How to create simple animation out of a drawing?

gmaximin 2020-07-09 09:21:43 UTC #1

Hi, I'm looking for a simple way to turn a drawing into an animated file. Not anything fancy, but very basic motion (for example a wheel on the drawing that could turn, while all the rest remain immobile, like a normal drawing. Gif-ing could be a solution, but would be time consuming to redraw all frames one by one. Is there any other method / tools that I could use? Any help would be greatly appreciated...

fuyudust 2020-07-09 09:41:38 UTC #2

Spine animation
Anime Studio
Live 2d cubism
These software help you create something like this, it's quite complicated at first tho, but there're tutorials out there:

gmaximin 2020-07-09 09:49:07 UTC #3

Thanks a lot, seems that could do the trick for what I have in mind. I'll look into it!

KizKat 2020-07-09 12:01:34 UTC #4

GIFing a wheel might not be too time consuming, since you'd only have to rotate and save out the frames. Animation tends to be a very time consuming process, be it doing frame-by-frame or just learning software that lets you build rigs. What software do you currently use for your drawing, and how would you save out your GIFs, out of interest?

gmaximin 2020-07-10 00:20:02 UTC #5

I'm doing my comics using pen and paper, scanned and lightly edited using basic photo editor (so very basic, since it is part of the project to keep 'basic').
For a side project, I created motion by saving frame by frame and using an online free gif maker. But for this specific episode, I want to bring motion to below drawing (just an extract, actual is 5 times bigger). So even though it is as simple as rotating a wheel in process (2D, no texture, no colors, no light changes; basically just moving shapes around), there are a lot of elements, which would make it very time consuming to edit and save frame by frame before gifing... Ideally I need to find a software that groups shapes and allows motions in a systematic way. I tried with Inkscape layers last night. That would save some time, but still very long.
I'll look into @fuyudust earliest proposal today, and if it is too complex, I might just drop it and keep it as such.

KizKat 2020-07-10 14:57:40 UTC #6

In future, if you want to keep things traditional but incorperate animation, I would recommend drawing all your "groups" on different pieces of paper, and lining them up digitally (there are many free softwares out there that would let you use layers). That way you have everything that needs to rotate together in one place, and can save out frames with relative ease.

Good luck with the tutorials!