WeirdBlackHippie

| Anime, Hip-Hop, and Animation| ATLien Nerd with a Blog | |IG: WeirdBlackHippie|

[batwan-deactivated20220318]

This spooky thing called “slavery” happened, and my entire ethnic identity was erased.

[weirdblackhippie]

#ourworkisneverover

[stonesthrow]

Yes Lawd! Remixes

[animalex11-blog]

Animation websites

11 Second Club

50 Most Influential Disney Animators Academy of Art Animation Notes Academy of Art Character and Creature Design Notes A. Film L. A. Animated Views Animation Addicts

Animation Backgrounds 2

Animation Magazine Animation Meat Animation Nation Animation Podcast Animation Progression Reels Animation Studio Stuff for Students  Animation Tips & Tricks Animation Treasures Animators Resource AnimSchool Animation World Network - AWN

Art of Animation 

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

 BCDb - The Big Cartoon Database

Big Screen Animaton  Broose Johnson Artist

Cartoon - European Association of Animation film Cartoons, Model Sheets & Stuff Catsuka

Celf-Centered Animation  Character Design Chronicles of an Animator Chuck Jones Gallery Colorful Animation Expressions Concept Art

Cowan Collection: Animation and Comic Art  Darling Dimples

Deja view Disney Animation Archive Disney Concepts & Stuff

Disney, etc.  Disney History Don Bluth Animation Drawn Flooby Nooby

 Focus on animatioN

Hans Bacher’s Animation Treasures

Harwey@deneroff Ink and Paint Club

Inspirationhub  John K. Stuff! Lineboil Mark Pudleiner’s Blog Martin K - Animation Blog Mayerson on Animation Michael Barrier.com Michael Sporn Animation, Inc. No Fat Clips!

On Animation

Pencil Tests Pinterest: Animation Reference Pinterest: Character Design References   Pixar Talk Rainplace

 Sandro Cleuzo Blog

SCAD Libraries

Scurvie’s Disney Blog 

Speaking of Animation

Spline Doctors Temple of the Seven Golden Camels The Animation Podcast The Art Center The Art of Armand Baltazar  The Art of Glen Keane The Art of Disney Animation The Ghibli Blog The Magic Behind the Magic The Walt Disney Family Museum Uli Meyer Animation Vintage Disney Collectibles

Walk Cycle Depot

[ichise]

[tenkaichibudokai]

[amazingartistyellow-deactivated]

Hot on His Tail

Good lord do I hate animating fire…..

[90skindofworld]

[goldwerewolf]

I envy writers.

As an artist I can give you a snapshot into a world.

But a writer.

A writer can take you there.

They can weave together words and create a portal to anywhere. You can visit those places instead of looking out a window and wishing to be a part of it.

I envy writers.

[bluez2776-deactivated20170302]

I envy artists.

A writer can give you a story.

But an artist.

An artist can show you the exact emotions behind everything.

They can paint a picture worth a thousand words without ever writing one. They can show you every single emotion, every single thought in a second. They can show emotion like a writer never could.

I envy artists.

[manga-spot]

Nostalgic Vibes (Fan art by Jean-Francois Painchaud)

[saltyicecream]

(2) 2d Character animation

Disclaimer: Art isn’t a science: there are no definite proofs, there is no “correct” methodology, there are no facts. That’s not to say there aren’t cool ideas for you to explore. I don’t claim to be the best animator, I’m just showing you what works for me.

OK, so we want to start animating a character. One of the most important things about characters are the faces. It can really throw off a perfectly good animation when you see the face deform into something you can’t even recognize. What we want is consistency, but how do we get that? Well I can think of three ways : Make face guidelines, generate a 3d animation and rotoscope it, or get a clip from real life and rotoscope that. I’m just going to focus on the first one for reasons I’ll explain later.

You should start with a rough sketch, I like using simple shapes, but a lot of pros just go straight into outlines of the major forms.

OK, we got a very basic construction of a head (eyes, mouth, neck, etc). Now to keep our parts of the head consistent relative to eachother, we can add another guideline to help us (I used a triangle).

Now I made up some hairstyle and eyes on the first frame. Then I applied it on the other 3 keyframes and added inbetween frames to make it smoother.

You see how the eyes and mouth are within a certain boundary. This is really helpful to get it looking believable. Keeping the ratio is critical to make your character’s face consistent. Now remove the guidelines and you get a half-decent animation.

You can expand your animation to do whatever.

You can do all this relatively fast if you feel comfortable with drawing your characters. 

You can also use 3d. The problem with 3d though is that it takes alot of time to get assets made, rigged, and animated. By then you might as well render it and keep it 3d. I should say, a lot of modern day 2d animations do use at least some 3d. I’ve noticed it a lot with backgrounds and that’s understandable since you don’t want to redraw every single frame as the camera pans. 

As for rotoscoping, I think it’s a bit vacuous. Most of my favorite animations are done with exaggerated movements of different body parts to accentuate emotions (e.g. mouth getting bigger when angry or surprised). This problem applies to 3d as well, but if you’re skilled enough (and have enough time) you can make great animations that have this exaggerated element.

*This works for other “styles” that are more realistic.

