48. Brushes! part 1

Allright, so before I decided weather or not it was possible to do any secondary animation on computer, I had to check that I could replicate the drawings fully digitally. For this I would need a brush (in photoshop, or what ever other software) that replicates the way my pen behave on paper.

This actually means that I need to replicate what the drawn lines look like once scanned.

Step 1: What to replicate

I start by drawing various type of strokes: Slow, fast, overlapping, light and heavy strokes.

Step 2: Understanding parameters

The amount of parameters can be overwhelming  but if you take them one by one it's actually straight forward.

- First you need to choose your brush size to match the pen. You won't be able to change the size of your brush once its finished, it will look odd. If you need a bigger brush, youll need to scan a bigger pen and create a new brush.

From now on stroke on the right is pen stroke on the left is "cg"

I've set the hardness to 33% because the pen is not drawing perfectly sharp.

Note: the size of your brush depends on the size of your document (because it's set in pixels) here i'm working at 300 dpi. If I was at 600 dpi i'd have to scale my brush up twice.

I keep it round because it's a classic pen.

- Then lets set the shape dynamics:

The size jitter "randomise" the size of the brush in the range you set (here the brush can be 50% bigger or smaller). The size is also control by the pen pressure and I've put a minimum size so the brush doesn't disappear when I'm drawing lightly. (Here you need to match the diameter of your lightest pen stroke)

The size jitter represent the flow of ink of your pen and the randomness due to the paper, not the wobbliness of your stroke due to how you draw. I am not using the angle jitter and roundness jitter since my brush is round.

-  Scattering moves the brush in different axis, i am not using it here.

- Textures and Dual Brush aren't useful in this case.

- Color Dynamics

Color dynamics gives your stroke a more natural/scanned look. Scanner never scan black as black, it's multicolor darkness. Here my foreground color is a very dark blue and my background color is a very dark red. They are being mixed randomly at 57%.

A brush is just a succession of dots really close to each other. What the randomizing option does is give each dot a different value, in hue, brightness and saturation. The purity seams to multiply the effect. At -100 the brush turns black and white...

Note that if you un-tick "apply per tip" the color changes is applied to the whole stroke. It can give some nice effects.

- Transfer

Here you'll need to set the opacity and flow of your brush. As you can see on the strokes on the left, the pen doesn't cover the paper regularly (more or less ink comes up).

The opacity and flow are both transparency but one is applied by stroke, the other one is applied as you draw. With opacity you need to lift your pen and draw again to have a color twice less transparent whereas with flow if you draw twice in the same place in a single stroke, this place will be twice less transparent.

The important thing at this stage is to play with the pressure of your wacom pen. You might end up really easily with a completely transparent brush when your not putting a lot of pressure on your pen. You need to set the minimum opacity to something that suite you.

- brush pose is some kind of 3d ness of your pen on the wacom. lets not bother with it.

- The next parameters have no options. I change them on/off as I draw depending on the effect I want to give:

noise:

Adds sharp noise to the stroke.

- Wet edge

Makes the center of the brush lighter and the edges darker

- build-up is some kind of airbrush option.

- Smoothing smooth you brush stroke, I wouldn't use it with a tablet if you want a hand drawn feel...

At this point you should have a brush fairly similar to your pen:

red arrows show the cg brush strokes.

The only option i couldn't find is to have more opacity/flow at the beginning of a stroke, I think it would look much more natural. If anyone knows how to do this, let me know!

Sorry for the bad english, this took more time then i though and I need to go back to work...

Cheerios

47. Yiynova MSP19U

After reading Frenden review a couple of month ago I was really keen on trying out the MSP19U, a cintiq alternative at only 30% of the price.

It was out of stock for a long time, so last Sunday, when it was back on Amazon, I ordered one. I just got it yesterday.

Since lots of people seamed interested, I thought I would share what I think of it, here.

My overall opinion is GOT FOR IT. After drawing several hours on it, it's just a perfect tool.

