Freehand Character Problem

[toshiyori]

I have Debut 10 trying to freehand draw a character (in parts) for animation. I have been drawing cartoon characters for years now I want to use them in animation. After drawing the head I can't even make it "Auto Fill" I have watched the tutorials over & over, and yet been unable to make a simple cartoon head. Is there a tutorial exclusive for "Cartoon Character Creation" using 'Freehand ?

[slowtiger]

Your difficulties seem to come from your former experience. Have you ever created characters in Illustrator or another vector application? Then the concepts of AS should be familiar. If not - if you so far have drawn your characters in a bitmap program - then you will need some time to lear a different approach to creation.

Although there's a freehand drawing tool in AS, the best approach is more of constructing a character of several overlapping shapes instead of drawing it. I found a tutorial for Illustrator which gives you a good idea about the basic principles - although doing the same in AS is a bit easier ... http://design.tutsplus.com/articles/cre ... ctor-25887

(Don't we have any decent AS character construction basic tutorial yet?)

[Víctor Paredes]

(Don't we have any decent AS character construction basic tutorial yet?)

http://anime.smithmicro.com/tutorials/t ... acters.pdf
This one is good. My only critic is he doesn't use the curvature tool at all, so the character has many more points than it should.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtZvVWJy7SA
I made a webinar about character creation too. Even when the character is simple, the webinar is very complete (in my unbiased opinion), but sadly it's only in Spanish.

[toshiyori]

Selgin, thanks, the "written out tutorial" is just what I needed it goes into detail that I can realize with time. The vidio tutorials go to fast for my poor brain.
Now, I think I can get the ##@^^& figured out !

[Greenlaw]

While I would encourage you to learn how to adapt to drawing/constructing with the native tools, you should know that AS handles imported bitmap images surprisingly well, so you can draw in another program you may already be comfortable with and rig the images for deformation in AS.

The advantage is that bitmaps can give the elements more complex details and textures than vectors. The disadvantage is that they can only be deformed so much before they fall apart. Depending on the style of your animation, bitmap elements can be ideal though.

(In my current job, I'm using bitmaps I painted in Procreate on my iPad as AS fill and stroke textures, so it's a bit of a hybrid technique. The result actually looking pretty cool and it deforms nicely.)

Note: I'm making some assumptions here about what's available in Debut, as I've only used the Pro version.

G.

[toshiyori]

Thanks Greenlaw, you are using "Bitmap" which is "Windows", I am using Apple that has no Bitmap, just: JPEG, PNG, PDF, TIFF. I have used characters in the PNG format that do not do well in animation mainly because the body parts cannot be separated easily, therefore the bones application is questionable.

[braj]

Bitmap is shorthand for image-based graphics. Not bitmap file type.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmap

[toshiyori]

Going by the tutorial furnished by Selgin I imported an image, traced the head,arms, body ,legs, etc. when it come to applying "Bones" I went to "Edit", "Select All" ,using the "Translate Point Tool" to separate the body parts only the traced outline moved, is this correct ?

[Greenlaw]

Yes, just for clarification, I'm using .png for ASP. I typically use .exr in other programs I use in production, but they're both bitmap formats, as are any format that uses pixels to describe an image.

What you're thinking of is .bmp, which is yet another bitmap format. It's not really Windows specific but, regardless, I don't typically use it.

G.

[Greenlaw]

I have used characters in the PNG format that do not do well in animation mainly because the body parts cannot be separated easily, therefore the bones application is questionable.

I don't quite understand what you mean by that. If you're importing the character as a single bitmap image, you can rig the image with bones by using different ranges of influence, or you can 'explode' the character before importing and use bones offsets--that's how it was typically done in the past, before 9.x I think. If you're importing .png, just be sure to have a transparent background for the image in your paint prgram, otherwise you'll need to create a mask in ASP.

Nowadays, if you're using bitmaps for characters, it's usually better to breakout you character in multiple layers instead (as you probably should with any complex vector-based character.) If you breakout the character in Photoshop, you can import the .psd directly and preserve the separate layering. After importing the layers, the rigging process is generally the same as rigging for natively drawn vector elements in multiple layers.

As mentioned above, bitmaps can be less suitable for extreme deformations because stretching and tearing may become obvious. However, bitmaps do allow for greater textural detail than you can achieve with vectors alone. In the end, the decision to use bitmaps depends on the visual and animation style you're pursuing. Our first ASP film 'Scareplane' used native vector tools for all the characters and props, and bitmaps (.psd and .png) for all the environments. Our current production takes a hybrid approach, using native vectors for strokes and shapes, but we're using painted images (bitmaps,) as fill textures for the strokes and shapes. The result is characters that have a very organic appearance but bend and deform nicely. (Within the range of the animation style we've adopted anyway.)

Just to be clear, this is nothing new. Many ASP artists work this way, mixing bitmaps with vectors for characters. If you visit the galleries at the Anime Studio website, you'll find many beautiful examples of characters created using only bitmaps and bones, bitmaps without bones, or hybrid bitmap/vector/bones setups. It just illustrates how flexible ASP can be for creating a variety of styles of animations.

Hope this helps.

G.

[braj]

Don't forget you can use .psd files and maintain layers from your paint programs too, so you can draw everything on seperate layers and not have to pick it apart like you would a flat .png.