One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is animate a hand-drawn character. True hand-drawn animation is tricky and time-consuming to pull off but there are now a bunch of tools online to do the animation part for you. One such website that makes for a fun time waster is sketch.metademolab.com. Here’s how to use it.
What to do:
- Draw a character on a blank sheet of paper. Make sure the arms and legs aren’t crossing the body.
- Now take a picture with your phone and send the image to your PC.
- Then go to sketch.metademolab.com and select upload picture and upload the image of the character you drew.
- Now follow the steps to prepare your drawing for animation.
- One of the steps involves marking the character’s joints with points so that the limbs can move. Here you’re going to want to make sure the points go into the arms and legs.
Once your drawing has been animated, you can select from the sample animations (pictures of the cat) on the left-hand side to have your character do the same movements.
To test the website out, I created this simple bean bag character. On my first attempt the arms and legs were a little out of the scanned area when my image was being prepared for animation and it made the character come out skewed. So, on the second go I was sure to include the edges of the arms and the legs in the scan area, and that fixed it.
Dominic Bayley / Foundry
You can even send your creation to a friend or family member by clicking Share once you’re finished.
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