The thing to keep in mind, is that the skull is a complex shape, and it follows that the face is also a complex shape. Having simple shapes still helps because those complex shapes fit inside simple shapes.

Hope this helps, and thanks again for your support.

[saltyicecream]

2d Animation Tips - Tracing

This seems to be a sensitive topic for many people, but I’d like to make the case for tracing to be an important tool for learning. In fact, I think tracing is one of the most efficient ways you can learn not just to animate, but to learn to draw more generally. This is more of general advice for people starting out, rather than a tutorial.

 If you want to learn to learn anything, you should start with the best. I found one of  yoh yoshinari’s many animations of yoko. The movement is pretty solid, but where would you begin with understanding his thought process? 

 I think it’s best to kind of reverse engineer some major forms to see the general movement so I first traced it.

 There’s quite a bit going on here. I tried to isolate the head movement

 And made a line of movement

From here you can try to use the form of the head to see if you can reconstruct the original animation, but I just wanted to keep the line of movement to make things less derivative.

 The movement is very rough and needs a bit of polishing and refining, but I think you can make it into a solid animation with a second or third pass.

 The bigger question is, did I make something derivative? Yeah, in some sense it is derivative. It wasn’t directly traced, but I took the line of movement from Yoh’s animation. The better answer is: it doesn’t matter.. because it’s about you learning rather than showing it to people telling them how cool you are for tracing another artist.

 There are a few things to be said here. If you are at a level where you can make solid animation with good composition ( and yes there is composition in animations just like there are in illustrations and movies), the dangers of making derivative work rise pretty quickly. Maybe there is a market and audience for people who can trace really well, but personally I don’t care for that and I assume others don’t care about that either. In other words: if you want to be known for your animations, you probably shouldn’t trace others.

 Just to break the taboo a little more, there is a guy by the name of Drew Struzan. He is a professional movie poster illustrator, he made covers for star wars, indiana jones, and back to the future .. just to name a few. He uses a projector to trace people’s faces onto his posters. He does this to maximize his time for what would take him days or weeks to do by eye. Is there anything wrong with this? I feel like there isn’t, and the reason is because I feel movie posters’ main strength and appeal are their color choice and composition. There are people who get paid to capture someone’s likeness and, sure enough, that is a talent that you develop with time and skill. I just don’t think Drew is paid for how well he can make the faces look exact.

 And just to touch on some of the drama of people tracing me, I don’t think it’s a big deal. There are people out there that think it’s ok to use my art for advertisements, and leak patreon stuff. It just doesn’t seem like a big deal to me if someone traced an animation.

Anyways, hope that is somewhat helpful.

[agreeing]

[twotheleft]

[gkusoul]

The Legendary Roots Crew…….as Peanuts……

[kevinkeller]

[dotnova]

How do you get your lines to look so clean? What brush do you use? I just switched to manga studio from illustrator and all my lines come out horrible cus I'm not used to pressure sensitivity. Any advice would be great but I also understand you don't want to give away secrets to those who are tryna copy you lol

lol Nonsense, there are no secrets over here (other than my second life as an assassin). I’m not too familiar with the Illustrator side of things, other than knowing that vectors will always be the crispiest of the crisp in terms of graphics. I assume you’re using a tablet in Manga Studio since you mentioned sensitivity. Here are a few of my common approaches when attempting to get my lines right:Before anything, I adjust the settings on the machine itself. Not sure if you have Mac or Windows, but take a look at the settings for the tablet. This is what it looks like for my Cintiq on Mac but this will vary if you have a different tablet or operating system. I like my sensitivity high so I can use light gentle strokes and still have a crispy line.

The next thing I typically do is double up on the sensitivity settings. Manga Studio has it’s own pen pressure utility that you can adjust if you go to the Manga Studio dropdown menu at the top left and select “Pen Pressure Settings”. This is to get everything feeling how it does for me on real paper. 

After that it’s all about resolution and brush settings I suppose. I’m sure you’re already hip, but make sure your resolution is high enough for crispy lines. I typically work between 300 and 600. 

When you click on a brush you will be presented with some basic options like size, aliasing, stabilization, etc. Important stuff for crispiness is anti-aliasing. The more to the right the setting is, the softer the stroke will be. The more to left the setting is, the harder and crispier your line will be. Stabilization can help sometimes but it tends to make things not feel natural for me if I over do it. All it does is purposely slow down/lag your stroke for more control. Post correct is up to you, if you want your line to be automatically straightened/corrected after you draw it. There are other advanced options you can play around with as well if you click the wrench at the bottom right corner of the basic brush settings.

You’ll have to find a brush that you favor for the type of lines that you want. I’ve bought a lot of cool brushes that have the settings already tweaked for me since I’m not an expert on all of the settings. If you search for FRENDEN, he has a lot of dope brushes already configured for great strokes out of the box. They’re pretty cheap as well. One last thing is to make sure you’re using vector layers for your lines. The icon with the paper sheet and 3D cube under your layer management is the vector layer icon. This will allow you to resize lines and rotate lines without losing quality. With all of that said, Illustrator (in my opinion) will always be the crispiest. But you can play around with the settings to produce strokes to your liking. I hope this helps!