Introduction To Photo Cut-Out Animation Part 1

One of the new features of Toon Boom Studio V 4.0 is a deceptively innocent change to “import and vectorize”. It is an added vectorization type “with texture”. This opens the doorway to many potentially new and creative ways to use TBS, the most significant of which is “photo cut-out animation”. Toon Boom already had excellent support for cut-out animation and this new feature really adds many interesting possibilities. In this tutorial series I am going to begin to show you some of the conceptual ways to use this new feature for doing photo cut out animation.

For a long time TBS users have been wanting to be able to do cut-out animation using source assets that were created as bit mapped graphics. Up until now that required doing the cut out and masking in a bit map editing program like Photo Shop and then importing the parts into image elements in TBS for animating. You can still do this, but there may be an easier way thanks to the “vectorize with textures” enhancement added in TBS V 4.0.

Friz Freleng and the Pink Panther Cartoon

I wanted to keep this tutorial simple, so I chose a cartoon graphic that just screamed out to me to bring it to life in an animation. It is a drawing of the great animation director Friz Freleng and one of his most famous stars the Pink Panther. I am unfortunately not able to credit the artist of this cartoon drawing, but it is so full of character and implied action that it just seemed totally appropriate for use in this tutorial.

The first step in constructing this animation project is importing the source cartoon to a drawing element using the “import and vectorize” command. We go to the exposure sheet and start on the first cell of a drawing element. With the right mouse button we click to open a context menu to access the "import and vectorize" command. This opens a dialog box where we select the source drawing and set the vectorization type to “with texture”. (see the red arrow in the figure below) This will import the cartoon drawing into our drawing element cell in what is described as a “vector manipulation box”. This “vector manipulation box” is the secret of how we are going to turn a bit mapped graphic into multiple vector animation assets in separate drawing elements.

Click to see an enlarged version of this figure

With the bit mapped graphic imported into our drawing element cell, we can begin the character cut-out process. There are many ways to approach this so I’m going to show you the way that I used to cut-out the Friz and Panther characters. I started out making a copy of my drawing element’s first cell. That way I don’t have to worry about destroying other parts of the vectorized drawing that I will want to use later. I start working on the copy of my first cell and begin with the scissor tool. I pulled a bounding box around the Friz character and then by dragging the bounding box to one side the Friz character is separated from the rest of the cartoon drawing.

I now can select and delete the rest of this copy of the drawing leaving me with just the Friz character. My next step is to begin the clean up of this initial cut out, so I am going to use the contour edit tool to adjust this "vector box" shape. I begin by adding additional contour points to the outline which I am going to then drag to define my desired character’s shape. To add a contour point you hold down the CTRL key while clicking on the outline. (the Option/ALT key on the Mac)

It is a process of dragging and adjusting the outline contours, first roughly, and then zooming in and fine tuning the outline adding more contour points as I go as needed. If you are not familiar with contour editing it may take you some practice to learn when and how to use the point control handles and how to adjust the contours. But, it’s actually fun.

Next I’m going to make a copy of this drawing to use to cut out Friz’s arm and I’ll delete the unwanted parts of that copy just leaving the arm cut out.

And then using the contour editing tool and adding and adjusting contour points I’ll define the shape of his arm just like I did for the main character drawing.

Now I’ll go back to my previous drawing of Friz and using the eraser tool I’ll remove the lines of his arm. I purposely have a yellow background for my drawing view panel so it is easy to see what is drawing and what isn’t.

Having erased some of the drawing, I now need to use the paint tool and the brush tool to fix up the drawing. Yes, that’s right. The bit mapped image is inside a "vector box" so I can draw and paint on it just like any other vector drawing. I’ll create some color swatches to match the colors in the image so that my edits aren’t too noticeable from the original.

My next step in creating the Friz character is to separate the body drawing and the arm drawing on to separate drawing elements that I can composite into a cut-out for animating. It is simply a matter of copying drawing objects and pasting drawing objects from one element to two separate elements. My initial drawing element is just being used as a scratch work element and will not be used in the final animation. So I've created an element "a" for Friz's body and an element "b" for Friz's arm.

I want to have Friz yelling at the Panther as I envisioned he was doing in the original source cartoon image, so I need to make a second mouth position. I will do this by making a copy of the body cell in element “a” of Friz with his big mouth wide open. Then using the eraser tool, the paint tool, and the brush tool I’ll close his mouth on the copy drawing. Now when I alternate between these two element "a" cells, Friz’s mouth opens and closes and can be animated to match his speaking.

Cell a-2

Cell a-4

The Friz character is now ready to rig and animate in camera view on the timeline. Next time, in part 2, I’ll cut out the Pink Panther character, rig both characters and create the actual animation.