I occasionally make animations for Dr. Christopher Labos and the group Mouton No More. They started with the idea I would get illustrations of the characters and animated them simply in the software "Motion by Apple but the illustrators stopped illustrating and I was left with the task of making the main character seem more alive by a sort of cut-out form of animation - replacing his arms with arms in different positions and replacing his face with different expressions. This can only take you so far so I took it upon myself to make a 3D version of him and soon a small cast of characters that I can simply pose and render out. I think this will look better in the end and since I can't really draw cartoons, it lets us have a little more freedom with the characters. Not sure if there will be any full animation sequences yet. We'll see how it goes. We are not producing a short at present so I can afford to play around a little.
As you can see (above), the original look wasn't very complicated and very appealing. The new version was taken from a bought model (by cartoon studio on Turbosquid.com)(below) that looked enough like the 2D version I felt confident that he could be modified to look more like the drawing.
I think I succeeded (see below) and can use the model I bought as a base to make the rest of the characters. He isn't perfect and isn't feature film ready, but he'll do fine in the 90 second science shorts, hopefully!
I have new character ready for rigging already. It amazing how far you can go with a simple base model to work from. I would love to develop the skills to model everything from scratch but that particular talent is evading me at the moment.
And below is one of the earlier films in case anyone is interested.
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