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Animation – Base on Vectors or Raster/Bitmap?
So I’ve done a lot of googling on this subject lately, but I’m yet to find a decent/relevant answer to the question, so I thought it was about time I asked it directly 🙂
So I’ve been doing some animating in AE recently, just finished one which was fairly simple, and I made all the components in illustrator and imported the vectors. After figuring out I needed to use continuously rasterise to make it work (and working around the puppet tools issues with vectors and continuous raster) I ended up with a pretty decent short animation.
HOWEVER –
My next project idea is a little more complicated, and will involve a few actual human characters. And while outlining in illustrator is simple enough, colouring in complex lineart is… painful. And removes the ability to edit the lines afterwards, which is one of the main benefits of vector in the first place.
I’m just as familiar with photoshop etc, so I’m considering creating the complex characters in a raster program (possible manga studio in fact) and just using illustrator for repetitive shapes and backgrounds – The kinds of things that I may want to zoom in on with the camera.
But now to the actual question that has been bothering me – Will using bitmap characters slow down my preview and rendering times significantly, compared to making the same thing in vector graphics?
The reason I’m thinking it might be a big difference, is because the initial vector graphic can be a small file that is scaled where needed… but the raster file would have to be made at at least double the film resolution in order to stay decently sharp when used, and so will be a (relatively) huge file size.
On the flip side, vectors being rendered involved more cpu usage than displaying a bitmap.
So standard vector images, vs big bitmap images – Will I notice a significant difference in preview and render times?
My current thinking is, like I said, to do backgrounds and objects in vector, and characters and complex things in raster, but I can (and will) do it all in vector if there is an advantage to it. (Unless someone says I’m better off doing the whole thing in huge bitmap files, but I doubt that will happen haha.)
Hope this made sense, tried to give as much information as I could. Thanks for any help you can give!
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3 Replies
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[Neil Scrivens] “So standard vector images, vs big bitmap images – Will I notice a significant difference in preview and render times? “
As long as you have a decent amount of RAM, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
24gb RAM in an i7 iMac
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I think you should be fine.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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