A Tool For Creating Two-Dimensional Painterly Animation in the Context of Webcomic Storytelling
I created an animation tool which can be used to speed up the process of creating 2-dimensional, painterly animation. It would normally take me an hour to paint a single frame of animation in my style. Using the program, I only have to manually work on a frame for 20 minutes. Therefore, the program greatly decreases the amount of time it would take to create an animation in the painterly style I was aiming for.
This project won the Award for Artistic Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University’s 2016 Meeting of the Minds Research Symposium.
For more information on the research paper that inspired this project, please check out Image Analogies by Aaron Hertzmann, et al.
Below is the poster I created explaining the basic process for the Meeting of the Minds presentation:
Here is a demo video illustrating the stages of the animation. On the left is the animation with simple blocked out colors. These are the frames that are fed to the program. In the center is the output that the program computationally generates. On the right is the final animation with frames that I cleaned up manually in Photoshop.
I’ve also included each stage of the animation process as gifs below:
Rough Animation Sketch:
Cleaned Up Animation Sketch:
Cleaned-Up Lineart:
Animation with Blocked Out Colors (Input for my program):
Painterly Colors Computationally Generated By My Program:
Animation Frames Manually Cleaned Up:
A Brief Explanation of How the Algorithm Works
For those who are interested in how the program works behind the scenes, I’ve constructed a more technical explanation of the steps of the algorithm.
