Recreating Cel Animation Digitally

[Alyxandr]

ORIGINAL POST: www.reddit.com/r/animation/comments/3umx0p/question_how_to_recreate_the_visual_style_of_the/

With all the new, modern cartoons that are coming out like Gumball, Rick and Morty, and the such, you can see that the visuals are pristine and clean. But when you watch the cartoons made traditionally like the early Spongebob show, Batman: TAS, and so on, there is a difference in visual style. I don't mean art style when I say visual style, I mean the way the art is presented on screen.

The reason it looks different is because of the medium (ink and paint vs. digital art) and the way the images are compiled (layered transparent celluloid photographed over painted background art vs. digitally layered art).

EXAMPLES OF CEL ANIMATION: http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/11833/12054518_1.jpg?v=8CEBE48029EC160 http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5hcdiwXgP1qdtw9eo1_500.png http://www.rubberslug.com/img_show.aspx?ImageID=416978&X=530&Section=Item

I was wondering if there is a way for tradigital animation done in Flash or Toon Boom to look visually the same or similar to traditional animation on celluloid.

From what I've come up with, it seems that celluloid animation has a slight black glow or drop shadow that is cast onto the background because of how they are layered in compiling. I've also noticed that the drawings are ever so slightly, but naturally imperfect due to human error. That, however, is not a quality that can be recreated through computers. In terms of animation methods, traditional animation will be 2D frame-by-frame tradigital animation. I've used Flash and Toon Boom and Toon Boom has a more traditional brush (and the brush doesn't always flip out COUGH COUGH ADOBE FLASH COUGH).

I'm not crazy am I? There's an obvious difference in the way the visuals look in animation like Akira (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b9akEQQJng) and Fullmetal Alchemist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTMfM9SGkao). It's like traditional animation looks as if the animation can actually be physically touched where the animation and the backgrounds are separate entities (a quality I love) where digital animation looks uniform to the screen (which I don't really care for).

With what traditional animation I've watched (and enjoyed the medium's visuals of), it is mostly from VHS tapes. There is low fidelity, unintentional glows/bloom, and so on.

What are your tips and/or thoughts?

[Silvergun-Superman]

I've always wondered about that myself. You could try experimenting with different filters in Photoshop (or other such software).

For example, I applied the Gaussian blur filter to the image of Spongebob on the right to make it look less clean.

[NoRights]

Well you're talking about a number of factors coming together. Modern animation looks cleaner since there's generally no generation loss, no film grain, and no physical imperfections with digital files. Every medium has it's tell tale signs as a result of how it's produced. Vector programs like Flash and Toon Boom smooth things out, people stylize it with thicker lines and simpler character designs. Elements are reused for consistency and to save time/money.

Traditional animation is both time and labor intensive but you can still do it, even digitally. Cuphead is drawn on paper and colored in Photoshop. Heck, I'd love to see somebody recreate the look of Fleischer's 3D multiplane camera in Toon Boom, myself.

[Celshaded]

My main goal with working in Flash has always been to have the final animation look like it wasn't done in Flash, I'm still in the process of figuring that out though. I've found that the best way to achieve a traditional look is to actually work traditionally; working on paper and having physical work that you put together in the computer. It's a lot more work than working 100% in Flash, but you are still able to take advantage of being able to automate certain things digitally. You just have to experiment and figure out how to get the look you're going for.

I know one major factor is animating in a program that doesn't do vector lines, like TVPaint or Photoshop.

[Alyxandr]

Here's what I've made so far. I made the clean lineart and colors in Toon Boom, then imported it to paint.net, applied a glow, applied the oil painting effect, added a grain effect, and finally subtle Guassian blur. This looks pretty close to what I'm going for. I assume in Premiere it will be slightly different to make.

(Also I'm a fan of Kerslash! It's really cool.)

[Alyxandr]

At 12/1/15 11:45 AM, NoRights wrote: Well you're talking about a number of factors coming together. Modern animation looks cleaner since there's generally no generation loss, no film grain, and no physical imperfections with digital files. Every medium has it's tell tale signs as a result of how it's produced. Vector programs like Flash and Toon Boom smooth things out, people stylize it with thicker lines and simpler character designs. Elements are reused for consistency and to save time/money.

Traditional animation is both time and labor intensive but you can still do it, even digitally. Cuphead is drawn on paper and colored in Photoshop. Heck, I'd love to see somebody recreate the look of Fleischer's 3D multiplane camera in Toon Boom, myself.

With my latest cartoon, I'm doing my best to do every thing tradigitally (meaning that I redraw almost every frame). I've learned from other forums that doing things like that will give it more substance than just applying lo-fi effects to it.

[EvilRaccoon]

At 12/2/15 10:02 PM, ade-syndicate wrote: With my latest cartoon, I'm doing my best to do every thing tradigitally (meaning that I redraw almost every frame). I've learned from other forums that doing things like that will give it more substance than just applying lo-fi effects to it.

It will. When animation was done on paper and cell, it was taken straight from the artist. Your tradigital workflow with recreating or vectorizing the scanned line is the problem, and it was mine too at one point.

