Can I Import Drawings?

[arthur brogard]

 My young son draws cartoons that tell a story.

 On A4 paper.  Black ink outline drawings.  Very simple.

 I thought it might be good if I could bring them into Opentoonz and use it to animate the series of drawings.

 Opentoonz can do 'tweening',  can't it?  And we can put voice overs, I think?

  So would this be possible?  How to do?

[Rodney]

You should be able to drag and drop those images into OpenToonz.

Alternatively you can just load them via File menu or via Right Clicking.

In order to animate a scanned in drawing you will very likely want to convert the drawing.

The quality of that conversion will tell your son whether or not he needs to draw lines more thickly, etc.

Drawings that have fairly thick and smooth lines should convert well.

If you have any problems upload an example drawing and perhaps we can run a conversion test and you can work with that.

[arthur brogard]

 Hmm.  Thanks for that. Looks very promising for the future.  But right now I couldn't find how to do in Opentoonz.

 Went to the file menu,  right clicked a cell in the xsheet and tried following those menus...

 Got to a directory listing but it wouldn't open the dir on my HDD with the drawings in it and the directory on my HDD with the Opentoonz folders in it had a folder for drawings but it was empty and it wouldn't let me put anything in it....

  I tried dragging and dropping every way I could think of: nothing happened.

 Tried (after some googling) 'import magpie'  but had no luck there either.

 So I'm not too bright and need more guidance....  

[Jane Eyre]

When you right-click on a cell in the Xsheet, try clicking on “Load Level”. A file browser should open and from there you can select your drawings and then click on “load”. A pop-up will probably ask if you want to load or import - importing is usually the best option.

You should also be able to just drag your images from your desktop or etc and hover over the viewer. Once the green plus sign appears, you can let go to drop.

What file type are you trying to load? If it happens to be a gif, you’ll need to enable ffmpeg in Preferences (under Import/Export) before being able to utilize a gif.

[Jane Eyre]

Also, don’t be too hard on yourself! Most animation programs have a high learning curve. Give it some time & you will catch on.

[arthur brogard]

Thanks very much for that.  It worked and I've got three of his pics in there now.  I don't understand how to think of 'levels'  though.

 Here's a sample of one of his pics.  I guess I could photoshop them  (gimp actually) and thicken, blacken the lines if necessary.

 I put them under each other in a column in arbitrary places and then I dragged down each one so's the occupied a number of cells and therefore lasted longer on playback.

 Fine.

 But I notice the original number of blank cells between them remains.  I can't remove those blank cells.  I can't drag the pic above down into them.  I understand the utility of that - means I can extend anything at any time and the whole animation expands to accommodate it, nothing gets overwritten.  Good.   But I guess we want the blanks out eventually.  How do we do that?

Thank you for your help and encouragement. Much appreciated.   :)

[Rodney]

Consider this Part 1 of a multi-part response...

I think the very first thing I would do would be to clean up the image prior to trying to bring it into OpenToonz.

There is only so much that OpenToonz can do to automatically clean things up so every little thing we can do helps.

On a PC I like to use a great little program called Irfanview to perform a variety of tasks such as file conversion, cleaning up, quick copy/paste and the like.

There are lots of other programs freely available to do that same thing.

There are a number of approaches that can be used... but external considerations are a good place to start.

Here's an attempt to clean up the drawing mostly through changing contrast to force the image toward black and white.

It's definitely going to be easier for OpenToonz to ingest 2 colors than hundreds or thousands.

Added:  Of possible interest.  An attempt to importand convert the original drawing failed and crashed OpenToonz repeatedly.  Importing and converting the cleaned up image worked almost immediately.  So, thanks to you I leaned something very important today.   Clean up those images before bringing them into OpenToonz!  :)

[Rodney]

Part 2

The next thing I might do would be to separate elements of the scene into objects and characters that will be animated separately.

Good candidates for those include:

Train

Tracks

Buildings

People

Smoke/FX

Sound Effects (Zoom!)

This process can be done either inside or outside of OpenToonz.

I'm attaching the initial vector (editable line) image.... nothing separated yet.

I had to place it in a .zip file because the forum doesn't allow uploading of .pli files.

[arthur brogard]

  Thank you Rodney.  I'm with you so far.  Broadly speaking.

  When you say clean up I see you've eradicated the crumpled paper and the shades of grey.   I get the idea I think.

 'Import and convert'?   I just imported three drawings via Jayne Eyre''s suggestions and they're there okay and no mention of any conversion anywhere?

  Then the 'separate elements'.   I get the idea. But the practice?  How?  Using my imagination I imagine in OpenToonz I'd pick one subject - say the engine -  and then make animation changes to it going down the cells in a column, but not changing anything else.

