Can someone explain the steps(don''t have to be detailed) on how to take a pencil drawn image, then turn it into a fully animated, coloured figure? 1 more question...what is skinning?

Draw several frames of the image, digitalize them with a scanner and colour them using a painting program.

I don''t do animation professionally, but when i do this, i scan the image in with a flatbed scanner, boost the contrast until the lines are black. Then I use photoshop to fill the areas that need coloring/shading. Don''t know if this is what professionals do, but it works for me.


- Free Your Mind -

he/she has got the first part above.
skinning is the process of taking a wireframe 3D model, and making a texture that is then wrapped around it, making a "skin" on the model.

So if I wanted to make a character who needed about 500 frames of animation, I''d have to do it all by hand? (like pencil and paper?)

You could draw the keyframes and use a morphing program to get the intermediate frames in 2D. If you are intending to skin a 3D model then you only need to draw the skin, moving the models vertices about will animate.

,Jay

If you need 500 frames of animation for something, you need to look at it again.

Here''s an example of what they did for Age of Empires II.

-Draw each character by hand.
-From each drawing, make a 3D model in 3DSMax.
-Use 3DSMax animation feature to animate the model and save 8 animations for each direction for each character. Yes that is 64 frames of animation for each character, but the modeling program does the work of animation, then you just save the image at each point as a tga or bmp.
-Assemle all the animations into a single file.

So if you have access to a 3D modeller/animator, a lot of the work can be simplified, because you only have to draw the character once.

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Make it work.
Make it fast.

"Commmmpuuuuterrrr.." --Scotty Star Trek IV:The Voyage Home