[Phoenix Moore]

Hey all, I’m a student and I have been instructed to try different kinds of traditional animation (pen and ink, cel-drawn, etc) I was wondering if there was anyway to rotoscope in Animation Paper, as it would mean I wouldn’t have to jump ship to another program. thanks all!
– Azazel

[Niels]

Hi Azazel!

Sure! Animation Paper has build-in reference layers! This is exactly what is needed for rotoscoping.

You make sure to have your video material saved out as a framestack of png images (soon Animation Paper will accept video files as well, but for now you’ll need a sequence of png’s).

When you import your reference (rotoscope) material into Animation Paper (select 1st png and shift-select last png to have all of them imported), it automatically adds a reference layer with your video material. You can then adjust the opacity of your ref-layer to your liking – and add normal layers on top for your rotoscope drawings.

Let me know if you have further questions!

Cheers,
Niels

[Phoenix Moore]

i was wondering how to convert a video to png sequence? I’ve been trying to do it and I can’t figure out how to do it.
thanks
azazel

[Niels]

You can find plenty of software that can do that – both paid and free.

If you don’t mind using commands in the console, I can highly recommend FFMPEG (https://ffmpeg.org – free and cross platform).

After you installed it, you can use a command like this (check out the documentation for tons of options and variations): ffmpeg -i “yourvideofile.mp4” “frame-%%03d.png”

This will produce a numbered sequence of png files, you can easily import into Animation Paper.

It is a bit technical, but it isn’t that difficult. And FFMPEG has sooo many capabilities.

And again, soon you will be able to just import video directly into Animation Paper.

Cheers,
Niels

[Greg Ercolano]

A neat feature I added to an animation program I was working on; on macs you can change the transparency of the application window so you can see through to a movie playback program positioned underneath.

In my case I added that option, and a few hot keys to execute unix commands that would send frame advance/frame reverse commands to the movie player, in addition to adding a new drawing. This way one could just roto the frames, hitting the ‘next frame’ button each time which would automatically advance the frame in the movie underneath, and create a new drawing in the animation program.

I found I could do this easily with Mac’s own “DVD Player”.. a simple shell script I called ‘dvdplayer-step’ would send the frame advance command to DVD Player, e.g.

#!/bin/sh
osascript > /dev/null << EOF
tell app “DVD Player”
step dvd
end tell
EOF

To add a feature in animation paper to allow the user to run external unix commands (might be useful for other purposes..!), just allow the user to define simple strings that get executed with system(), and attach them to a hotkey.

[Niels]

Hello Greg! That’s a great idea! I have noted this and will put support for external commands on our todo.

Thanks,
Niels