Now that things are back to normal, here’s a quick update of The Deadly Truth. This link takes you to a facebook version of the video that looks better than Youtube’s. While you are there, you can always befriend me.

Here’s the Youtube one, which for some reason is one second shorter than it should be. Just a taste:

Note: I’m thinking of releasing the Toon Boom Animate source files for this animation once it’s published so that everyone can learn from my mistakes, so stay tuned!

“The Deadly Truth” will be released on Sunday, June 7th, 2009.

Edit: For those interested, I will post more quick updates through Sunday on Twitter. You can follow me here.

Hey there, just want to show you some stuff. In my last post I showed you an application called Google SketchUp. Since it’s an incredible tool to develop three dimensional models of whatever you want, I thought it would be a good idea to use it as an aid in the creation of two dimensional backgrounds for animated shorts. I’m still working on the outside shots I showed you before (I’ll post how those turn out in another post) but I’d like to show you how SketchUp is of great help when it comes to drawing perspective. You don’t even have to think about vanishing lines and what not.

We start off with a fairly simple Sketchup cube and with the push/pull tool we create a two wall room (or set). After that we pay a visit to the 3D Warehouse we populate our room with a suitable bed and a nightstand (although here I just modeled this “placeholder” as nightstand). Don’t forget to punch a hole in the wall for our window. We paint everything white, move our view around to get the best shot, and snap a picture (export an image). I’d like to point out that SketchUp is full featured software, so it is capable of much more than these simple things I’m doing. I want to keep the models simple because afterwards, the painting portion will take up most of our time. We end up with something like this:

We then import our image into our drawing software (in my case, I’m using Toon Boom Animate) and put it on it’s own layer. After that, it all becomes about “imaginative tracing”. Use your SketchUp lines as guides and make sure you keep every drawing in it’s own individual layer (you can group things afterwards). How about we start with the footboard. You can color as you go, or you can color everything when you’re done.

Now some courtains…

Now the bed and we improvise a nightstand using our SketchUp placeholder as a visual aid (don’t mind the shadows; that step comes afterwards, but I forgot to take snapshots without them ).

And we finish with our walls and the window. At this point you can color everything. Your aim is to accomplish a certain atmosphere. After all, we’re trying to tell a story…

Make sure you build up a nice atmosphere with every layer you paint.

I’m falling in love with SketchUp more and more. It’s an incredible tool that can save you a few hours. You should give it a try. How do you like our final product?

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When I started with this hobby, I didn’t think doing backgrounds for my animated shorts was going to something to worry about. After all, they were the portion of the whole thing that didn’t (generally) move, right? Plus, I considered myself kind of artsy and I had done a few paintings, so I thought to myself: “How difficult could it be?” I didn’t expect the answer to be “FREAKING HARD”.

As it turns out, creating backgrounds for a short is no walk in the park. It’s not that you have to learn about color, or drawing, or composition, or even effects (which you have to do, though, sorry). The problem with them can be summarized in one word: consistency. That’s right, if you want your backgrounds to frame your animation effectively, you have to be consistent, and as I soon realized, that is one difficult thing to accomplish. When I was a kid, my dad (a civil engineer) taught me how to draw two-point perspective and since then, that has become a bit intuitive for me. However, if my camera looks at the same scene from a different angle and I have to draw that, everything gets screwed up, because it is very hard for me to get the layout right from a different view. I end up with a coach that lies at twice the distance from a coffee table, for example, in comparison to the first shot.

ENTER: Google SketchUp

SketchUp is a 3D modeling application that you can download for free from our friends over at Google. It has many capabilities, but what drew my attention is how easily you can get seemingly complex models done, with just a few clicks. It’s tools are not very intuitive, but the learning curve for them is ridiculously short. With the instructional videos from screen name: SketchUpVideo and 4sketchupgo2school on YouTube you’ll be able to do very nice things with it in a couple of hours (make that three). Some animated series like Futurama, use 3D sets rendered with toon shaders that make their three dimensional objets look like 2D drawings. That’s certainly a nice way to use 3D, but an expensive one, and not the one I want to try out.

You see, I want to draw my backgrounds myself, but I’m going to get SketchUp to tell me where everything goes, and as a bonus to help me out with the perspective. My project takes place near a well-known church in the city where I live, so I want it to be present throughout the short. Unfortunately there was no model for it on Google Earth so I had to create it myself. As I wrote before, it is not complicated at all, once you get the hang of it. The two tools/techniques I used most in this case were the “Push/pull tool” for extruding every structure up from basic shapes drawn on the ground and the “Follow me tool” for mouldings and spheres. Here’s a panoramic view of what I created:

This took me a little past three hours to complete,
including the time it takes to learn basic SketchUp.

In a 3D space where you’ve made a mock-up of your set, and marked with big blocks where your buildings, nature and props go, you can quickly move your camera to explore what shots work best for your project. Not only will you get the correct layout, but you’ll also get your perspective right in every shot. A nice feature of SketchUp is that it lets you apply a photograph as a texture to any surface. In my case, that lets me visualize more clearly what I want as an end result. I browsed through flickr and found some façades that give me a better idea of the direction I’ll take. Let’s take a look at a nice establishing shot:

Which is based on this original rough sketch:

What if we climb on top of the chapel or take a look across the street?

What next? You can’t use these pictures for your project. No matter how cool it was to craft them, they’re still a long way from finished, so the next step is to take these and import them into your image editing application and paint your scene on top of them, using the blocks as reference for the position of all your objects and using the lines as perspective guides. However. we’ll explore that in a different post. Hopefully, this technique will ease up the process of drawing consistent backgrounds. Have a great day!

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