Well, “jittery” is the word I use for it, anyway.

As with the first experiment, this one started with a simple character sketch…

The original sketch was scanned and split apart.  This was a quick test so I didn’t worry about the arms, legs, etc.; just the head and upper body.

Multiple copies of the character’s head and body were printed  lightly across a sheet of paper.

The light copies were sketched over using 6B and 2H pencils.

The purpose of the guide was to keep the character’s head mostly uniform, but still allow the sketchy edge and shading variation to come through.  The same procedure was done with the upper body.

I added registration marks (little cross-hairs) to assist with aligning the copies later, as they would be “stacked” onto one another and then saved out as an image sequence.

The image sequence was rendered out as a 12-fps AVI with an accompanying black-and-white AVI to act as the alpha channel.  This was applied as an animated texture to the 3D plane object.

Very little thought was put into the animation of the character;  just a bit of head movement at the beginning and not much else.  The goal was to achieve a lively, energetic feel, even when the character wasn’t moving.

If I were to use this style character in a short film or anything beyond a test, the eyes and mouth would be treated as separate layers, each with their own variation frames.

trueSpace is a nice little program – very capable for stills work – but definitely not geared for animation. Never has been. That said, I’ve been using it for animation since 1998 or so, have grown very used to it, and to be honest – I kinda enjoy the challenges and workarounds associated with it. (Granted, I don’t do this for a living, so it’s no biggie.)

But when I see things like Keith Lango’s Squiggle Line Tutorial, I’m tempted to purchase industry-standard character animation software. Heh!

Oh… and it’s kinda hard for me not to play around with other things when I’m doing these tests.  In this one, I also toyed with keyframing in Richard Rosenman’s Depth of Field Pro. (Excellent plugin!) Other than that, colors were adjusted, grain added, and the whole thing was posterized to 18fps from the original 24fps.

Watching it back at this point, I’m really considering further testing with the framerate of the animated texture layers.  It seems that maybe 12fps is a bit too fast?  I’m wondering what 8fps would look like.  …and perhaps I could vary the framerates of the separate layers a bit.  Hrm…