Capturing Paper Animation?

Installing Pencil2D / How to
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Hi! I’m new to this site and I haven’t downloaded the software yet because I’m wondering if the software can be used for capturing pictures of handdrawn animation frames (on physical paper). I’ve been looking for something to start my first individual animation on!

Thanks!

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@gwen Hey, welcome to Pencil2D’s forums. It’s always great to meet another fellow animator :).

Although we’re glad you have cared enough to write, sadly right now Pencil2D is in a beta stage, so it is lacking the ability to capture directly from source be that a scanner or a camera. That means we still don’t have a wizard that activates the hardware to rbing it into pencil.

But, If you have a scanner rigged to scan your registered paper, taping your pegbar to the scanner for example, you could import the resulting images scanned with your scanner software, into Pencil2D.

For example if you have an numbered image sequence after scanning with your equipment, let’s say your filename looks like this:

anim_001.jpg anim_002.jpg anim_003.jpg anim_004.jpg

…and so forth

To properly import the numbered images you have to do the following:

  1. On a new pencil file, make SURE your “bitmap layer” is selected
  2. On the FPS box to the right side of the timeline, you have to select your specified frame rate. This is just a precaution. Use the arrows to get the desired number i.e 24 fps (you can’t type the number as of now)
  3. Go to File > Import > Image Sequence…
  4. A window will appear to browse you computer. Locate the folder that holds your image files
  5. This is important, instead of selecting the sequence from the first number to the last e.g 001, 002 , 003. You HAVE to select it from the last image file towards the first. You can click and drag a selection box, or click over the last frame, then shift click on the first frame.
  6. Once selected Pencil2D will take a few minutes meanwhile it accomodates every image in a separate “key”.

Note that you’ll have to reorganize your timing inside pencil to match the framerate. If you’re working on two’s you’ll have to manually select each frame and move it one frame over to get a double exposure. (We are still planning the implementation of an exposure feature)

Of course if you use 12 FPS by default you won’t have to move them over (lol).

Anyway. If you need a quick Pencil test via Camera. Pencil is not capable of video capture yet.

For that feature I’d suggest you could use the free software called MonkeyJam http://monkeyjam.org/download , which has an exposure system plus a video capture setup (but you can’t draw on it) :)

I’ve used it in the past for stop motion animation and it’s excellent software although it’s not being developed any longer (but it works hah)

Hope my answer helps you, and hopefully you’ll keep coming to visit our forums to show us what you’re animating, have a great week!

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Thank you so much for the help! In the meantime I’m gonna really crunch down on making a script, storyboards, etc… I’ll definitely keep visiting the forums here!