Moho Forum

I was wondering perhaps there is an existing script for this: I want to make a paper cut-out type animation and to give it a stop-motion look I am going to use a low framerate- like 10 fps. I want to give each shape a thin drop shadow- but since it should look like each "piece" is moved by hand every frame and then captured, I'd like the shadow direction to randomly change on each frame.

Is there an easy way to do this? If not I guess I can just make a few different keyframes and copy and paste them sparatically on the timeline.

surely moving a piece won't effect the light/shadow direction?

Hmm... you're right- I don't know what I was thinking. The light source wouldn't be moving- so the shadow direction should stay the same.

What I'm planning on doing is making origami characters from real paper, and scanning them on my scanner. I guess if I rig them with bones and "bend" them slightly it would give a good appearance. Anyways- if anyone has any tips on how to make it look more like stop-motion and less like it was created in a computer program, please share.

You could duplicate your shapes, place that duplicate under the original, colour it completely black, set its layer effect to "multiply" and an opacity of about 60%. Then go to "vector", check outline and fill animation, set it to random with a good combination of offset and scale.

In your case you need to "duplicate" the images by creating a vector outline for each. AS recognises the vector portion of Photoshop clipping paths if you save that as EPS, so you could do a selection in PS, make it a path, save it as clipping path, save the file both as EPS and PNG and import it twice. The path looks a bit distorted, but the points seem to be at the correct positions, only the curvature needs to be adjusted. (When I tested this, I couldn't get this EPS shape to take a fill. Solution, anyone?)

Another way could be to completely separate the two levels. First you animate your shapes. Then you duplicate the file, open it and switch off the original so only your shadow layer shows. Select all bone movement keys or whatever you have used and switch them to "noisy". Try some setting. Put it all into a group layer and translate it a bit into the direction of the shadow. Render the whole thing with a bit of blur. Ideally the blur should be strongest where the movement deviates most from the original.

I think the "stop motion" effect you are looking for might be the "height" of the drop shadow instead of the direction. If the object is moved it might not always lay flat to the surface at exactly the same distance.

You may want to do a test. A bit of random slight motion on each frame would give enough "Jitter" that "extra" movement of the shadow wouldn't be needed.

-vern