Chapter 6. Developing Your Cartoon's Scenery

Now that you have your cartoon character drawn and rigged up, it's time to focus on creating an environment for it to interact with. A lot of what you will be doing here will be similar to designing your cartoon character. We will continue to use the draw, fill, and layer tools to create a sense of depth.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Being consistent

• Discussing scene design

• Drawing your scenery

• Creating scene depth

• Polishing up your scene

Being consistent

As discussed in earlier chapters, when planning and designing your characters, having a consistent design is essential in order to create a visually pleasing production. Unsurprisingly, the same goes for scenery. As you start with the initial stages of your production, you will want to make sure your backgrounds compliment the main attraction, which will more than likely be your characters. There is really no direct route to achieve this. You can browse the mass catalog of online animations and discover everything from painted scenery to more minimalistic backgrounds. The key is that once you discover your look, you strive to maintain it throughout your work.

Discussing scene design

While there are several routes you can take when designing scenery, or characters for that matter, the following are a couple of tips that may help you when planning out your scenes:

• Keep the outlines of your backgrounds lighter or thinner than those of your characters. At the very least, don't make your background outlines thicker than that of your foreground objects. Of course, this doesn't apply if you decide not to use strokes at all for your designs. However, this technique will allow your foreground objects, such as characters, to stand out more while animating your cartoons. If you're using black outlines for your characters, you could probably try changing the color of your outlines for the background to see if it provides more of a pop. The following screenshot demonstrates how lines and colors can clash with background objects if not careful:

  

• The same concept applies for fill colors. If you have bright, vibrant colors making up the background, they could wash...

Setting up shots effectively

While working with your characters and scenes, displaying the elements on screen in a particular way is just as important as any of the steps outlined in the point we are going to discuss. Composing shots well can really make the difference between an animation that looks amateurish and one that looks professional. When starting out, you may be more concerned about the story or learning the tools to pay too much attention to these details. However, it's something you will want to pick up quickly for the sake of your work.

Composing shots, like anything in animation, is something that will improve with practice and research. The following are a couple of tips for you when you set up your assets and camera positions:

• First, watch your head room. One of the biggest offences seen in animated works (especially if the animator is new) is one that displays a close-up shot of a character, yet leaving ample head room that displays nothing of importance, as shown in the...

Drawing your scenery

While designing the scenery, there are many ways in which you could approach your scene depending on what your script calls for. Does your story lead to a spooky cave? Maybe it all takes place in a house. Perhaps you have many different scenes that take place in a variety of exotic locations. Whatever the case, you will need to plan your background according to where your story is taking the viewer.

For this piece of scenery, you can browse for the project file named OutsideScenery.anme, which you downloaded with this book in the Chapter 06 folder. Use this if you face issues with parts of this section or if you just want to see the finished result.

To get started, let's create a new document in Anime Studio so that we have a blank slate to work with. After going to File | New, we will be ready to draw up a simple, yet effective backdrop. For this example, we will be creating an outside shot, something you may find in the countryside. This simple exercise should hopefully...

Creating scene depth

This section deals with how the camera will react to our assets when it tracks them across the screen. Right now, everything is on one plane, indicating that all assets will react to a camera movement in the same way. This is optional as some people like to keep everything on one plane (this is also the reason why we didn't create layer depth while we were creating the assets). To create this effect, we will need to go through each layer and decide just how far back we need to push them into our document.

Depth shifting your layers

Since Anime Studio 9.5, it's now easy to adjust the distance of objects from the camera without having to do a bunch of resizing after the fact, because if you push something away from the camera, the layer will appear smaller, which can be annoying if we have everything placed the way we want it. This new method, which streamlines the process, is called depth shifting, and can be performed using the following steps:

1. First, take the Transform...

Polishing up your scene

You may have noticed that when we test the Track Camera tool with our scene, certain elements such as the land pieces come up short, so to speak. In other words, we can see the edges of these pieces while panning, which may not work to our advantage if we want to have a long pan of the scenery. This is where you will want to go back and lengthen your elements if needed. You can do this by using the Transform Layer or the Transform Points tools. It may be necessary to build on manually, especially with assets such as the fence where you may need to add more posts. You may be able to copy and paste and mirror some elements to create a seamless effect as well. This is all part of the process, so plan accordingly!

Again, if you would like a reference file for this exercise, refer to the Anime Studio project file OutsideScenery.anme in the Chapter 06 folder.

The methods we applied here can be used for many types of scenery. Be sure to keep an open mind and play around with...

Summary

Building a scene is similar to drawing out your cartoon character. As you can see, we end up using many of the same tools, and everything works together. Your characters and the backdrop must complement each other stylistically. As you practice and continue to build scenes for your own production, all of this will come together.

In the next chapter, we will look at how to create a library of assets and actions that we can reuse throughout one or multiple productions.