Character Views

My animated characters are being created as 2D characters. As I needed them in different views, I had to draw and rig each character in these different views. By different views I mean, a side view, a front view, a front three quarter view, a back view and a back three quarter view. I also needed to create blinks for each character in each view and create different mouth shapes to be able to lip sync the characters with their dialogue. Drawing and rigging all eight characters in each view was going to take me a long time, so I decided to go through my animatic and work out what characters were seen in which particular view and then only draw and rig what was needed.

Screenshot of Pipi in different views in Toonboom Harmony.

I drew each character as a whole and coloured them accordingly. When colouring each character, I created a pallet for the particular character and named each colour as to what it was used for on the character. As I drew each character, I cut each part of the character's bodies and put them onto seperate layers. I extended the line work and colour on each part so the when the character moved there were no breaks in their limbs/bodies. Then I moved each layer's pivot point to the place where I wanted the particular body part to move, for example on the top of the lower arm where the elbow would bend is where the pivot point for that body part was placed.

Screenshot of pivot point on Pipi's shoulder.

Once the character was rigged, I made blinks and mouth shapes for it. The blinks are made by cell replacement which is when you make different pictures of each stage of the blink and then make keyframes using each blink stage to make a complete blink cycle. The mouth shapes are also made as seperate pictures and then theses cells are keyframed into the animation timeline where they are needed to complete the lip syncing of the dialogue. I also only created mouth shapes for the characters that actually spoke and needed to be lip synced.

The final stage of sorting out the characters is to put them into a character library. The library system in Toonboom has the advantage of being able to be imported into any other Toonboom scene to be used. This means that no matter who the animator is or what the scene is that these characters or any assets using the library system will be consistent (or the same) in any scene. I used the library system for all of my characters to keep the consistency of my characters the same over all the shots in my animation. The pallets that I created for each character can also be imported into any scene just like the characters can.

As soon as all the character libraries are created, then it will be time to set up each scene and start animating!