Computer-assisted cartoon animation by traditional production pipeline

Abstract

The production of 2D cartoon animation is in essence a process of drawing a series of pictures that are smooth and temporally-coherent, and the production pipeline is traditionally decomposed into three major phases: (1)The extreme frames, in which the emotion, motion or color of the cartoon characters are changed rapidly, are first drawn by experienced animators in terms of the storyboard.(2)The key frames are then further drawn by the assistant animators on the basis of commonsense and his personal understanding of the episodes in the story.(3)At last all the in between frames are created in detail by the painters/inbetweeners in terms of the key frames.