Academic Courseware Animation by Joyce Ryan Copyright 2001-2004 Corel Corporation. All rights reserved. The content of this document and the associated Corel Painter software are the property of Corel Corporation and its respective licensors, and are protected by copyright. Corel, the Corel logo, Corel Painter, and Corel PHOTO-PAINT are trademarks or registered trademarks of Corel Corporation and/or its subsidiaries in Canada, the U.S. and/or other countries. Adobe and Photoshop are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Apple, Mac OS, and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. QuickTime is a trademark used under license. QuickTime is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Indeo and Intel are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. 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Academic Courseware Table of contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii Jargon 101: The Technical Terms Every Animator Needs to Know1 The Storyboard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Digital Ink and Paint Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 The Background Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 The Write-on . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Saving and Exporting Movies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 Animating with Strokes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65 Rotoscoping with Corel Painter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71 The Power of Scripting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 3-D Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87 Vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Academic Courseware: Joyce Ryan i Academic Courseware: Joyce Ryan ii Foreword In 1972, I got my first taste of "computer art." My husband John and I were students at the Rhode Island School of Design. John got involved in an experiment at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University had started to encourage art students to collaborate with computer science students. John was led into a frigid room that housed gigantic machines that seemed to eat punched cards for fuel. Most of the artists in the program quickly lost interest. The thought of feeding punch cards in, one at a time, to plot out a black-and-white drawing made of alphanumeric characters didn't seem all that appealing. John, who was studying Graphic Design at the time and liked anything to do with turning type into pictures, thought this might have some real potential. He ended up using all of his allotted time and most of the other artists' time as well. In those days it cost several hundred dollars an hour to use the computers. Moving forward to the mid 1980's. I was working with Washington University to develop a program of study that would introduce artists to computers. John and I were the only artists they had ever heard of who had any involvement with computers. I was already going to attend Siggraph, so I kept an eye out for some software that would meet the needs of such an academic program. I saw the big 3-D modeling systems, but was most impressed when I came across the first "paint" system I'd ever seen. It was by a small company called Time Arts, Inc. and it used a pressure-sensitive tablet with a special graphics card that allowed the computer to display 256 colors. Far beyond the punch cards from college, I could now actually draw and paint with the computer, and in color! This was the tool I needed to start my program at Washington University. As excited as I was, that was about how unimpressed the arts faculty were with the idea of drawing and painting on a computer. My program got a lot of criticism for being "unnatural" or superfluous. One or two brave souls came around, but mostly the faculty could not imagine why anyone would want to try to make art with a computer. I threw myself into learning this software inside and out, and was learning even more by teaching my students. This was the beginning of the computer graphics program in the art school at Washington University. The more I learned, the more I wanted to meet the people Academic Courseware: Joyce Ryan iii who had written this wonderful software. I had ideas for tools I wanted them to make especially for animators. My next stop was the Time Arts offices in Santa Rosa, California, where I first met, among many talented artists, programmers and engineers, John Derry, who was destined to become one of the co-creators of Painter. The people I met were pursuing a goal--to replicate natural media with a computer. I fell in love with their work, made some of the best friends of my life, and eventually joined the company in an 8-year relationship, first as a software reseller, then eventually as an animation consultant, software trainer, demo artist and interface designer. I wanted to take what I knew about conventional animation techniques and apply it to the computer. It has been my passion ever since. Jump ahead again and it is now 2004 and I am teaching Digital Ink and Paint at the Art Institute of Atlanta. I am demonstrating Corel® PainterTM to my class. I ask my students how many of them remember seeing the scene in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" where the children are shown lickable wallpaper. Willy Wonka excitedly tells them to lick the wallpaper, that the strawberries taste like strawberries, the pineapple tastes like pineapple, and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries--but the children had never heard of or tasted "snozzberries." The snozzberries had to be magic. I then showed my students the watercolor brushes in Painter that acted like watercolor, the chalk that acted like chalk, and then the brushes that acted like nothing they had ever seen before. The Image Hose that painted with donuts. The brush that painted with metal. And how it could all be used to make animation. For that moment we were all as excited as children tasting "snozzberries" for the first time. The fruit not from a bush or a