Modelling in 2D enabling fluid stylised animation

Abstract

This paper introduces new techniques and tools to draw, manipulate and animate stylised brush strokes in computer assisted animation production. We focus on eliminating the time-consuming and tedious process of drawing and managing the numerous brushes that are painted on top of each other, and on avoiding temporal aliasing artifacts such as brushes popping up in successive frames. Moreover, we also aim at giving the animator the same freedom of expressing the artistic style he is bearing in mind as if painting in the traditional way. To establish these goals we first break down the traditional drawing process into a modelling process and an animation process. The first is used to create extreme poses of the character (without the restrictive inconveniences of standard ‘point-click-and-drag’ metaphors), while the latter is employed to provide for frame-toframe coherent animation. Aside this, we present some higher-level tools that enable the animator to locally and globally control user selected parts of the drawings. This simplifies the interaction drastically. The provided solution is intuitive to use and empowers the production of painted animation while not hampering the animation artists’ creativity.