Animate a painting...

[bristock]

Hi guys,

I'm a newb when it comes to animation. I'm mostly a 2d painter and 3d model creator.

I have a digital painting I made of the founder of Aikido:
http://fav.me/d50wpf4

I'd like to import that graphic and be able to animate the eyes and the mouth. I dont want to have a flat color image. I'd prefer to retain the look and feel that it is now... i.e. the bitmap. I can make it vector in Adobe Illustrator and bring in the vector... would that be easier? When I tried "trace image" In Anime Studio, it looked pretty bad -wereas AI kept pretty good skin tones and shading.

So here's what I have:
The image is layered in Photoshop. I have the face/hair/background on separate layers. I was thinking of cutting out the eyes and putting them on a layer under the face... so they could move around under the eylids. I think that would work in Anime Studio...
But what about the mouth? is that possible?

[slowtiger]

You're on the right track already: everything which should move should be kept separate. Save eye mouth etc as PNG on a transparent BG.

[bristock]

Thanks slowtiger, I was able to export png's and layer everything in AS for eye animation. It worked well, while retaining the bitmap quality of the painting.

One thing I found odd... as I have adobe flash as part of cloud - i attempted the same thing, as well as with Toon Boom, to compare quality of the animation.

Oddly enough the png's exported from Photoshop looked best in AS. When I imported into Toon Boom I got fuzzyness and false color on the edges. When I tried with Flash (which i thought would work best as it's native adobe), it came in fuzzy. only AS kept the sharpness of the original image.

I'm not sure how to do the mouth. But the eyes came through pretty easily.

[funksmaname]

Nice looking painting.
I think the best results for the mouth would be to create a few 'extreme' mouth poses, and then flip between them as needed, and use bone morphing to transition between these pre-painted extremes. Good luck! looking forward to seeing the results.