One of the things I've always wanted to do is animate a hand-drawn character. Real hand-drawn animation is complex and time-consuming, but there are now plenty of tools online that will do the animation for you. One such website that allows you to spend your time in a fun way is Sketch.metademolab.com. Here's how to use it.
What to do:
- Draw a character on a blank piece of paper. Make sure your arms and legs do not cross your body.
- Now take a photo with your phone and send the image to your computer.
- Then go to Sketch.metademolab.com and select upload image and upload an image of the character you drew.
- Now follow the instructions to prepare your drawing for animation.
- One of the steps involves marking the character's joints with dots so that the limbs can move. Here you need to make sure that the points hit the arms and legs.
Once your drawing is animated, you can select one of the example animations (the cat image) on the left to have your character perform the same movements.
To test the site, I created this simple bean bag character. On the first try, the arms and legs were slightly outside the scanned area when my image was being prepared for animation, and this caused the character to end up skewed. So on the second pass I made sure to include the edges of the arms and legs in the scan area and that fixed the situation.
Dominic Bailey / Foundry
You can even send your creation to a friend or family member by clicking Share as soon as you finish.
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