Loose, 'cut-out' style animation

[sdyer23]

Vapre,

This is an interesting style of animation you are going for. I too enjoy this style of animation and after looking at the links I think I can offer you some tips.

From what you said, about scanning in drawings and mapping them to plane, that's not to far off. But I wouldn't use planes, I would give them a bit of volume, like in the Wolfman short, all the figures were flat, but they had a slight thickness to them -- almost like they were made out of cardboard.

This isn't too hard either to put through with some simple materials and such. If you wanted to build a charcater, you wou'nt have to use any complicated rig setups and skinnin the models would be non-existent. All you'd nned to do is parent the different the body parts together and move the rotation axis so that they hact like hinges. Simple and effective.

The trick though is that one should do something unique with the style. So if you can get a good story and some unique characters, I think you'll have a good start here.

That's about all I have for now, if you have any specific questions and such, please don't hesitate to ask.

Good luck!

-Tux

[vapre]

Hi TuxedoPengu,

Thanks for the reply. What you're saying makes sense.

I'm used to assigning materials to 3D objects that already have the correct shape/size etc. However, what I'm having trouble with is figuring out how to get the shapes right, considering we're essentially dealing with 2D objects now (albeit with a littel thickness).

For example, if I had the 2D front-of-a-wolf-shaped drawing which i'd scanned in, how would I assign that to a flat plane (or box) and still keep the correct shape i.e. not having a box-shaped wolf?

Hope this is making sense....reading it back, i'm not sure it will :)

Somehow, I think this is only the beginning on my worries. Getting the lighting correct to make it all actually look like cardboard cutouts (as in the Wolfman video) must take some serious skill.

[sdyer23]

Vapre,

I see what you are talking about. My thoughts then would be to look into UV unwrapping the odd shaped box, and exporting out the UV's to a program like Photoshop and then fit the textures that way, then import in the texture again into your 3D software and map it that way.

If you aren't sure on how to unwrap an object and working with a UV Editor, there are good tutorials out there online, just Google UV unwrapping or texturing with UV's or something similar.

Though I think this method will help you immensely as you don't have to worry about fitting a square piece into a circular hole, as it were. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions.

-Tux

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