Sketching 2D Character Animation Using a Data-Assisted Interface

This paper presents a system to assist novice animators in creating 2D, hand-drawn, character animation. This system, called TraceMove, helps the user to sketch the character and to animate it. Frames from recorded videos of human performers are stored in a database. This is subsequently used to provide a static pose hint to the users, in the form of silhouette suggestions, as they sketch the character. The desired pose of the character is thus easy to sketch for the user as they can trace and draw over the generated pose hint. The system then predicts the next frame of the animation as a moving pose hint. This is done with the help of a user marked skeleton on a single sketched pose and a motion capture database. The sketch predicted by the system can be edited by the animator as desired. The moving and static pose hints used together, let novice artists and animators easily generate hand-drawn, 2D animated characters.