Animating hand-drawn graphics

[motorollin]

I'm planning to create a music video. The graphics will be hand drawn as pen lines, with no shading or colour, just rough lines (I want it to look hand drawn). Is there any software for the Amiga which would allow me to use scanned 2D images to build 3D objects and animate them?

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moto

[KThunder]

there is a pc program called photomodeller that can do that i dont know of any for the amiga though. it uses photogrammetry to build 3d objects from multiple images of an object and can get textures at the same time. i started to write a prgram to do something similar but i found that with carefully taken pictures you can get rough x,y,z data for the pixel coords

i saw an article in an amiga mag once that had an effect similar to what you are describing for your video. i think it was lightwave and it was a rendering mode where you could set it to render verteces or edges or faces.

[X-ray]

You gotta choose, do you want a 2D effect like the A-Ha music video of Take On Me or do you want to input hand-drawn pencilled textures and wrap those on 3D objects and then animate those objects?

Both ways you can do it on the Amiga. But you'll need different software and hardware to do it.

[X-ray]

Oh I read your post again, and I think I understand what you want now. It sounds like a lot of work to draw individual perspectives and then scan those just to get the objects. You are better off modelling these as splines in a four-view raytracer then running the output frames through a Photoshop filter.

I will post a few examples if you are interested in going that route.

[motorollin]

Thanks for the info about PhotoModeler. I'm not sure how I would use this software in this case since the hand-drawn images would not be of 3D objects. Would it be easier to make 3D objects in a rendering package then apply the hand-drawn lines as textures?

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moto

[X-ray]

Woah, now I am back to not understanding what you want. Do you want to input hand-drawn lines as the basis for creating 3D objects, or do you want to make hand-drawn textures that you apply to 3D objects that you make separately?

[motorollin]

Oops, my reply came after yours Ray, making the whole thing a bit confusing :-) I don't want anything nearly as detailed as the Aha video. It's literally lines roughly drawn with a pen on paper like a quick outline drawing done in biro. The objects don't actually need to look 3D at all. In fact, I would prefer it if they didn't. But some of the objects will need to rotate, for example a crane which will swing round. It seems to me that if this is created as a 3D object it will be easier to achieve this effect than redrawing the object in a different position in each frame.

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moto

[Amiduffer]

Hey Motorollin. This might help it might not. In Imagine3D, theres a command that can take any 2D bitmapped drawing and turn it into a 3D object, which, I then think if you animate it swinging around, you can then cut out as a brush.

[sprocket]

Aren't we talking about using the DPaint 'Move' command for 2D sections..?

Using any sort of 3D rendering seems to me like it would require a lot more work and rendering time.

[X-ray]

DPaint's move command is okay if the perspective doesn't change, but Moto wants to rotate stuff.

[weirdami]

Would it be easier to make 3D objects in a rendering package then apply the hand-drawn lines as textures?

I would think so.

[Ral-Clan]

Okay, first of all, if you REALLY want to convert 2D drawn objects into 3D objects for use in a ray tracing program like Imagine/Lightwave, then supposedly PixelPro 3D will do this.

However, are you sure you just don't want to use DeluxePaint?  It's a great animating program for 2D images.  You can even take an animated brush, and then with the MOVE command, twist, rotate and spin the moving brush in any of the 3 dimensions.  Also you can move it backwards or forwards (away from the camera or towards the camera).

I'm thinking you could accomplish what you need to in DeluxePaint.

[X-ray]

Moto what you best be doing is making very simple models in a raytracer, and then exporting wireframe views as individual frames. This won't take a long time, even on an Amiga with an 030. You can do it with Real3D V1.4 or Cinema4d. Both were given away on coverdisks.
Then you need to apply a filter to those frames, to get that drawn look.
I don't know what Amiga software has the right filters, but on the PC side Photoshop definitely has them. The 'Dry Brush' filter is probably what you need.

[motorollin]

Thanks for all the advice. I did consider using a 2D paint package like DPaint, but as others have pointed out the changes of perspective would make this somewhat complicated. I'll look in to a raytracer (should have some CUCDs somewhere :-) ) and see what I can come up with. I've got Photoshop CS on my Mac which I'm sure could apply the "hand-drawn" effect to the lines of the ray-traced frames.

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moto

[JaXanim]

Maybe some reading around things like Isometric Projection and Cell Shading might create ideas?

JaX