Recently got a Wacom Intuous 5 touch. This thing is OFF THE HOOK AMAZING! The touch is what makes it better than anything like this I've used, including the Wacom products I've used over the years. It's the medium size which is WAY better than the small Intuous 4 I use to use.
I wanted to really try it out the new Intuous so decided to create a new character for Anime Studio.
Here is the sketch done in Photoshop using the Intuous 5:
The rigged character in Anime Studio
Here is the video walk test:
This character uses strokes for arms, sleeves and legs. Lots and lots of smart bones for head and body turns. I was able to achieve full side to front turns and also added in a "back" view in a switch simply by duplicating the front view and making some modifications. This gives me an entire 360 turn. Of course the turn doesn't work with any pose because the bone angles for limbs change too much, but having the ability to use the same rig at any angle will save effort.
Last edited by heyvern on Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Looks really incredible and speaks to the strokes for limbs technique. Also, I'm sure this is the dingbat in me, but I loved the way his mustache "bobbled" when he moved his head. Very "cartoony" in a good way!
Great work Vern! and nice to see progress from sketch to animation.
Only thing that stands out to me is that his goggles are the only things with an outline... if one is necessary, perhaps make it a more similar brown to the main colour rather than a black?
Yes, the goggles fill style is a mistake I missed. The goggles will be done in similar shaded style like the rest of the character. I missed that shape when I switched to a non stroked fill shape style.
Originally the character was done with "outlined" shapes and dark variable stroke weights based on the sketch. I traced the sketch in ASP and set up all the styles and variable stroke widths.
I changed the style because the rolling up of the sleeves was a main feature of the character. He would do that a lot when getting to work. It was a bit of a pain to do this with filled arm shapes, and decided to finally try that cool "stroke limb" trick I keep seeing here all over the place done so fantastically. There just was no simple way to roll up the ends of a filled shape, but a stroke was a piece of cake using stroke exposure.
Once I tried it and saw how freaking EASY and effective it is, I had to use it. It has so many advantages, no overlap issues, so few points (arm only has THREE points, just THREE! shoulder, elbow wrist!) how cool is that? I usually have 4 times that many points to deal with on an arm shape. To adjust the curvature when bending just a couple of smart bones on the forearm bone. I plan to use this technique a LOT more. Of course it's a lot more effort to create outlines with stroke limbs and having controlled variable width outlines is almost impossible, so I went with a clean non stroked style.
I kept the shapes as simple as possible with very few points to make body and head rotations easy. I was so happy at how simple and quickly I was able to do a side to side and up and down head turn. Of course this requires 2 bones, but it's not that bad.
NESTED BONE CONTROL IS FANTASTIC!!!!
This character would not have worked at all without nested bone control, or at least it would have been a gigantic complex mess requiring custom layer scripts and all kinds of additional effort to make it work. Arms, head, body are each in group layers and controlled using the new nested bones feature. Head and body have switch layers to flip from front to back, but are controlled by the same bones using nested control.
What's so cool is that the body is a switch with front/back sub group layers. The "parts" in the sub group layer are on separate layers:
Coat left
coat right
shirt
legs/hips
coat back
Using smart bones for body rotation I can control the sub layer order of the body parts above. And since the entire body and all of the layers are in a single switch layer I can easily do animated layer order without reordering a bazillion layers. The body group layer has sub level layer ordering for the smart bone controlling the body rotation. Without nested bones this would have been impossible.
Even with bunches and bunches of layers, they are all organized in groups and when they are all closed up, there is only 6 layers total required to do animated layer ordering. Nested bones is a freaking godsend for Anime Studio.
Wow, that's impressive, although the vectorized version does lose some of the vitality of the original (bring on the beer and squiggly tie! ). I guess I'm just partial to comic book line art style. Still, really nice demo. The character would make a good mascot for some product.
Very inspiring. After I finish my 2nd animation (within the next 3 months hopefully) you're work and willingness to share your techniques has convinced me to switch from Debut to Pro.
Yes all the requests for the coat animation are in progress.
The fluid natural sort of bouncy cloth coat animation needs to be done before creating the multiple "layers" of vectors for the body layer.
The coat is split into separate parts that have the exact same points but different visible shapes (top left coat front, top right coat front and back coat). I will need to rig, adjust and bone control those points on one layer first then I will duplicate that layer and recreate the shapes for the various layers so they will all move the exact same way. It's a bit more work but the end result will be awesome!
You can see the beginning of this in the images with the leg bending. I added in control bones for the base of the coat that have bone constraints controlled by the legs. The tricky part is adding in multiple "nested chains" of bones that allow for both varied leg control movement of the coat AND also some natural gravity physics movement for that natural cloth motion. It's tricky but works. A parent coat bone is constrained to the leg and a child bone controls the dynamic physics movement.
New video test of the body turn. The actual turn is a bit rough but works if I do it quick or stay at one position. It doesn't actually turn all the way around. I basically used a switch layer to switch front to back. To do the turn it's a "fake". He turns all the way, then I flip and he turns back the way he came. I have to do it this way because both front and back use the same bones. Unfortunately this means the left hand becomes the right hand type of thing. It still works pretty well.
Also added in some secondary coat movement with dynamic constraints.
I think the turn works well - as does everything else... I like the character. My only criticism is the hands look kind of odd... like a bunch of bananas
). I guess I'm just partial to comic book line art style. Still, really nice demo. The character would make a good mascot for some product.
