2D Animation in Blender

This post will be a bit of a departure from my usual topic of drawing. I don’t know if I have mentioned this yet, but I would like for this blog to be an exploration of many different kinds of art, and this post is a good example of that.

Today, I will be showcasing a little of my exploration into how technology can assist in the creation of art. Stated less pompously, I mean that I am using a computer program — in this case, for two-dimensional animation — instead of more traditional media. This post will not be a tutorial, as I feel that I have not yet learned enough to confidently share my knowledge on the subject (I plan to later, though). But I still feel that it is something that could be of interest to some of you, provided you are interested in expanding your artist’s tool-set into the digital realm. Perhaps you might want to explore this topic with me. If this is not something that interests you, or you are more inclined to stick to traditional media, I will return to the subject of drawing soon.

Blender

The tool that I am currently examining is called Blender. It is an open source, 3D modeling, animation, video rendering, and game engine software — a lot of things that sound right up a digital artist’s alley, or at least mine. It’s free to use, and you can get it here.

There are a lot of things that can be said about this program and its copious features, but for the sake of this post, I will keep to those that I am using. Blender allows you to sculpt 3D models. For my purposes, I am using simple planes (think flat squares). It also has a complex animation system that uses, most relevantly, bones — or armatures, as they are called in the program.

I used a different piece of software called Krita (also free) to create the shoddy image I later animated in this program (I was more interested in the animation than the overall presentation, heh). I will definitely be covering both of these programs in much more detail later, as they are probably of great interest to anyone looking into various digital art forms.

Cel-based Animation Technique

To illustrate what I am trying to do, I will share a bit of my limited knowledge regarding cel animation. The term “cel” in cel animation is a contracted form of the word “celluloid,” which was a transparent sheet onto which characters were drawn in traditional animation (before computers became capable of simulating these things). If you recall having an “overhead projector” in some of your classes, you will be somewhat familiar with this principle — you can draw on a transparent sheet, and lay another on top of it to draw something else on top of the previous image; both of these images will appear superimposed in the projection.

Animations entailed having a back-lit background, and then laying these transparent cels in layers over the background. The final image would be photographed, and then the next cels would be loaded on and the background adjusted if needed. To make this insanely tedious task a bit less impossible, animators split their characters into pieces that they could then animate individually and later overlay on top of the other components of the character. For instance, an arm would be animated on a separate series of cels, and then each of those would be placed on top of the cel containing the body.

What I am Doing

So you are probably seeing where I am going with this. I split up the following doodle into its component pieces — or into the things that might have been separated onto different cels in traditional animation.

It's like we took a hatchet to him!

I then realigned these things into the proper shape using various methods I will describe in detail later. Essentially I used planes for each piece of the dragon, and then used the bones in Blender to “rig” the image for animation. It ended up being a little rough, because I drew the dragon in segments first instead of drawing him as one entire character and then splitting him more logically.

The bones are those triangle-looking things.

However, the rig worked. The planes moved relative to the position of their bones, just as I had hoped. Sure, it’s no masterpiece — nor is it even that much of a challenge for anyone already mildly versed in Blender — but it is doing essentially what I wanted it to do, and I thought it might be interesting to see if it worked out.

It's a little rough, but I think it demonstrates what I was trying to do.

The more tech-aware readers might already see what I am trying to do here; I am really trying to replicate the functionality of a commercial software called Spine in a free alternative. That is essentially true, and just as Spine’s primary product is meant to create sprites for video games, so is this little project, here.

I am not sure if this particular method will be of much use for the more complicated requirements of animation meant for film — I will definitely need to look into finding more tricks to make that viable, if it even is.

In any case, that’s one of the things I have looked into during the past couple of weeks. I will write about my discoveries as I look further into this.