To help you a bit though the clean up artists initially at disney where draftsmen, they had steady hands that could draw single lines. Then the colour was put behind it. When you digitize your artwork, you create a perfect mathematical line for it. Line tools create a too-consistent line, and the brush tool creates a smoothed pixel perfect edge. Even when converting a scanned bitmap to vector (twain acquire) it'll still average out the line.

You're needing the graphite look, if you look at a single frame of this kind of animation you'll find that the pixelation in the line helps create warmth. The hands flow is also more correct as it was done with a pencil, not redrawn by a vector application interpreting a stroke. There are ways though you can use your pencil art in flash.

Since you're drawing pretty much every frame, you can clean up your art like the disney clean up artists would do, scan it, using your peg bar as placement, facing the drawings down so they all stay in place. Then make it into a movie clip (per drawing). Create the blending mode to be multiply knocking out the white, and then use vector fills to create a shape below. Cell was pretty much flat colour anyway, so that can help. This process is a work around though, because you end needing to make every frame a movie clip, because movie clips dont show on the stage when you play through them. But it'll give you that look.

I'm not the best clean up artist, so i have another workflow. I create it traditionally, Pegbar, lightbox, etc. Scan in then bring it into Sketchbook pro, which has basic animation features, but fantastic lifelike drawing tools. I bring them all in frame by frame and do my clean up there because it has things that are native and work well like steadystroke (which is like a line that catches up to your drawing, but straightens our your stroke). Then once done then save out as a 32bit sequence, cancelling the need to make anything a multiply in flash, and do the colour underneath in vector.

Or...you can buy Toon Boom harmony 11 or later for thousands as it allows you to mix both Raster and Vector. ;)

Ive done these workflows and others a good few times, so hit me up if you have any questions. I dont use photoshop for the sequence lineart because imo Sketchbook has a more animation-like stroke to it's pencil.

[maficmelody]

I've spent a few years researching and developing such a pipeline for my Riley & Spencer project ( http://rileyandspencer.tumblr.com/ ) and two larger "secret projects" lol

I agree that textures, pressure sensitive strokes, and filters can carry so far. Maybe because I was trained to roll paper between my fingers I'm biased being more comfortable with traditional 2D and overall more satisfied with the Xerox look in post.

The Freak of the Week music video is the closest compositing traditional look I've seen.
https://youtu.be/y2vzBdIejVY?list=PLz5lyKZDxvkqSTeJLKeABj2T_A2OVW-rk

It's worth checking out the In The Making video, too.

[Guganimator]

Tbh i do have a tip

Frist, make a storyboard of your animation

Then, use that storyboard as a base for your frames

After that, use a good drawing program with layers (paint tool sai, krita, medibang) and draw each frame on layers (note: each time you finish a frame, put transparençy on the previous layer for onion skin effect) also draw it with the pencil brush, add drop shadow, erase some spots on the outlines so it looks like cel animation

Final step: open up flash, or any other software, draw a square with a gray color, set the transparency to 15, and put your frames on these squares, that way, its gonna look like a animation cel, put the background, audio, and othet stuff and done

[Alyxandr]

At 8/20/22 08:13 AM, Guganimator wrote: Tbh i do have a tip

Frist, make a storyboard of your animation

Then, use that storyboard as a base for your frames

After that, use a good drawing program with layers (paint tool sai, krita, medibang) and draw each frame on layers (note: each time you finish a frame, put transparençy on the previous layer for onion skin effect) also draw it with the pencil brush, add drop shadow, erase some spots on the outlines so it looks like cel animation

Final step: open up flash, or any other software, draw a square with a gray color, set the transparency to 15, and put your frames on these squares, that way, its gonna look like a animation cel, put the background, audio, and othet stuff and done

Props for responding to a seven-year-old forum post. I'm still super interested in this topic! Thank you for responding. I actually found some neat stuff recently on the topic, including underlighting and replication techniques.

@MrMiguelArt on Twitter makes astoundingly accurate looking recreations of cel anime. I asked him if he could go into detail how he makes them, but he didn't respond.

If you go onto their Patreon, Knights of the Light Table goes into detail about how they made their Starlight Brigade animated music video and even offer Toon Boom brushes!

I'm working on making a tutorial on how to make this effect, but I need money to buy things, mainly tools, and I have no money right now lol

[RobC3]

I’ve been interested in an effect like this too. My experimenting has been within Opentoonz’s compositing features. Actually, I’ve been frustrated too with how silent the artists are who seem to do this effect accurately. I’d like to share a test I did in Opentoonz a couple months ago, the top image has compositing applied and the bottom is the original unedited image:

I tried to add stuff like cel-casted shadows, vignetting, and some slight chromatic aberration at the edges of the “photograph”

Ultimately, I would like to publish a guide to do this somewhere on the forums.

[EdwardMarr]

An imperfect brush. Little line smoothing. Some grain. A slight gaussian blur. That should be good.

[Alyxandr]

At 8/28/22 11:06 PM, EdwardMarr wrote: An imperfect brush. Little line smoothing. Some grain. A slight gaussian blur. That should be good.

I've seen mixed results. There's more to it than just that if you care about doing that effect convincingly.