"Spoon"

[slowtiger]

Finally that little project I started last year gets momentum. Here's a background.

[Elodie]

It was painted in TVPaint ? it looks like real watercolour, especially at the top !

[slowtiger]

To be honest, I put one scanned watercolour image in the background, but it really only shows at the top and maybe right of the image. Everything else is done in TVP - the lines as well as the washes. I think I will do this on most BGs: have some scanned watercolour show up in the edges as to make everything appear on a piece of paper.

[Elodie]

Oh, I understand
That's a clever way to work !

[slowtiger]

I tried to export the brush as TVPX but only got a "can't export". This happens to me most of the time. It's just a tool bar with one brush in it!

However, here's a closeup of the same scene.

[slowtiger]

Just a workflow thing: I made lots of swishes and splashes and a general mess with ink on paper and scanned it all in. Opened all in a second project, used scan cleaner, duplicated everything, made one half white (I need white and black swishes). Now whenever I need some swish I go over to this project and cutbrush what I need, back to animation, rotate and resize with cutbrush tool, paste, erase excess. This is surprisingly fast, plus I have all my swishes nicely in one file.

(Doing stuff with ink on paper is lots of fun, using brushes and fingers and a toothbrush. But my desk is a mess now!)

BG is ink on paper, animation in TVP, swish ink on paper.

[D.T. Nethery]

That's a very nice effect. Thanks for sharing this technique.

[slowtiger]

Another BG for the same film. Most of it will be black and white, only some scenes in colour.

Only the sky is scanned in, everything else done in TVP. Original size was double HD for zoom in.

[Elodie]

Both media mix well ! Good job !

[Fabrice]

Only the sky is scanned in

So you used brushes for the trees ? nice job.

[slowtiger]

Trees were done with two different Animbrushes. The first consists of about 30 bitmaps forming an opaque ink-like line with high dynamics (from 1 to about 100 px width). With this I tried to sketch the foliage very loosely in light green.

The second Animbrush consists of about 30 scans of watercolour brush splots on paper, most very transparent. I checked preserve transparency and dabbed lighty across the tree with this brush, using darker greens up to black in each pass. Back to brush #1, adding some light dots, uncheck preserve transparency, set brush to Behind, fill some holes with contrasting greens. Done.

I'm so used to the stencils of TVP now, it's my favourite workflow to first create an area with sharp edges, then fill and texture it with large and transparent strokes of any kind. This way I avoid that sterile digital flat look fast and easily.

I think I could do the second part with a paper structure of watercolour splots, but right now I only have 1 more week to finish that film and no time for lengthy experimenting.

I wonder if there's interest for a little tutorial about this? Not now, but I could do one end of month.

[Elodie]

I wonder if there's interest for a little tutorial about this?

I think it's worth it !

[slowtiger]

OK, I made it. Deadline tomorrow, film uploaded today. It's not finished yet, some mistakes in there, and the sound needs to be mixed professionally, but all of that will be done until mid-December. And I'm quite OK with the result.

spoon_loeffel.jpg (94.43 KiB) Viewed 47966 times

I broke 3 spoons while making sounds.

This is where I created some textures.

Since the film might have its world premiere in February (if it gets selected) and the rules are strict, I will give out a link and password only to people I know who are interested and PM me. Please don't share or publish, thank you.

[slowtiger]

I'm in the process of correcting mistakes and adding details where necessary. Next week the final sound mix will happen, after that the first viewing on a larger screen, for friends.

I'm quite happy with my workflow design: animation and BG drawing in TVP, compositing, where necessary, in Anime Studio. It's easy to change something in TVP, re-export again, and it shows up in AS immediately. I had some minor cutout character animation done last year, the style needed to be adjusted, so I re-drew in TVP, exported, and the animation in AS updated automatically.

I also noticed I had to use pre-multiply on some material to get the correct result in AS (which doesn't have any import options about this). So I'll advocate to keep this function in TVP.

Here's one scene (try and spot the cutouts!):

[o0Ampy0o]

Here's one scene (try and spot the cutouts!)

Everything.