What can i do to get this style?

[Ben Swallow]

I want to rotoscope a short clip in this style, can somebody help? Even without the colour would be ok I want bold black lines but with some detail

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

I assume you are aware that both of Richard Linklater's animated feature films were produced by a large team of professional animators who worked by hand over a very long period of time to hand rotoscope the animation for the films. They made extensive use of keyframing vector shapes to cut down on completely hand drawing every frame. They also break different components of the video out into separate layers, render them as separate elements, and then recombine them together for the final shot.

That last technique i mention about breaking things down into layers is really worth paying attention to.

You are of course free to do the exact same process in Studio Artist using movie layers to build up hand animation frame by frame using a source movie onion skin. All of the features are there (including the keyframing shortcuts). but i'm assuming you are looking for a totally automatic solution.

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There are a large number of different techniques you can work with in Studio Artist to get a 'cartoon style'.

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David Kaplan produced a Sundance film festival award winning feature length auto-rotoscoped animated film 'Year of the Fish' completely using Studio Artist. You can read all about the film and the process(s) and techniques he used to make it here, if you work your way back through all of the posts associated with the film.

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Here's a link to a series of posts on Paint Animation Strategies Tutorials. This series of tutorial group posts leads to a number of other online articles that discuss the overall process of building a paint action sequence to create a given artistic stylistic effect for a paint animation. Reading that material will help you both understand the process of creating a successful PASeq for movie processing, and will also give you some different ideas to approach the creation of different cartoon style effects.

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Here are some video examples posted here on the user forum with a 'cartoon' tag.

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Here's a previous user forum discussion from 2009 that is all about getting the cartoon look of 'a scanner darkly', which is what you are specificly asking about. So you should definitely read that.

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I think the person on staff here working on our latest set of presets can turn you on to some very specific version 4 preset examples for a 'bold black line but with some detail' auto-sketch style. So i will encourage them to answer your question with some detailed preset examples to try out.

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I'll also try to find some time for a little experimentation with some of the newer feature we've been adding. And hopefully post some additional information for you associated with the latest features we've been working on.

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Richard Hoffman made great use of auto-rotoscoping in his award winning film 'Invisible Mountain'. in some very creative ways, that don't just mimic traditional cell animation approaches to building paint animation from video source. David Kaplan also tried to develop his own unique look (and coloring) for his animated film. Again, trying to create his own signature personal approach and aesthetic.

Studio Artist is capable of so many amazing and unqiue painterly auto-rotoscope effects, i would encourage you to explore some of that more, rather than just try to duplicate Linklater's work, to find your own unique personal artistic style for your own project. That's my personal opinion on how to approach a paint animation project using studio artist. Find your own unique personal aesthetic.

That said, we'll try to get some more info up over the next few days to help you out with this specific request. But please read the tutorials on building paint animation strategies mentioned above.

[Ben Swallow]

Very helpful thanks alot

[Candice Pacheco]

Hi Ben,

We are about to release new presets with 4.05 and these are two of them that you might find usefuI.  I will attach them here with images so you can see the final effect.  Also check out the vectorizer sketch presets for thick or thing black outlines. There is a lot of them there.  Then you can fill them in with color using the paint synth or image ops.  You can see how these PAseqs that I am attaching do that with Image Ops and min compositing.  In the image you have attached they are doing multiple layers and a lot of hand work.  What I am sending you is just one layer.

[Candice Pacheco]

Here's the second PAseq preset.  Just add this to your Preset folder in the PAseq folder then choose one of the subfolders or create a new one.  You can also drag to you favorites folder.  Or I believe you can just drag the preset onto your Studio Artist icon on your desktop

[Candice Pacheco]

Hi Ben,

I am attaching a couple of examples of the vectorizer sketch presets.  Is this the direction you want for your outlines?

[Ben Swallow]

Hi Candice,

I tried out the Color Simplify with Vector 2 and it's pretty much what I'm looking for but are they any other vectorizer sketch presets that come out cleaner and tighter, and I'm looking to put more detail into certain areas for example the face, can I do that?

[Sean Bryden]

Have you gone through the Vectorizer sketch effects? Look there and see if there is anything that is closer to what you want.  These are all mostly outline effects and you would have to fill them in if you wanted color.  Let me know what you think of those and we can go from there.  You can also go into the vectorizer editor and in Generation there is usually a slider at the bottom that you can use to tighten the effect.  You can also play with the other controls to see what you can get.

[Ben Swallow]

I went through all the vectorizer sketch effects but none of them are right. I want clean effect and enough detail so you can still see facial expressions. I'm really new to studio artist so I haven't a clue what the editor controls effect have. Prehaps you could help abit more?

[Lucas Krech]

There are very fine tuned controls for the vectorizers, and other tools/effects. It is probably worth your while to play with that and find exactly the effect you want rather than settling for a prefeb that is close.

[Ben Swallow]

Is there a tutorial on editor settings, specifically for the vectorizer controls?

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

There's a vectorizer tutorial video, that covers the basics of getting started using the vectorizer. We should probably do a more in-depth one.

The User Guide chapter on the vectorizer would have detailed descriptions of each vectorizer control panel and associated Editor controls. The User Guide pdf includes detailed descriptions of all of the Editor controls for all of the different studio artist operation modes.

Some specific project oriented vectorizer tutorials are available here.

Here are some more tip articles on the vectorizer.

If you want more tutorial information on some specific aspect(s) of using the vectorizer, feel free to bring it up here and we'll add it to our long list of things to work on as far as generating additional documentation goes.

[Ben Swallow]

Thanks that was very helpful I'm getting closer to what I want. I've been trying out these techniques on a clip of someone walking and I was wondering if it is possible to focus on just the subject so the background doesn't get drawn, abit like the example source movie.