Hello! Another productive week as far as the animation is concerned: I completed two shots which were hanging over from last week, finished another in full and almost finished the shot which has taken the longest thus far (16.5 hours at the time of writing). This one kind of took me by surprise to be honest- there’s not a whole lot of action going on and it’s not even full body (just torso and head), so I didn’t think it would take this long. But I suppose it’s a long shot in terms of duration (144 frames) and there’s a lot of hand and face detail- all the stuff which takes forever! Until she’s sat mainly still towards the end of the shot, there’s not a lot of lines I can repeat either, so most frames need to be drawn in full.
OK, update over, I thought I’d give a quick tip in how I’m drawing the faces/ more detailed aspects of some of the wider shots. I’ll use shot 35 as an example here as that’s one I worked on this week, so it’s fresh in my memory.
As the aspect ratio I’m using is 4:3 for this project, the canvas size I’m working on in TVPaint is 1440x1080 pixels. If it’s a zoom or anything, then I work on a bigger canvas size accordingly- but this shot has no camera movement, so it’s the exact amount of pixels required.
I do the majority of the lines in this project (as illustrated in the screen grab above) using various amounts of zooming in on the display, depending what section I’m drawing. More basic lines, I can be at 56.76%, but when it gets to more detail, I tend to zoom to 75% or 100% (anything past that becomes pixelated- see image below, which is zoomed in to 150%).
So, even when viewing this shot at 100%, the face is still quite small on screen:
Which means when it’s a fairly still shot like this, if I’m not drawing the lines fairly accurately, then it’s going to look odd with lines moving all over the place. I like my lines to ‘boil’, but when it happens too much, it stands out (and not in a good way)!
So, this is where my pro tip comes in: create a new project, but exactly double your pixel ratio, so in this case the canvas will be 2880x2160. Import the ref footage and make sure ‘stretch to project size’ is checked. Export the lines you’ve already completed from the original project file as a clear PNG seq and import those in to your new project (so you have them as a reference). They will be a bit pixelated, but that doesn’t matter as they’re only there as a guide and won’t be exported later. Create a new layer and draw the detailed sections you need to draw- so the face in this case. And also, make sure the brush size you’re using is exactly double what you are using in the original file. Then draw away!
In the image above, this is zoomed into 100%, which gives me a much clearer reference than the 100% zoom in the original file, being as I have doubled the size. Once you’re done drawing, then export only the layers you need (again as a clear PNG seq) and import into the original project file, again with ‘stretch to project size’ checked. And voila, you have a smooth looking finished shot (image beneath) ...Providing any of the above made the slightest bit of sense (I’m probably missing a vital step here)! Any questions, drop them below.
Right, that’s me out of here- time to watch some non league football in Coventry, living the high life, I know! There will not be one of these updates next week by the way, because I will of course be at the excellent Manchester Animation Festival all week. Do come and say hi if you see me- I’ll most likely be stood alone anyway!!
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