Hello:)
I´m a beginner in drawing and animation, and got into drawing by working with different books; I sometimes read about the 5 views (front, side, semi-profile, back, “back-semi-profile”) you´ll need of every charakter. And here goes my questions:
1. Are that 5 views enought for animation / for a slow head-turning?
2. If so, will it be done by morphing (automatically create the inbetweens by morphing), and does it look “good enough”?
Is there a TV Show or a sample with head-turning done in the described way someone could advise to me?
I´ve just created my first charakter, and looking forward to start animation, maybe with one of the TB-Products (used the trial versions, some month ago).
I´m not really into drawing, so I hope 5 views are enoght, and the software does “it”:).
Please excuse my rough english! Thank´s!
5 views certainly wouldn’t be enough for a slow turn.
Yes you could use morphing to help you do a turn easier but it will still require tweaking and work. It won’t work just by clicking and it is done.
Thank you Raider for your answer.
I´v read a little about morphing in the TBA-Handbook (the example with the owl).
By using morphing on a head-rotation - I´ll be glad if the face / head-outlines would be transformed in a satisfactorily way.
Just fixing the face-details would be ok for me:
I´m not really into drawing (I know a lot of techniques, but never practised a lot), so it´s really hard for me to draw a semi-profil-designed face in other views (most challenging: chawbone and jowl)!
My style is more detailed than ‘Family Guy’ and less detailed than ‘King Of The Hill’ (not the easiest, not the hardest creating-challenge…).
[A lot easier (to draw different perspectives) would be a Style like ‘Simpsons’ because of their cylindric heads, mainly defined by their mouth´s - but: d´oh!]
The outlines tend to work well if you have them on a seperate layer.
The problems tend to occur when you have part of the head vanishing. (like when you go from 2 eyes to 1 for example).
Whatever the case morphing will save you time.
I looked for a specific example of character morphing but couldn’t find anything except for an arm shape being animated. I’d love to see what this looks like on a face if any of you have actually used it to make a character turn. I didn’t think it would work well for this but if does it will save me from cheating and going to a convenient cut to another character while the other reverses direction (lol). I’m guessing this isn’t possible with a symbols based character?
Raider: Are you referring to a character that’s been created using line art and color art settings or something else?
Also, how would you solve the unneeded eye problem, just move it off the screen after a certain point or delete it?
…meanwhile I tried an easy morphing (without setting those ‘from…to-points’), just by giving the front and the semi-profile, 24 frames:
http://www.pic-upload.de/view-8589856/morphing.jpg.html
It worked great! So I got an idea: use it like that just for the outlines, and fill in the details later. The outlines / face contures are the hardest thing for me to draw, so: 
I could prepare my main-charakters in this way, and maybe avoid head-turns on temporary charakters (will be an animated-serial, “soon” :))!
To Tony: I didn’t think it would work well for this but if does it will save me from cheating and going to a convenient cut to another character while the other reverses direction (lol). → I didn´t really get it (not´ a native english-man), but seems to be funny 8).
To Zebtoonz: wasn´t able to open it - could you please re-check? Maybe it´s not reachable here in europe…
To Raider: thank you again. Got to be some kind of patchwork, but it will save me, who has some bad drawing-skills…
You have to include the -E for the link to work–you can’t just click on it because for some reason it omitted that bit. So, just copy and paste in your browser. Here it is again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmlaaXK6W-E
…and again the -E is not included for some reason. Oh well.
use the [ url ] address [ /url ] tags to make it work (without the spaces)
That was an awesome tutorial Zeb… definitely going to incorporate it. However, it wasn’t a morph. I’m guessing it really isn’t used much for character animation but is more of an effects technique, like smoke or hair blowing in the wind?
Thanks for the tip, Raider! Duh, I should have known that.
As for the head turn clip, you can use the principle for whatever but I personally have begun using it for head turns in my animations.
Another thing to use for reference for that and any other animation technique is watching other animation frame by frame. I use KMPlayer (freeware) which allows you to go through frame by frame forward and backward with the shortcuts D and F. I watched some head turns in Kid vs. Kat clips this way. They insert a front face between the 3/4 views and that helps. In my animation “Construction Crew” on my YT channel, there is one head turn at around 1:53 which I did by drawing 5 separate heads. Worked pretty well.