Tracing Paper

Hmmmm... I'm glad now that I didn't go for that September deadline for Pictoplasma - Mainly because I stumbled on this!

It hit me yesterday, while we were playing on MAYA toon settings (a set of lines and fills that give a cell-rendered effect in 3-d modelling), that what I actually wanted was a scruffy pen line, so that the characters look like doodles.

The idea is to capture footage from Second Life, then redraw over the frames on animation paper and scan them back in. It sounds long winded, but I really like the drawn look - I like it when pens don't always give an even flow of ink, so you end up with scratchy lines, then sudden bursts of ink.

So, last night, I printed out a few of the Machinima images I've posted previously, and traced over them. I really like the effect. In a nostalgia note -when I was little, my mum used to dry out the bits of greaseproof paper you get between frozen slices of meat, and give them to me and my brother to use as tracing paper. "I'm not saying we were poor" (Les Dawson voice goes here). It wasn't as bad as it sounds.

Then again, I am a vegetarian now, so maybe it was!

Next week, I'll post a short animated sequence to test it out. Let me know what you think!