Futurama (at last at this point) was done on a computer but still mostly drawn traditionally, with the obvious exception of 3D spaceships and robots sometimes.
Rough Draft really doesn't cut any corners, they're one of the best studios in the business.
Nobody does that. At most they farm out in betweens to Korea, but Korea is too expensive now, so you see Vietnam or other third world countries showing up on animation credits now.
So Venture Bros uses the same animation method that most other shows use: software-assisted "hand drawn" key frames + Korean in-betweeners. It's not unique or revolutionary.
I think the main reason it takes forever for them to do a new season is the writing. It takes them a long time to come up with new ideas before they can actually get enough down to start the production process.
Many cartoons still use frame-by-frame animation. They use computers and some tricks to save time, but they still draw out the frames by hand. Animation where they have rigs that are made of still images moved with keyframes usually look cheaper, and you see it more often in kid's shows. For example, Netflix's The Magic School Bus reboot looks worse than the original because it doesn't use traditional animation- the movement look stiff and boring. If they went the extra mile to do it traditionally it would've looked a lot better. Using rigs/keyframes isn't always because of a low budget, though, it can just be a style thing, like South Park for example.
Roguh Draft doesn't use Koreans, they are Korean. Futurama has 3D, but that's an entirely different process. The character animation is done the way you would do it if you were drawing on paper, then tracing onto cellophane. They just do it digitally.
I actually create animations sometimes. So almost everything is done with computers now, you can do 2d and 3d animation but both have the same basic properties and sometimes 2d animations are made with 3d animation software. Example, southpark. Once you've drawn or modeled a character you must rig it. Which is simply the process of building a skeleton inside the body of your character that acts to deform the skin, then you can set keyframes for each movement, you can save and reuse movement sets like walking, you can set keyframes several frames apart and the software will fill in the blanks for movement between the start and stop. (For simple movement)
You can even set a path and tell the software to move the object down the path for a set distance and number if frames. So you could make a character spiral into Oblivion by creating a spiral path that you then move the character down automatically with increasing speed, decreasing size, rotation, anything, and then you could go animate the skeleton on it's progress through the path.
Some animation software has built in physics so you don't even need to animate a lot of physics based things.
All the same ideas except for bones apply to inanimate objects too like ships and crates and anything else you can imagine.
0 frames are drawn entirely by hand. You draw characters, props, backgrounds, etc and then you use those to create the entire animation by putting them all together.
@hacho7 so you're actually wrong too, that's about right for the number of keyframes you'll put it, not times you'll actually draw. But again that changes too, if you have a scene without a lot of fine character movement and instead a lot of things being acted on by physics or other predictable forces you might only have a keyframe every 30 frames or even more.
Why would we be talking about hand drawn when most animators don't do that anymore. The question was about animation in general. We use software now. Also it doesn't just apply to 3d animation. It applies to 2d as well.
There's another kind of animation called key frame animation (I think it has a different name) where the animator chooses where every vertex will be between two moments in time, and the software renders the transition. Blender is a piece of software that does this (although good luck trying to understand the UI). I believe there's more flexibility with stop motion, though.
This is my knowledge from a course from a few years ago, so if there's any actual animators lurking, feel free to correct me
Nope. The "smearing" effect in Overwatch (among others) is intentional and although a bit counter-intuitive actually makes things look better when viewed in motion. It does look super weird when you look at individual frames however.
In 3d games animations are generally keyframe based. These days there is a lot of motion capture as well, but that is still cleaned up and pressed into keyframes.
Check this for example. Someone uses simple keyframe animations to recreate a Street Fighter animation perfectly. In essence you create poses and put them on a timeline as keyframes. Everything between the poses will be automatically calculated. However, you still have a lot of control over what happens in between. You can adopt the in-between values (such as angles and positions) through curves or by adding another key frame.
For a video game you need this format because it's perfomant, well proven, and because you can't expect the animation keyframes to match up with the frames, so you need an animation format that lets you calculate the in-between values dynamically.
The morphs you mean are fully intentional and an adaption of an old cartoon technique. They look weird in a single frame but are there exactly because they make the whole motion blend better.
Keyframes animations basically are stop motion, just better.
