Roger Rabbit vintage 2D overlay look

I’ve done a lot of searching, both on this board and around the general 'net, but haven’t found any tips to point me in the right direction for this. Sorry if it’s already been covered.

I want to mix live action and animation. Not unusual, I know, but I want the animation to be 2D, like Roger Rabbit.

I’m not a total newbie to blender or digital illustration… but I’ve only really dabbled and don’t really know the full range of possibilities. I tend to figure out a way to do something, then only do that for ages. I know how to accomplish mixing 3D animation and live action, but I’m a bit stuck about how to go about doing it with 2D. So before I go and hand-draw over every frame gimp or something, I wanted to ask if anyone here had ideas about how to do this?

Would you use a greenscreen? Can you import PNG animations? Is it even possible to make 2D animation with transparent layers? Before anyone posts Ian Ball’s NHS cartoon tutorials, I’ve seen them, and think they’re wonderful, but it’s not what I’m after.

I was hoping there was some kind of compositing trick that would somehow flatten an image and remove its depth.

Wishful thinking?

People have made plenty of rigged 2.5D characters in Blender and you could render them with NPR (Non PhotoReal) output settings. Then composite that over video.
For hand drawn cell animation I don’t think that Blender has the tool set, although you can use the Grease Pencil with Onion skin display to sketch on each frame. I don’t think that you could easily draw on 2’s etc or animate the GP easily. unless you convert the GP to curves but then you would have loooooooooots of curves and you’d still have a color fill issue…

A simple tut for GP animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2cXwEprTTs

Tip, you dont have to dupe the frames unless you want a complete copy of previous frame. You turn on the auto keyframe recording in the time line, then each time you draw on the GP layer you will get an updated keyframe.

EDIT: turns out you can animate on 2’ or 4’s or whatever by just skipping ahead, the GP layer will hold the keyframe until the next KF update. Check out the wiki http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/3D_interaction/Sketching/Layers_and_Animation

Also this method means you don’t get nice inking or line effects or fill with color. All depends on the style of animation you are going for I guess.

Oh great. I’ll have a look and see what that’s like. Thanks. :slight_smile:

Answer: not great. Remember that Blender is not designed to do 2D cell animation, it just has some stuff that you can bend towards that.