Hello, I want to improve my animation skills and decided to make head rotation (but not in 2d). I mean effect that for example you filming someone from behind and he/she/it suddenly turn his/her/its face to camera. I don’t want to make it like in South Park (from those of you that are from Poland Włatcy Móch cartoon would be more applicable), but rather as in tv cartoons and animes.
How to do it (please give me tutorial for n00bs)?
Since synfig works in 2D and is vector based such things are really hard to create. Basically you will be forced to do it by hand, meaning that you will have many parts that must be shown or hidden at some point. It’s hard task to do this vector graphics, since you cant draw overlapping contours directly. A simple problem example is the flipped “T” case. Draw two of them, rotate one 180° and make sure they overlap each other while the top of the T is always in front. As you see, you can’t do that with only two shapes.
The fastest way to avoid this problem is to draw the basic lines first, see which of them collide and then to shorten the hidden line until it isn’t visible any more. Thats the moment you will need to change its opacity to 0 and ignore it completly.
The better way is it do always draw the line. For example the nose, even it is behind the head and use a second shape for clipping (composite -> onto). That way you have the best control, but it is time expensive.
That’s not a noob question but I’m sure you’ll reach the needed skills to achieve it.
Here is an example of what you want and the analysis of how to proceed.
morevnaproject.org/wiki/Scenes/Demo/22
-G
Hm… I will probably do it similar way - make lineart of few keyframes (I have scanner so it should be easy; lipsync and things like that I can make without drawing) and then trace it and for nose and other things that are not always visible I’ll use niabot hints.
But please keep thread open - maybe someone else will point me to easier workflow.