Expert: Andre Hickman - 7/27/2004

Question
Hi,

I'm new to the whole vector idea so I don't know if what I want is possible and what is the best way to achieve this. I'd Like your help.

I have drawings of characters that are very detailed in color and lines. I want to be able to make slight changes to them to create an animation short. The basic way would be to redraw with these changes.

But would it help if I scanned them into the computer and made vectors out of them? As far as I know, the only way to do that would be to trace over them with a vector pen. Thought there are alot of lines if I must then I must but I don't know if its possible to retain all the color and shades into the vector? or would i have to use fill tools? If so, then that would defeat the idea of vectors as the detailed colors of the drawing must be cloned like the orig. Is it possible to have an image turned into digital pixels from a scan allowing one to play with it as if you had drawn it on the computer?

if vector is the way to go, what is the best prog for it?

Thanks you very much for your for time!
Klim

Answer
If you are trying to animate your original drawings, then what I would do is to disect the drawings at the joints (in Photoshop, and then piece it back together in whatever animation stage you are using (i.e. something like flash)  for example, cut off the forearm, and the upper arm, then place them back together, hinged, and animate.

As far as vector graphics, well, you 'can' do it, but to keep the quality of all your shading, you are going to have to do quite a bit of work (and I'm not sure what kinds of shading you are using, so if you can point me to a sample picture that would be great). In Photoshop, you can do the following:
1) Select a certain color range, (i.e. your black outlines and shading)

2)Go to your layers palette, and click the paths tab. at the bottom, you click that icon that looks like a circle with tangent lines.  That will convert the selection to a path (vector shape) then go to file>export paths to Illustrator.

3) Open the paths up in Adobe Illustrator, select them and fill them in black (they won't be visible at first, so fish around in the crop marks to find them) and voila! you have your original art in vector form! now realize that these aren't 'lines' persae, but are shapes of the marker or pen lines, so you are going to be dealing with a lot of vector points.

4) create your color by using the pen tool and creating shapes to fill in the spaces where you need color, and use solids, gradients, or gradient mesh colors, to get your color shading right.

You will get better paths if you use a larger scanned image in Photoshop, or scale the image up to a larger size.

Now I ran through this in the mos simplistic form, so if you run into problems, or need mor advice just ask.  I hope this helps, and is close to what you are looking for.

Cheers,
Andre'