It's cleaner now, although it's not something I can blow up to cinema size...
... (yet? maybe someday?)
Of course, the morphed outlines need to be properly tweened, for one thing. In morphing, you often limp along with simple ghosting of edges rather than getting edges that track a tilting shape.
FYI - this is based upon seven keyframes.
PS I would LOVE to be able to be doing this work in AS--just wish the application were easier and more complete, that I was smarter, and the documentation were more comprehensive...
Genete wrote:So what program do you use? I think I have missed some information from your previous posts...
[a] At the risk of boring others who've heard this all before, (currently) my principal strategy for animation is pixel-based morphing -- specifically I use MorphMan from Stoik. (Another important tool is Illustrator, as I explain below.)
My 3D face modeling is partially done in iClone, but iClone only provides usable frontal views--the likeness simply isn't accurate from the profile view. As the head turns towards a profile, I must resort to reference photos of the poet.
[c] I used MorphMan to map shade lines and ink lines from my first view (the view which looks up into his nostrils) over to my profile views. Because I don't have the mighty brain of a natural-born portraitist (I firmly believe some people are born for the job), this was a relatively difficult process.
Even keeping simple continuity across a few keyframes is harder than one would think. For instance, my concept called for a spiral curl on the forehead, but during my work, some of my keyframes had the curl on the right side and others had it on the left side, and I temporarily removed it. But I forgot to add it back as I went through the rest of my animation pipeline.
[d] This results in a series of bitmaps for facial keyframes. I perform various kinds of posterization and then color replacement with extreme false color, in order to crunch my images into the simple shapes needed for cel animation.
Posterization down to a very few colors (only 6 or 7 in all) of course helps find the contours.
Search and replace of natural colors with a few garish false colors (red, yellow, cyan, etc) is extremely helpful in revealing color noise that persists after posterization.
I have learned that I need to be scrupulous about color hygiene, or I get dirty vectors in Illustrator--you know, those little leaf-shaped error shapes clinging to your real vector lines. (I call them "leeches.")
[e] Now it's time to align my keyframes. I crop my first (bitmap) keyframe as a master file in Paint Shop Pro, and then add a translucent layer as an onion-skin. I align my subsequent keyframes over this one and save out each frame as a separate bitmap file.
Since I was working with only a head view, I suddenly had to figure out for myself where the common anchor point should be for all these floating heads! I decided to make the base of the sternocleidomastoid the origin point--and that helped enormously.
[f] Once I have six or seven keyframes, I send them to the Animation Department for a test. Yeah, AS IF! In reality, my Animation Department is a copy of GIF Movie Gear. This allows me to rough test the keys, and I save the animation both as an animated GIF and as a filmstrip (that is to say, a flat bitmap).
NOTE that I deliberately add a little frame line around each keyframe as an alignment guide for all future work. This involves the Blend Animation function in Movie Gear.
[g] When the keyframes check out, I can import my filmstrip into Illustrator and autotrace them. By moving to Illustrator, I migrate the keyframes into the infinitely scalable domain of vector art. Search and replace of colors is also of course very doable in this application.
[h] My work doesn't stay in vector form very long. To retrieve the images, which are now very large and very smooth inside the Illustrator window, I literally screen capture each enlarged frame and go back to step [e]. This allows me to build a new, higher-resolution stack of keyframes. (The thumbnail animation you see here actually was created at 568x576 resolution--good enough for a medium-shot composition in HD.)
Now I have 7 big pretty keyframes. I bring these into MorphMan and generate the pixel morphs between them. This creates 7 AVI movies of 30 frames each. (AVI is vastly better than GIF because MorphMan dithers the colors when collapsing the palette).
[j] I suck the AVI movies into GIF Movie Gear and convert them into large animated GIFs with perfectly smooth flat colors. Then I concatenate them into one big animated GIF, and make a thumbnail version.
[k] Finally, I place an emergency call to the insane ward. They're coming to get me tomorrow!
Few! Very complex!
If you want to develop a "long" movie (2 or 3 minutes or more) you have to really need a complete and fully detailed storyboard. If not you will get completely crazy.
The most important step is the obtaining of the source images to copy from. If really iClone doesn't help you and you have to resort to reference photos... Why don't you do them directly to Anime Studio? (I mean the front and other side views)
For example I you have the model views taken form any source (old film, old photos, or whatever) Then put them into a switch layer in AS as they were the main reference poses. Tweak the keyframes positions to make a rough image animation. Then when you are happy (now the difficult task) make a trace of of the front view with lines and shapes and keep them the same points around all the animation. Transform the lines and shape order properly to achieve the same animation but with vectors.
The difficult task is to divide the initial view into the proper shapes lines and number of points to try to match all the view involved in the animation. For example you have to draw also the shapes that are behind the visible shapes of the current view. When needed you show them changing the order.
Just some hints. If you are happy with your method and have fun then ... Go ahead with it!
:?::?: So what program do you use? I think I have missed some information from your previous posts...