I never used a new cintiq so I can't compare the Yiynova (pronounced yinova apparently) and the new cintiq. I did try an older model of cintiq and was not convinced, to much parallax, lag and muddy color, the cintiq was also too heavy and big.

But here is what you need to know about the MSP19U,and what probably justify the lower price.

Pros:

-Price (only 680£ with delivery)

-Size (quite small and light, you can draw with it siting on your lap in front of telly)

-Pen feels better then wacom IMO (smaller tip holder) even though when you open it to put the battery it feels like a kid toy.

- Screen is solid glass and looks better then a cintiq.

- Drawing ecperience is perfect, no lag, no jitter, pression is awesome.

- The tablet seams like good quality, nothing like fisher price or anything.

Cons:

- Set up: It took me a while to figure out how to get the right resolution with the mac. TIP: turn your mac of before connecting it, and then on. Don't just do a restart.

- Viewing angle is rubbish, you can't use it as a proper monitor, it's just for drawing. When you sit back you can see a gradient. But when you draw it's perfect.

-  Cursor jitter when your not drawing and the pen is on the screen, it's not a problem for drawing, but when you use the slider on a browser or highlight something, it's quite obvious.

- No space for keyboard: the tablet touches the desk so you cant put your keyboard underneath. It means that your body is 20/25cm away from the actual screen. A bit like if someone put your plate a bit too far. I'm thinking of building a little stand to be able to slide the keyboard under the tablet.

- The handle to get the tablet up and down is not accesible enough to change the angle while working. Durring 5hours of drawings, I never felt like I should move the tablet up and down.

- I have one dead pixel. And I read of other people having one. While it's not a deal breaker, it's worth noting.

Over all, most of the cons are not related to the drawing experience. So as a drawing tool it's perfect. The difference is the same as getting a sport car and a safe car, they both do the job, but one has leather sits, A/C and buttons to change the mirrors ...

If the choice is No Cintinq or MSP19U, I definitely  recommend the MSP19U. Same if you're wondering between intus and msp19u. The MSP19U is a professional quality tool, not a cheap replacement.

Regarding the film, I will be using the tablet for backgrounds elements like véhicules, for sfx, and probably for the horse. I made photoshop brushes that reacts the same way as my pen. But that's next week topic ;)

In the mean time here is the first drawing I did on the MSP19U, I let you guess witch one is CG and witch one is pen: (it's big, if you click on it you can see the details...)

46. Screen Print

Last saturday at dawn (10.30am) completely hangover, I walked more then an hour in the sun to pick up the screen prints. And man was it worth it! They are brilliant. It's my first screen print and I love it, I love it so much I might screen print some backgrounds from the film.

I will start sending them on monday to a few lucky backers.

I printed with Atom Printing, I highly recommend them, great work, fast and affordable.

Here's the print:

If you wanna get one, they're £20, just chuck me an email.

And here's how screen prints are made, it's pretty rad!

And a video that shows the screen printing process, nothing to do whit atom printing or the film, it's just a youtube video :)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxXdndoas94&w=420&h=315]

45. Bones

I finally got around shooting the skeleton shots (some of them anyway.) Now you may wonder how do i rotoscop a skeleton??

Well it's not easy... So I built a "Skeleton Costume" and I start from there and draw all the missing bits (bones really) the old way :)

The roto is SO painful, but drawing the spine and all the other thing is pretty fun. I'm saying that probably because I'm still doing the first shot.

Here is the test animation I made, to make sure that the suit worked... It's not part of the film. I'm including the live footage, because let's face it, it's pretty stupide.

Here in HD on vimeo 

44. Deadman's little helpers

So a few students from RCDC (Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication) backed the film's kickstarter. I met them at the Kickstarters end's drinks, and for what ever reason when they're not busy at school or on personal projects, they want to help on the film... Instead of partying and having fun! Crazy peops.

