Hi guys! I finally got some free time to post overview of rigging process of 2D character using Toon Boom products. I did a quick example of a little boy walking and then kicking the soccer ball and it is without clean up steps just to get idea that how it works in cut-out animation.
Convert all your character’s sketches into vector form, create cutouts according to target animation. In the end add pegs and arrange them properly so each drawing element appears on its correct position with their peg layers. You can also move elements back and forth along Z axis which is more advance way to adjust different parts of your character. Normally you setup the order of character levels in the view that you think you will use the most, for example the 3/4 view is the most used in cartoons. Once your rigging with all the pegs are OK in quarter view then you can create a key frame where you will reposition in Z the different parts of your character by pushing it just a bit with Z axis. After you have all the views you want front, side, 3/4, back you create a master key frames, you create individual poses from the key frame Front, the key frame side, key frame 3/4, etc. just by selecting the collapsed key frame in the timeline and save it into library panel.
It really helps when you start a new scene that you want to animate you will require just drag and drop of your character’s master key first, then you can place other poses as well in similar way from the Template library. Not only views you can do the same if it was an Action, like a Walk Cycle. Just take the frames from the timeline and drop them in the template library. Now if you want to create extra drawings of hands, feet, mouth, eyes etc.. you can add them in the master rigging scene and recreate a new master rigging template with the extra drawings in there.
About 5 years ago when I was learning cartoon animation and was trying to figure out that how the heck are all these characters walking so beautifully ,to find out the concept behind it I visited so many websites and checked all tutorials explaining this walkcyle animation but I couldn’ t get the answers of all my questions.
So today I am here about to show you what your teachers or seniors wouldn’t..This tutorial is meant for 3D and 2D characters rigged for cut-out animation. Getting your own character to walk is the most important part of animation and sometimes it is not as simple as it sounds, I tried to show you here a generic walk cycle without much Clean-up steps.
This tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of application Toon Boom Studio and tools / key animation terms like transform tool, pivot point, camera view, layers, pegs, key frames, constant key frames, tweening, contact key pose, passing key pose etc.. The time period of this tutorial was more than an hour recorded in 2 sessions I almost slept in the middle of demonstrating..XD also youtube and other video hosting portals don’t allow to upload larger files so for the sake of file size I cut it down from the end to make it eligible for most of the hosting video servers but it’s still HD video and I am also thinking about hosting it on my own hosting server..
I remember most of my early teenage years were spent on reading novels full of action and suspense written by some of our great local language Urdu writers Ishtiak Ahmed, Mazher Kaleem.. especially in hot days of summer vacations we kids used to share all novels and Taleem-O-Tarbiate magazines with each other. The Ameer Hamza and Umro Ayar novels were famous, kids imagined themselves travelling in the streets of Baghdad with character Umro Ayar with his Zumbeel ( Zumbeel is a bag with full of magical things ). Above clip is the trailer of a 20 minutes episode based on the famous arab Character Umro Ayar, we worked on it about 5 years ago and presented it with English voice-overs for UK viewers.
This reel sums up my (old) 2 d cutout works. I still feel proud of it even though it’ s more than 2 years old now. These are few most memorable animation sequences during my early career years, ( collaborated with few great sketch artists ) in fact I was dropped in some facts about their whole development process.
