped through to pull it off.

I often wonder when that program will ever be commercially available.

-vern

Nothing new on earth ...

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/colormation#comment features a process called "Colormation" which is not even rotoscope but a very similar effect, produced by the combination of orthochromatic film, bright lighting, and a makeup on the actors to enhance eyes and mouth.

And guess what ... I like the effect! It is so nicely retro and trashy, I'd really enjoy a film in this style as long as it's fast and has an intelliegtn script.