So they're helping me shading some shots. To make sure everything is consistant I made this little "tutorial" on how to shade beard and hair on the film:

You can check it out in high quality on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/65075512

Anyway thanks Andreas, Amy, Ashley, Andreas and Matt

42. Same old, Same old

Damn, I've been dead busy with playing fancy dressing and drinking (for the live action of the film, obviously - well mainly) that I forgot to post last week! Anyway there is much more black on the character now, and shading takes twice longer... If you want to start a 2d film, hand drawn, here's an advice, make everything white! Damn that black T-Shirt is killing me.

So you can forgive me, here's a little GIF, the walking drunk (it's not the shot that caused me lots of pain):

40. Half

Today I finished shot MO_03_00 witch means that I reached 5 minutes 30 of animation! That's half the film animated!

This shot was a bitch, I emptied a whole pen to finish it, here's a little preview:

38. Animating

Not much to say this week, I've been animating for the last few weeks, and I'm getting faster at it (not sure if it's better though) One more shot and I get to shoot live action again.

37. Loops

In animation we use a lot of cycles to save time on repetitive action, such as walks or runs. A cycle is just an animation that loops i.e. the first frame and the last one are from the same motion and we don't notice a change in rythme when the animation starts again.

Looping a video can get very tricky, but it will save a tremendous time in animation..

For exemple I'm working on a shot where the guy walks toward the camera, it's a 10 second shot, witch would mean 120 frames to animate. Way to much.

So let's turn this video (video is speed up):

into this cycle :

The first step is to find where the action repeats:

Now the first and last frames are kind of the same but the guy is moving forward...  Rubbish... So let's scale and rotate him so it matches as much as possible.

It's starting to get there, but because it's video, nothing loops at the same frames. It needs to be fixed, element by elements:

Each individual part of the body is looped. If you don't pay attention to the background.

Then I put the guy back together:

Et voila, if you look only at the guy,  the video is looping. You can see that I don't loop the lower body and upper body at the same frame, same with the arm and the guitar. That's another tricky part, as it's important to keep a natural look, but once drawn:

This fella can walk, forever!

An I only animated 21 frames!

Don't forget that first and last frame shouldn't be the same one, or you would have twice the same frame. You need to match 2 frames, and then remove the last one, if that makes any sense :)

It's the last day of my kickstarter if you wanna chip in, it's here: www.deadmansreachfilm.com

36. Live action, Again

I finished animating all the shots I filmed so far, so I'm back on live action. I have a few "classic" shot to shoot, i.e. me going around in my living room pretending to be in the desert, but after that I'll start the more complex shots, involving old fashion special effects such as building a fake head in latex. Ho boy that's gonna be fun!

Here, a mock up layout of one of the shots I film yesterday:

And just a little reminder that the kickstarter is still going! (9 days left!)

34. Kickstarter Update

Well the Kickstarter had an amazing start! We reached the initial goal in only 24 hours!

The initial goal was to cover the cost of finishing the film animation and the off costs, like festival inscription.

The new goal now includes the compositing of the film (putting all the animation layers together) and the sound recording!

I hope we can make it! So keep sharing the love!

Also I feel like the T-shirts don't get as much attention as they deserve, It's probably because I didn't talk about them in the video, so here we go:

I'm planing to print the T-shirt with the AMAZING Dude Factory, this means that the printing quality will be beautiful.

They print on American apparel cuts, Male and Female!  You can also choose a variety of colors. Check it out, HERE, And it's only £25!

33. Deadman's Reach Kickstarter is ON

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/59642578 w=500&h=281] visit Animating DeadMan's Reach now! And enjoy awesome rewards and stories about the film!

33. KickStarter is READY - Trailer

Ahoy! "Animating Deadman's Reach" KickStarter is ready to go live!

I will be launching it THIS THURSDAY, valentine's day.

And it will include Awesome Rewards!

Don't miss it, Thuersday, for 30 days only! I will be trying to raise 7000£.

The preparation was bloody intense, but at least you''ll be able to enjoy making fun of me in the KickStarter video!

27. Zoetrope Gif

  I finished shooting 3 sequences last week and I now have 12 new shots that I can animate.

Some of them are quite scary...

This one for instance, each drawing is a proper a4 drawing... shaded and all.

