Designing and Animating a Character Sprite with Modern Techniques

High-quality 2D animation for video game production is both strenuous and time consuming. Traditionally, 2D game animation consisted of drawing each frame by hand and processing it into a bitmap for use in-game. As every frame was individually drawn, it was difficult to create enough drawings for smooth animation as well as keep form consistent between frames. Although, this technique usually resulted in a strong sense of 3D volume and realism when well executed. Current technology allows for faster 2D animation workflows using interpolation and bone systems as well as greater consistency, smoothness, and efficiency, but oftentimes the results lose the sense of depth and quality found in traditional animation. This thesis explores efficiently creating, and animating a 2D sprite by utilizing a composite of traditional animation techniques and computer animation practices. Using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash, and the Unity3D game engine, a short game was created to demonstrate this process in a finished work

Unhinged

Unhinged is an animated graduate thesis film 7 minutes, 30 seconds long, which was originally conceived as a story about decision making, and it turned into a story about loneliness and an acceptance of it. It tells a story of a troll, Lancelot, who carries on a lonely life in a neglected cabin in the middle of a desert. He entertains himself by playing masquerade with his friends, mannequins-hat-holders. One day he hears a knock on the door and struggles with fear to open the door. This film is a hand-drawn animation that was mostly produced in TVPaint Animation Software. It is done in full color and has an elaborated soundtrack. This paper outlines the whole film creation process from the very beginning of an idea development stage until receiving a response and critique. It describes all my inventions, obstacles, failures, and successes, as well as technical specifics of the process

Fox Fire

“Fox Fire” is an independent animated short. Its plot is centered on a young boy, a mysterious girl, and their adventures at a Japanese summer festival. The purpose of this project was to create a short and fun animation to stir the imagination of its viewers while incorporating elements of Japanese culture and experimenting with unique aesthetic choices. During the initial brainstorming stages of this capstone, I decided that I wanted to somehow incorporate pieces of Japanese culture and mythology into the project. Not only is the folklore fascinating, I often enjoy expressing my Japanese heritage through artwork. The choice of animation as the medium was a result of my respect and admiration for the craft as well as my interest in illustrating “conceptual art”. The project began with the creation of various preliminary and conceptual works, such as a written story, storyboard, character design, background paintings, and concept paintings. These elements help to establish a solid foundation on which to build the final animation. Thanks to these initial steps, the story is clear, the look of each character is consistent, and the color choices are worked out. As an Illustration major, I viewed these steps as particularly crucial in the creation of a successful final project. The look that “Fox Fire” ended up taking was heavily influenced by animated movies that I have always admired. For instance, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland inspired the black expanse that my young boy character gets sucked into. I used a variety of mediums to complete this initial process, including charcoal, acrylic paints, digital painting, and even cardboard. The final animation was created using Adobe Flash, a widely used animation software. Most of the frames were hand-drawn directly into Flash using a Wacom tablet, while others utilized the software’s “tweening” function. While “tweening” - a function that automatically generates frames for simple movements – is useful, it creates an unnaturally smooth “computer generated” aesthetic. Therefore, I tried to minimize its use. The “ink drawn” look of the characters was at first just a happy accident created by Flash’s ability to create interesting line-weight and eventually evolved into an intentional aesthetic choice. Throughout the process of creating the animation, various fluctuation in style and character designs occurred, mostly as a result of time constraints or the worry of something looking clichéd. The project was certainly a balancing act of creating “economical” animation while still struggling to retain high-quality drawings and fluid motion. I believe that this is something all independent animators struggle with due to the heavy workload that accompanies even very short animations. However, I believe the end product of “Fox Fire” is well-made, enjoyable to watch, and something that I can take pride in. Though my major revolves around creating beautiful still images, the venture into moving art was an interesting departure and I hope to experiment with it again in the future

Studio Ghibli’s landscapes and animation: design, characteristics and process

This dissertation joins the vibrant discussion in the animation and art industry about the impact of digital technology on culture and older more traditional hand drawn techniques, which are still used by art houses such as Studio Ghibli. It explores the visionary presence that digital techniques have had mainly in Japanese animation culture. From the perspective of someone who has been closely following the main animation houses for a long time, the mix of an autoethnographic and theory-based approach helped give clarity to the changing field and its impact on culture. Looking at key thinkers such as Blaire(2015) and Sullivans(2005) dissection of the research method, allowed me to combine my thoughts on digital evolution in animation while linking it to a theoretical framework. By analysing concrete narrative studies used by Theorists such as Bigelow(2009) and Wells(2002) and then combining that with industry artists of both traditional and modern techniques, I demonstrate that late 20th century aesthetics of art and design in Japanese anime can be pushed to new heights with use of digital technology but also explore the possible drawbacks to traditional styles it would have. Breaking down modern stereotypes of Japanese animation as viewed by western culture was a fundamental point in this research and was achieved by analysing the artistic differences using case studies between different art directors including Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai.

Space-time sketching of character animation

International audienceWe present a space-time abstraction for the sketch-based design of character animation. It allows animators to draft a full coordinated motion using a single stroke called the space-time curve (STC). From the STC we compute a dynamic line of action (DLOA) that drives the motion of a 3D character through projective constraints. Our dynamic models for the line's motion are entirely geometric, require no pre-existing data, and allow full artistic control. The resulting DLOA can be refined by over-sketching strokes along the space-time curve, or by composing another DLOA on top leading to control over complex motions with few strokes. Additionally , the resulting dynamic line of action can be applied to arbitrary body parts or characters. To match a 3D character to the 2D line over time, we introduce a robust matching algorithm based on closed-form solutions, yielding a tight match while allowing squash and stretch of the character's skeleton. Our experiments show that space-time sketching has the potential of bringing animation design within the reach of beginners while saving time for skilled artists

Raine Azure

Raine Azure is an animated graduate thesis film, with a runtime of 6:27. This animation follows the story of March and Autumn, a brother and sister (respectively) tasked to protect a crystal altar that serves as the world\u27s rain dynamo. They set off to save the world from a beast which has stolen the power of the altar and upset the world\u27s balance. Along the way, March discovers that a balance exists between self-reliance and dependence on others. The primary goals during the production of this film were to explore and develop my skills in animation, character design, and music integration. However, due to the production pipeline, story development, rigging structure, and project management became unexpected points of development, until the primary goals returned within the last months of production. The film was produced in Toon Boom Animate Pro 3, via a 2D cutout animation workflow. Music was produced via Cakewalk Sonar X3, utilizing virtual instruments from IK Multimedia, Kong Audio, and Garritan, amongst others. This document covers all aspects of the film creation process from start to finish. Challenges, revelations, failures, and successes are covered here

Sketch-based Human Motion Retrieval via 2D Geometric Posture Descriptor.

AbstractSketch-based human motion retrieval is a hot topic in computer animation in recent years. In this paper, we present a novel sketch-based human motion retrieval method via selected 2-dimensional (2D) Geometric Posture Descriptor (2GPD). Specially, we firstly propose a rich 2D pose feature call 2D Geometric Posture Descriptor (2GPD), which is effective in encoding the 2D posture similarity by exploiting the geometric relationships among different human body parts. Since the original 2GPD is of high dimension and redundant, a semi-supervised feature selection algorithm derived from Laplacian Score is then adopted to select the most discriminative feature component of 2GPD as feature representation, and we call it as selected 2GPD. Finally, a posture-by-posture motion retrieval algorithm is used to retrieve a motion sequence by sketching several key postures. Experimental results on CMU human motion database demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach