From the course: Using Character Animator in Production

Image resolution of puppet files - Character Animator Tutorial

From the course: Using Character Animator in Production

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Image resolution of puppet files

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- You spend a lot of time creating your puppets, but then, when you create your video, you realize that you didn't make the file large enough, and the image looks bad. (upbeat music) The first step in preparing your puppet file is to create a puppet large enough for any shot you want to create as you push in for tighter shots. Let's just talk, just a brief moment here, about the difference between bitmap and Vector images. Now, bitmap is made up of little pixels. So a high def image is 1,920 pixels wide by 1,080 pixels high. So if you push in closer on that, you'll see those dots as they get bigger and bigger. Now, Vector is a mathematical equation between two points in space. So, you can zoom in as close as you want on a Vector image, and it'll never degrade. You can't see any dots or points on it. So Vector is scalable, big and small infinitely. So if you're creating a puppet in Illustrator, you don't need to worry about the resolution, other than potentially the line thickness. So the line thickness that you create for a puppet, the size that you like it, when you zoom in really close might get to thick, so you might need to have multiple versions of it. Same thing, the line might get too tiny if you zoom out really far. So just be aware of that. Now all the pups that we're using in this course are bitmap. So let's take a look at that, because that's where the resolution really becomes important. So high definition, as I said, is 1,920 by 1,080. So your puppet size needs, at least to look good at that resolution. Now I tend to just look at the heighth, not the width, because your puppet often will not fill the whole width of the frame. But it does fill the heighth. So let's just take a look at the 1,080 number. So if you want your puppet to be head to toe standing in screen, never get any closer, just make sure he's at least 1,000 pixels high. However, if you wanted to zoom in and do a close up of that character, you're puppet's going to need to be taller. Now if you're doing a 4K production, which is ultra high def, it's also known as ultra HD, or 4K UHD, that's a resolution of 3,840 pixels wide by 2,160 pixels high. Now the problem with 4K on a system like Character Animator, is that that's four times the resolution, four times the number of pixels it's pushing around, and it will have a tendency to slow down processors. So recording at 30 frames a second might be more difficult. So, let's take a look at a high def production and see how to determine the size you should make your puppets. So let's take a look at this image of one of my puppets, see how big it should be. Now we know that from the top to the bottom, that this should be 1,080 pixels high minimum in order to look good. The resolution will be full on a high def screen. So, let's say I want to zoom in to about here, okay? So let's look. Now, the heighth of the full character is right around 10 inches, okay? That makes the math pretty easy. So I want to zoom in to five inches. That means that I want this to be 1,080 pixels. We could do simpler math at 1,000 and just add on to it at the end. So if this, at five inches, needs to be at least 1,000 pixels, then 10 inches needs to be at least 2,000, or if you want to be exact, it would be 2,160 pixels. Now, if I want to be able to zoom in even closer, I need my puppet to be even taller. So let's now go take a look and see where I ended up on the actual puppet I built and see if I actually made it big enough. So here's the puppet I created. Now, we know from having measured, that my character needs to be at least 2,000 pixels high. So if I'm creating a new puppet, I'm simply going to go into file new, and I'm going to set, I'm not going to worry as much about the width as I am the heighth. So I'm going set it to at least 4,000 pixels high. I can adjust the width and change it whenever I want. And now all of a sudden I have my new file that I can work in and add as many layers as I want. Well let's see how I did on my original puppet that I had created here. So to test this, once I open up my Photo Shop, I'm just going to go under image, and down to image size, and I'm going to make sure that this is set to pixels not percent. So right now it's showing that I created this at 5,377 pixels, so I can zoom in much closer than half way. At 4,000 pixels I can zoom in to this close and still be full resolution. But at almost 6,000 pixels, I can zoom in this close, which I do at times, and still have full resolution, and it won't break down. Don't spend days creating a puppet only to realize that you didn't make it large enough for your production. A moment of planning can save you days of work. (upbeat music)

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