Making Cartoons

Moving slowly but surely. Any tips, advice, whatever, it's all more than welcome.

This is as far as I got with this creepy bastard. There are a number of things that need to be done differently if he's gonna be animatable. Time to start over and try new things.

_{______General Rapist______}

I'm using blender 2.83's grease pencil to attempt to make 2d characters. You have what are called "strokes" and "fills", which are used to create outlines and colors. You draw something and it can be filled in by clicking a check box if it is a closed shape (or semi-closed).

However, all you really need to understand is that bending knees and elbows is a bit of a pain in the ass with this setup. Unless you build some super complicated rig for each character (there's no time for all that), you have to make an upper and a lower arm, plus the hand; same goes for the legs and feet. So that's 12 body parts for 4 limbs.

_{There's always those stupid strokes messing up the character.}

So then, the next trial is gonna be using just fills with no strokes at all. You can use the compositor to simply outline the whole object.

The problem is when, say, the arm goes in front of the body, there is no outline on that part in front (on the interior) of everything. The only thing that gets outlined is the outer boundary of the object (the silhouette).

That's fine. You can render the whole thing like that and then use that as a camera background. Then you go through each individual frame, one at a time, and trace lines over them. Then render it all over again; this time with the lines. It looks like this.

This is the best thing I can come up with for making those characters with that nice black ink line art outline. Even having to draw parts of each character on each individual frame by hand is still going to be way faster than making dozens of super complicated characters. Probably...

<I'm trying to make a beginning to this short film I made and uploaded to Brand New Tube. Check it out here. Umbrella Mayhem
It's kinda shitty but I only spent a week on it. The goal is to make a beginning for it and fix up some of what is already done. Gotta get these characters down though.