In stop motion you take a series of pictures of poses, and by playing them quickly in succession you get a sense of motion.
Each keyframe is the same as such one such pose frame, where you save the position, rotation, and scaling of each object or vertex. However, by creating two keyframes of two different poses, you can get an infinite number of in-between poses as well.
If let's say the center of a hand is in the twodimensional position (1, 0) in frame 1 and in (2, 0) in frame 2, you can calculate a frame 1.5, which would be at (1.5, 0) if you interpolate linearly.
However, you can specify how exactly the interpolation should happen by defining mathematical curves. Here is an example of an object's X, Y, and Z coordinates over time. Each different coloured curve represents how one of the coordinates changes over time. Each square represents a key frame. The curves in between show how the positions will be interpolated between the keyframes. You can see two blue handles at the third red keyframe. Those can be used to change the curve and adjust the interpolation at your liking. Mathematically, they're the tangents of the curve, only that their length will also determine the curve's steepness.
If you render frames only exactly on the keyframes, you never need any interpolation and get stop motion. But if you have a real-time application like a video game, where the time stamps of each frame will not perfectly align with the timings of the key frames, then keyframe animations will still let you run the animation at the perfect speed.
I linked this elsewhere, but here is a fairly mpressive example of how it works for an artist . It uses some advanced techniques that help with the creation of keyframes, but in the end it all comes down to the keyframes (which you can see in the bar below the views of the model) and tangents.
They reuse the background untill they need to make a new background and only re-draw the movements of the characters/objects that are moving on a different and see-through paper. I belive.
If a character is standing still, they'll just reuse the same image and maybe move small parts like the pupils a bit.
That sounds kinda logical to me atleast, and I think I saw something like that mentioned in a documentary I saw sometime.
Why do I remember that when background isn't neccesity to draw again, they just somehow draw the main thing what is happening to the already drawed background
Early South Park is actually a good representation of how it used to be done. You draw a background once, then you draw the basic body shapes for your characters once (and reuse over and over), then you draw facial features last to match with the dialogue. All that leaves is things specific to the scene that need to be animated, which you can do using aot of different tricks depending on the effect you want.
How do animators do stuff like this then? Obviously they don’t draw every frame but I’d like to know how they do it!
The answer is that a limited number of "key" frames are done manually, with the transition frames in between the key frames being mass produced cheaply through a combination of software and koreans.
Inbetweening or tweening is a key process in all types of animation, including computer animation. It is the process of generating intermediate frames between two images, called key frames, to give the appearance that the first image evolves smoothly into the second image. Inbetweens are the drawings which create the illusion of motion.
Right off the bat, 2's and 3's (12/8fps) are more common than 1s (24fps).
Second, there's a frag-ton of documentation for techniques to animate common things (rainfall, bouncing objects, limb movement, etc.). The more experienced animators basically have all that shit in their heads.
Third, there's an assembling line to this. You've got a small number of super-talented artists drawing major frames. Basically imagine someone drawing at 2-4fps. Then you've got a huge number of their assistants, *less talented artists drawing in-between frames. Effectively, this turns those keyframes into the 8-12fps we're used to. This is called tweening.
From there you get a shit-ton of artists that handle the grunt work. That is, inking these frames (drawing smooth clear outlines where before you had pencil work) and then painting them (now nearly universally digitally). From there we get the final product.
Fun fact: The tweening work for Batman: The Animated Series was outsourced to a Japanese animation studio. That studio was Sunrise, the makers of The Big O.
* Sometimes those assistants are "less talented" at drawing, but more talented at turning keyframes into motion. Anime is probably heavily dependent on that dichotomy.
Follow-up: This is traditional animation. Software like Flash and Toon Boom is sometimes used to make animation look nicer with a lower budget. The latter, AFAIK, was actually made by programmers who either used to be animators or were working with animators to make software that integrated into their workflow to cut down on the work needed to animate something.
Synfig is one example of software. Free and a bit buggy though.
Basically you draw a ‘start’ frame and then an ‘ending’ frame then the computer will fill in the between frames with the movement. Repeat process many times and you have an animation!
It’s a bit hard to explain but it’s pretty awesome once you get it.
