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AmberDust — Alpha Channeling Tutorial for 2D Animation
Published: 2012-04-30 14:03:47 +0000 UTC; Views: 1807; Favourites: 32; Downloads: 69
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Description
In my time studying animation at University, we were taught a few methods of Alpha Channeling (AKA, removing the white background from drawings trick) and while there are some easy techniques for clean animation styles with unbroken lines, if your style is at all rough or sketchy, then the process is instantly made time-consuming and difficult.This is the worst thing to happen, especially for making your third year final film and when you have to colour your frames individually anyway, it becomes a nightmare! So this is a method I developed for automated alpha channeling. All you need is pre-scanned animation and Adobe Photoshop (CS to CS5).
It still gives a professional look to your animation and if done right, still completely preserves your pencil line quality. So for indie and student animators, this is ideal! It will have a similar look to using the 'Multiply' layer mode in Photoshop, but gives you much more freedom in what to do with the lines afterwards, such as adding shadows, glows and coloured lines.
Give it a go and let me know what you think. I'm in the final stages of animating my grad film now, so I understand the need to process animation quickly for a deadline and thought I should share my technique!
If you experience any problems, leave me a note or comment so we can perfect this method.
Enjoy! <3
For more information on the stills used from my grad film, Acorns, please see my production blog at www.littleacornfilm.blogspot.com , thanks!
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Comments: 2
The tutorial is a beaut ! <3 I am totally loving it. But I didn't get the line "Pick a colour that is opposite to your color palette so that it is easier to see where you have painted and where you have not." Would you mind explaining it to me ?
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Hi adi-chi! Thanks very much! Sorry to be unclear, what I'm talking about here are contrasting colours. For example warm vs cool colours. The idea is that certain colours stand out from each other so when you are painting a character in say reds and yellows, you'll want a very cool colour like blue or green as the background so you can clearly see your warm colours against the cool blue of the background. The reason for this is because if you painted a character with a white background or a grey one (or the grey checkers that indicate transparency in Photoshop), it is likely to have gaps in the colour which will pop out at you when it's moving on the final background, which isn't good because you want your character to appear solid! So if you use a contrasting colour on the background then you can clearly see any gaps and fill them in. You also don't want to pick a colour which is a part of the colour palette used for your character! If you have a character with a blue jumper, a blue background would not help you see where to paint! I hope that helps, please let me know if you need me to explain further... glad you found the tutorial helpful! ^^
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