  When I reach the end I block from view the first image and then when run I have an animated engine - zero else.
 
  Then I repeat the process with something else - the background scenery say - and when I run that I get changing scenery but no engine.

  Somehow Toonz enables me to run the two together like as though they were layers in gimp or cellophane sheets in a drawing office. 

 How Toonz would do this I don't know.  Maybe that's what different columns are?

  How we prevent the background showing through the engine I don't know.... maybe have to trace the outline and define as opaque?

 That's my current state of understanding.   That's what I need some help with just to know how to begin to use Toonz I think.   :)

  How I would do it outside of Toonz I just don't know. 

 Unless it is create a series of drawings in the way I've described doing it in Toonz?

[Rodney]

Here's a screenshot where I have separated all the various elements in the scene into logical objects that will move or be animated separately.

OpenToonz allows us to color code those for easier viewing but that that required... it's mostly so I can share that approach with you.

I'm skipping the cleanup phase because that can be a bit complex to explain... although not hard to do.

In the case of this 'cleanup' remember that I did most of that outside of OpenToonz so... I didn't even need to do that in OpenToonz.... I just went directly into converting the image into vector lines.

That may or may not be a step you want to do but I figure those shapes aren't going to close and color themselves so... I might was well do something.

So... objects separated.... now they can be refined individually and set into the scene in front of or behind other objects.

As for the process of converting from that bitmap (raster) image into vector (editable lines) I on the top text menu I went to Level and then "Convert to Vectors'.

Just make sure the cell/image you want to convert is selected in the xsheet or a message will tell you... nothing to convert.

I'll upload the actual scene file here in a moment if you want to stare at that.

[arthur brogard]

   So there's the secret magic thing, Rodney...  how did you do that in Toonz,  separate them?   And how do we 'set into a scene in front of or behind' ?

  So those columns are, as I was thinking, like different 'layers' ?    And I guess we choose which ones to run concurrently?   So we can switch one on for a few frames and then switch it back on?   But side-by-side cells are always played together?   Like we can't have column one playing starting from the top, cell 1,  and column 2 playing at the same time but starting from cell 100 in column 2?

[Rodney]

Something you may note in the above screenshot is that I have all the separated objects lined up horizontally in the xsheet.

I would say that it is probably not normal standard operating procedure to have all of the images in a Level Strip stack up like that in the xsheet but... I find it useful.

More often than not each object will have it's own Level/Level Strip.

What I find powerful about this approach is that not only can I drawn and animate in time in the xsheet and can also drawn and animate in depth (almost 3D even).

But I digress....

Keeping only say... the smoke in it's own level will make for better smoke animation.  The same for characters, props etc.

At this stage I've got them layered on top of each other but that can change whenever I want.

Project file coming up...

Here's a quick test to make sure everything is working:

Drat.  I forgot that animated gifs don't play here in the forum.  Gah.

[arthur brogard]

 That's wonderful Rodney,  amazing....   But I'm scrabbling to understand how it is all done and I've got to put it on hold for me right now while I do fatherly things for that same boy....   like settling them down for the night and all the rest.....

 Won't be back until tomorrow by which time I hope understanding has permeated my thick skull...   you make the future possibilities look much better than I'd been thinking...

  I guess I had in mind we'd just display like a slide show more than an animation and just using OpenToonz to let us do that and add sound.  With a little tweening where OpenToonz could manage it.

 Because his series of drawings don't lend themselves easily to Tweening, I think, though maybe I'm wrong.

 So I wasn't expecting much..  but now.....          :)

[Rodney]

I started to talk about separating and got sidetracked.

Sorry about that.

I separated everything in the Level Strip by copying about 10 copies of the original image.

I then started to erase everything except one element from each.

Where it seemed logical... I stopped and made another copy so I wouldn't have to keep erasing things I had aready erased.

As for columns.  YES!  You've got it.  Columns is a very near equivalent to layers but... they are layers that are powered by all the images that can be found in any LevelStrip... any....anywhere...

And yes, they will play together because as far as the camera knows... they are all in frame (the same frame).

You can have any of those images start and stop wherever you want them.

That's why they call it an exposure sheet (xsheet).  It exposes those images ot the camera wherever you want them to be.... right, left, up down..

There are a lot of tools that automate the process of loops/cycles (such as for rotating of wheels) and then of course we can add 'keys' that tell an image to stay in this position in frame... rotate.... scale... 

Column1 (or the column to the leftmost) is where a background should normally be.

Things to the right will be on top of that... unless transparent or some other effect is used to tell it otherwise.

I hope I'm not making this too complex.

[Rodney]

One day at a time. No rush here.

Animation is a lifetime thing. 

See you in the Funny Papers!  :)