tree, but from an inventor's imagination! I wish to thank my husband John for contributing so much of his artwork and support while I was writing these chapters. I want to thank my son Lucas for his comments and insight. I want to thank my students at the Art Institute of Atlanta for letting me test my tutorials on them. I want especially to thank all the good people at Corel who supported this book and who continue to develop Painter, pushing the envelope of what it can do. They just keep making it better--it must be magic. Joyce N. Ryan, 2004 Academic Courseware: Joyce Ryan iv Chapter 1 Jargon 101: The Technical Terms Every Animator Needs to Know Always check to make sure you are working at the right size before starting any project. Check the preset sizes in your editing software, or talk with your video editor, film editor, Web developer or service bureau. Before beginning an animation project, you must consider the final format your work will be displayed in. Are you working for film, video, or the Web? Will any of the animation frames ever need to be resized for print? Setting the correct size, shape, and resolution for your project from the start is critical to its success. Typically, if you are working for film and video, you might work at 720 x 486 pixels (standard NTSC video). If you are making an animated comp in QuickTime®, or an AVI to run on your computer, 320 x 240 usually works well. Storyboard panel formatted for television. TV cut-off and safe titling If you are creating animation for television or film, you must make sure that your type is not cropped by the shape of the screen, and that nothing vital in your image is lost. The rule of thumb for layout purposes is to crop a 12-field layout, 1.5 inches all around for TV cutoff, and 2 inches around for title safe. Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 1 A field guide or "graticule" helps the animator plan a layout. 35mm film layout is based on a proportion of 1:1.376 (known as the Academy Ratio). This typically yields a size of 12 x 8.72 inches. For television, this format varies slightly. Typically, an aspect ratio of 4:3 corresponds to the NTSC standard. The degree to which TV cut-off crops the field depends on the make, model, and age of the TV set. TV layout based on a 4:3 aspect ratio indicating TV cut-off and title safe for a standard NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) television broadcast. Scanning for animation If you draw your animation by hand, you will have to scan it into Corel Painter. Your drawing should be created at the correct dimensions (width to height) for your animation. Ten seconds of animation at 30 frames per second can translate into 300 drawings if you create one drawing for every frame of video. It is critical to scan efficiently to handle that volume of artwork. If you are scanning in art to use as final renderings in your animation, you will scan at 72 dpi in RGB at 720 x 486 for NTSC video. However, if you are scanning in to trace, reference, or make a rough pencil test of your motion, get into the habit of scanning at 72 dpi in grayscale, so that your files are small and scan quickly. Depending on your drawings, you may even scan them in as black-and-white line art; the drawings will look jaggy, but if you are only using them as reference to trace from in Corel Painter, that is all you need. This will give you files that take up the least amount of storage space on your computer. Tape an animation peg bar to your scanner, so that all your drawings are scanned in perfect alignment (registration) to one another. Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 2 Each scanner has a different interface, so you may have to explore a little to find the settings you need. If you have to increase the size of an image, the best place to do that is on the scanner; blowing up a bitmap in a software program is always a bad idea. "Paint" = Bitmaps, "Draw" = Vectors Computers handle images in two ways: as bitmaps, or as vector images (also known as object-oriented graphics). When working with objects and vectors, the computer keeps a "display list" that describes a series of points in space and their attributes. What size should you work at? That depends on your finished product. Will the artwork ever be used for other purposes? Remember, it is always easy to make the image smaller, but it is very difficult to make it bigger. The rough draft for the fish was done in Corel PHOTO-PAINT®. Once the client approved it, the image was recreated with shapes so it could easily be resized for various uses. Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 3 The finished design created with vectors. Unlike vector images, bitmaps cannot always be easily resized without loss of quality. Bitmaps are resolutiondependent. If you blow up pixels, they just look more obvious. Note what happens to the letters when they are blown up. It is all right to reduce a bitmap, but it is almost never acceptable to enlarge one. Understanding vectors A vector is a mathematical description of a location in space; as such, it has no actual size. Images described by vectors are resolutionindependent. They can be rendered at any size and maintain their image quality. The image file only contains a list of vectors and display properties, making vector-based (object-oriented) files very small compared to bitmaps. Eventually, the file has to be converted to a bitmap output. When it is sent to a printer, the raster image processor Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 4 (RIP) usually handles that task. The display adapter in your computer interprets the image as a bitmap of pixels on your monitor. Some "Paint" programs like Corel Painter and Adobe® Photoshop® let you import vector graphics and turn them into bitmaps ("rasterize" them) so they can be embellished with paint effects. Corel Painter combines the best of both worlds by letting the artist work with both bitmaps and vectorbased objects. Vector-based graphics are easy to resize with no loss of quality. However, they ...