November 8th, 2007
Rotoscoping - Hard to get it right
Since I’ve already told you what I’m currently playing, there’s no reason to hide that I really like the aesthetics of “Another World.” Besides, It’s an awesome game.
Since I first saw “Flashback” I wanted to know how the animation was done. Now I know that the technique used is called rotoscoping. Last few days I’ve been trying to do some rotoscoping myself and so far the results are mediocre, to put it mildly. I wanted to make 3-4 keyframes and interpolate the frames between them. No free lunch, as they say. To make the animation look acceptable, a huge amount of tweaking must be done. I don’t think there’s a way around it.
Here’s what I did exactly: I caught some frames from a movie with VLC, imported them to Inkscape and hand drawn (only straight lines) contours of a guy walking. Then I wrote a script to parse the resulting SVG file and form a few keyframes from it (basically, lists of points). Then I interpolated the missing frames and played the animation with pygame.
I’ll play with it a little more during the week, and see what I can do to make the animation look at least as good as in “Another World”.