animation lighboxes

[Katatafisch]

hey people i want to try some animation now and want to go the classical way with pencils since im much more precise there and can work better with it
so i was thinking to get a lightbox....some sort of thing with plexi glass and some things to attach the sheets and and a neon lamp
and i searched the internet a bit about them and found some really nice ones like 300$ or more but even the cheaper ones are around 200$ so i thought about making my own little light box

well actually you just need some wood, a way to attach the plexiglass to the wood and a neon lamp and some thing to keep the sheets in place but idk...maybe someone has already done this and could give me some hints or maybe even a building plan

would be really nice
thanks in advance guys

greetings

[boundless]

I JUST built one yesterday! Cost me about $30. I still need to get a peg bar and a hole puncher before I can use it though. I'll post more info on it later.

[Darkswift2204]

i got a question about how much more time does it take to make animations with pencil and lightboxes then flash? and how mcuh more time does it take to make a flash with pencil paper and scanning it then flash?

[boundless]

When I use Flash, I make all my original drawings with a tablet. The reason I'm animating with a light box is to keep a traditional look to my work. Scanning and tracing in flash is a lot of work and I never found it to be worth the effort. You can make rough sketches in a separate layer and then flesh out your drawings in another. And the time it takes all depends on how comfortable you are with the process, how much detail you're putting in, and other variables. What you should know is that animation takes a long time no matter how you do it.

[Darkswift2204]

i know it takes a while... im not good at drawing with my tablet and im trying to learn how to get the whole outlineing thing.... but thanks xD

[chluaid]

if you have a transparent overlay sheet on your tablet, you can put rough drawings under there and trace directly over. It's not like the real thing but it's a pretty valid technique that worked for me a few times.

[Darkswift2204]

o cool! dats awsome XD didnt think that would work thx

[TheEYE]

if you have a transparent overlay sheet on your tablet, you can put rough drawings under there and trace directly over. It's not like the real thing but it's a pretty valid technique that worked for me a few times.

That's a really good idea actually.... and ironically, my cintiq 12wx has the perfect amount of room at the top to attach a peg bar!  Your a fart smeller Adam!

[boundless]

Do you know where to find peg bars? I've seen some for about $5 + shipping online but I dont know if those places are trustworthy.

[tyokio]

Im too fearful of scratching my 12wx screen lol, though one scratch in a year is pretty good I guess. I'm considering buying a perspex animation disk to use for hand drawn animation.. could buld one of those but I bet I wouldnt be able to get it acurate. £46 for one thats allready built though.

[Katatafisch]

i really like the idea adam, wow didnt know that so many have the 12 wx too ^^
well if you are scared to scratch the screen you could take a sheet of plexiglass and put it on the monitor...the brightness is the same and if you take some pieces of tissue or so underneath at the corners the cintiq is well protected...i might try this soon

[Esn]

I've tried that technique Adam, and I'm afraid that it hasn't worked for me at all. I can't see which lines I've traced already and which ones I haven't, or the quality of the line that's going into the computer, and the result looks like a clumsy mess. A better option for me was scanning the original artwork, then importing it into a painting program onto a separate layer, making that layer partially transparent then tracing it on the layer beneath that with my tablet.

As for light boxes, I bought an Art Graph Light Tracer a while ago for a pretty low price on ebay. It's not made for animation, but a few basic modifications to it can fix that.

[Lockzor]

I made a little tutorial on making a homemade lightbox ages ago if it helps:

http://www.biteycastle.com/smf/index.php/topic,675.0.html