Template - South Park Style

[darkmatter]

Well, I'm a new Anime Studio Pro user. I've gone through all the tutorials, and now I'm starting to make my own things.

Here's a simple template that I made:



I really want opinions and some advice

[ali980]

The only advice I have is:
continue!

[darkmatter]

It's almost done:



I think that when i put some clothes on him, i'll take out eh outlines.

Please, give me feedback, some constructive critics.

Keep in mind that this is my FIRST draw on anime studio.

[darkmatter]

A simple character made with the template. C'mon give me your opinion, I really want to improve the draw.

[toonertime]

it would be nice if you could do
something to make the
character look a
little more interesting.
Well conceived, tho!

[darkmatter]

it would be nice if you could do
something to make the
character look a
little more interesting.
Well conceived, tho!

hmmm, something like what?

[jhbmw007]

Well- it's Southpark, pretty much basic shapes and circles- I'm not sure there's much you could do to improve it... Perhaps to make it look more authentic, you could use a bitmap fill of a construction paper texture? I imagine if you just scanned different colors of construction paper it would work. It will, of course, prolong your rendering times.

Southpark is actually animated in a 3-d program. They use slight drop shadows here and there to give it the appearance of real stop-motion cut-out animation. AS has a drop shadow effect, but even at the lowest setting (1) it may be "too much" of the effect. Imagine if the character was really made up of cut-up paper- you'd only see a shadow maybe on an edge that's sticking up (like 1 milimeter) from the surface. Perhaps there is a simple way to do that in AS- but I don't know it.

[jhbmw007]

Here's what I was talking about: I found a nice seamless paper texture- meaning you can use it as "tiled". Instead of having a seperate jpeg for each body part, create identical shapes for each part, one on top of the other. One having the tiled texture image (underneath), the other being the desired color for the shape- just make it slightly semi-transparent so that the texture shows through (this shape would be on top). I would copy and paste the first image drawn, then select each point and bind them (spacebar) to the corresponding point of the duplicate shape.

Just in case I've totally confused you by now- here's what I was able to come up with:


Here's the texture image to use for the underlying shapes:


And here is the .anme file- although I'm not sure if the image textures will show up properly:
http://www.mediafire.com/?9zxhumphp2k

Each main body part is on it's own layer- and all the layers have shadow turned on with a value of "1", and all with different, random directions for the shadow.

These details are very subtle, but make a difference. When it comes time to animate, I would use step animation or a very low framerate. You should end up with a very close resemblance to Southpark.

[darkmatter]

whow, that's impressive =D thanks