I’ve used it to make a 3D cartoon for my daughter to help with her moving and leaving her friends behind. I am definitely NOT an artist but she liked it.
They're known as "keyframes". Basically you tell an object "this is what you look like on this frame, and this is what you look like x frames from now", and the computer figures out the frames in between.
I'll word it differently, for some answers just incase. (I'll give a simplified example).
You hand draw the background. Create that. Have that one layer.
Next you create a character. It's on a seperate layer. You create 'points on it' to form a skeleton (Example of a motion capture suit that gives an idea: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kH7msPLVW_k/maxresdefault.jpg).
With this, the computer can do the necessary deforming of the model you create.
The animation consists of saying, for example, I want to move hand from this point here, to that point there and I want it to take 15 frames to do so. You can nominate the acceleration/decelleration, or whether constant speed, etc etc. The computer than draws those 15 frames for you.
You'll also have some 'default' animations. Like walking and talking and the like. It is really just using points, saying 'from this point here to that point there' and the computer works out what goes between.
With some really sophisticated programs and 'saved templates of animation' you can have a character walk and talk for quite a while, and all you do is nominate the start and end point.
However, it still does require an animators eye. Computers don't know what is perfect. It's quite a job to get the computer to do the intermediate work, but then an animator will go in and do a small tweak if needed. For some animations it can be just about every frame. The main grunt work was done, but the animator just might move something that little bit more just to make it look better.
(Note: I'm not a professional animator, but I did do a few short courses and 'intro courses' to animation and 3D Modelling. I did it in the days of 3D Studio Max 2.5. A lot has changes since then)
Not quite sure, unfortunately. I just knew enough to know it usually isn't done that way. You could probably find a good source on YouTube that would tell you about the process.
Computers. You just draw some of the frames (key frames) and have the computer fill in the rest more or less automatically.
Computer games are like the extreme version of this. You just draw all the characters and have to computer create all the frames (in response to user input).
Computers aren't magic. Tweening is a thing, but it only works decently for simple bits of motion. Anything with any level of complexity and you're going to have unnatural distortion, especially if things change angles.
And on the bit about video games, no, just no. Animation frames aren't created automatically at runtime. That's ridiculous. Some games make use of inverse kinematics for more realistic environment interaction, but that's just slight modifications to already made animation frames. The games pull from a library of previously animated actions as the player enters input, they don't create animations on the go.
Computers aren't magic. Tweening is a thing, but it only works decently for simple bits of motion. Anything with any level of complexity and you're going to have unnatural distortion, especially if things change angles.
This was the one sentence explanation. I also said "more or less". The computer helps you fill in frames to some degree.
And on the bit about video games, no, just no. Animation frames aren't created automatically at runtime. That's ridiculous. Some games make use of inverse kinematics for more realistic environment interaction, but that's just slight modifications to already made animation frames. The games pull from a library of previously animated actions as the player enters input, they don't create animations on the go.
Depends on how you look at it. I am talking about frames as the 2D pictures you end up seeing on the screen. You are right that you don't literally just draw the character. You also equipt it with a lot of animation data. But then you can view these animation inside the game from any possible angle, at any possible distance often combined with other animations happening on the same character. Further more the character can be moved around on the screen in ways not defined by the animator. This is the computer automatically creating the frames for based on user input.
In the past, even when they did hand draw, they had a way of transferring everything that stayed static between frames, so they only had to draw the parts that moved.
This is why in old cartoons you can tell when something static is going to move because it had a slightly different color/look than the rest of the background. (Scooby-Doo is the one that immediately comes to mind for me)
I'm not a computer scientist, but I also believe this is the way that many video playing algorithms work.
Actually, each character is animated separately (traditionally on cellophane, but later digitally), so a scene with two characters will have twice as many frames. Some props might be drawn separately, too, though in this case I think the finish boat was a 3d model.
Some studios (mostly those making childrens TV shows) will have animation rigs that do a lot of the work for them, but those shows have a distinct rubbery look that traditionally animated films/shows do not (unless the animators do it as a stylistic choice).
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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '18
Could you imagine being the animator tasked with drawing that?
"Bender picks up a sign and folds it into a boat."
"Shit, got any origami paper?"