Hand-painted animation with intelligent brushes

Abstract

In this paper we argue for the concept of brushes and pigments enhanced with behavioural intelligence as a complement to established 2D computer animation techniques. Our approach allows the user to enrich and animate interactively created images by semi-autonomously embedding procedural animation into them. This way, artistic skills of trained animators become within reach of everyone in the digital world, even to completely novice users. To exemplify this concept, we elaborate on several special-purpose brushes and animated pigment for painting with animation. These include a programmable semi-autonomous brush used to paint variations of strokes in successive frames (e.g. flames of fire), the moving-dab brush which enables dabs of paint to follow a user-defined path (e.g. smoke puffs) and animated pigment to produce secondary motion such as vibrant or waving paint textures. We believe our system offers a new fresh perspective on 2D computer aided animation production and associated tools. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.