I made it into a kind of zoetrope gif, for fun. So that's 9 frames out of the 26 the shot needs...

Comment here

25. Live Action

I've now finished animating everything I shot a will back, so today and probably tomorrow will be shooting live action again. It's quite a pain in the ass, but it has to be done... the bigest trouble is that, since last time, my hair grew quite a lot, and I'm gonna have to shave my beard... What a drag!

Here's another little GIF, enjoy:

I'm a bit out of Ideas on what I should post, Do you have anything you'd like me to explain about animation, or anything you'd like to see?

Let me know HERE.

24. Shading animation

First of all, sorry for not posting yesterday. I'm sure the 2 visitors that were eager to discover more about the making of DeadMan's Reach were very disappointed, Mum... Conor... sorry.

Anyway.

I didn't post because I was going to post a video that I filmed with a GoPro stuck to my head. I thought it would be fun to see how I shade animation...

Turns out it took me more than 16 hours to shade the 33 frames of the particular shot I'm working on, and because of that:

1) I couldn't draw with a GoPro on my head for 16 hours, I had to stopped after 8 hours... Neck fixing is not included in the film budget.

2) Even speed up 3000 time, the video was extremely boring.

So, I decided to post a GIF instead. It's crazy how gifs are more popular than video, maybe its the equivalent of Disc/ CD but in the 2010: GIF / Vimeo

Anyway, here is what took me 16 hours to draw, color and shade...

And I'm still working on it... I'm now thinking "Summer 2016" is a good release date.

You can comment here.

23. Kick-Starter

I'm seriously considering putting DeadMan's Reach on KickStarter. The main reason being that I'm starting week 23 of a production that was suppose to be 24 weeks. And I can't see how I can finish 7 mins of animation in 1 week... So I need to extend the production quite dramatically...

So what's this Kick-Starter thing?? Well kick-starter is a founding platform for creative projects.

Basically you pre-sell stuffs before  making a project, and you use the money you got from the sell to actually create the project. i.e. For an album, you pre-sell your album, then make the album, then send the album to the people how pre-bought it.

It's a one month process where you need as much word of mouth as possible to reach the amount you need to do (finish) the project. It's a all or nothing. If the amount is not reached you pay nothing and the project get nothing!

It's kind of what I started doing with the sell of the DeadMan's Reach sketch book, but on a completely different scale. (I would have done a Kick-Starter straight from the start but It wasn't available in the UK at the time).

For all of you who bought the book already there will be special, cheaper stuff!

Here are the products (Rewards) I would be selling:

The book, obviously:

T-Shirts:

Original Animation Drawings, like this one:

Original BackGrounds, like that one:

And some more surprises!

As always let me know what you think.

22. Back to Black

I finished the pencil animation for the Bedroom sequence, Those of you who bought the book had a preview of what the film animation will look like, thanks for your feedbacks!

I switched  back to shading for a few days before starting a new sequence witch involves a different drawing technique...

Here is what 3 hours of shading looks like:

[vimeo 51915738 w=500 h=281]

21. Animation GIF

This week I'm planing to finish one of the sequence (BE) in line test. It should be quite doable, but I'd like also to finish the shading on this sequence...

It's quite exiting to see a sequence build up shot by shot. It's the moment where you have to hope that the edit is right!

And because everybody like them, here's a GIF:

20. LineTest

Last week I started animation, I did 200 drawings in two days, tough. I'm probably going to finish the sequence I'm working on and then change a little bit the technique I'm using.

I will try to find a way to make animation a bite more... expressive, by animating straight with a pen.

It's going to be harder, but will save tones of paper and hopefully will make the drawings look much more  "alive".

In the mean time let me introduce you to my LineTest, it's a setup that allows you to take pictures of drawings with a consistent lighting and framing.

You can check your animation much more quickly then when scanning drawing. When I say my line test I mean the one my friend Lucas lent me, thanks mate.

I'm using a D80 to take the pictures and icarus camera control to control the camera from the computer (Tethered)

Here it is in action: [vimeo 50990280 w=500 h=281]