Rotoscoping/masking help?

Hi. I have a video which I want to make look like anime/animated. Think Archer, where the characters are cartoons, but the background looks real, if that makes sense? I did some research, and learned the technique I need to do is, rotoscoping or masking. I’m a bit of a newbie, and looked up masking/rotoscoping on youtube, but haven’t found anything that allows me to animate or “cartoonize” my video. Any tips?

WOW are you talking about rotoscping all the animated characters out of the animated scene and putting them into a real video background? If so that is a buttload of roto work there and is quite tedious if in fact you are planning that. It can be done but again it is a ton of work dealing with animated masks and keeping it tight to not have feathering to keep those hard edge lines of a cartoon character. Not sure how well or easily it is done in Blender but typically if I am doing any masking work I use a compositing software like HitfilmPro but there is a full functional free version of that software as well called HitfilmExpress and the masking is quite a bit easier there than it is in blender, no nodes required as it is a layer based compositing software. So my advice is if indeed that is what you are going for it might be a better solution to use something like after effects or Hitfilm Express to do the rotoscoping work. There is also another free node based compositing video editing software called Natron as well that is rather new to me as well. I personally prefer layer based compositing vs node based.

No, not quite. I want to make the people in the video look animated. I’d like to add a “scanner darkly” effect, or something similar to that degree.

Ahhhh ok, you are looking for cell shading then.

Yes. Where would I learn how to do something like that?

I would start with checking into how the movie was actually made. I know in the past they used to just draw cell animations overtop the live actor on film. So they would essentially trace characteristics over top the live actor on film (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) But I am sure now days it is approached more technically and quicker, so as to how to achieve this I would not honestly know where to point you other than study and learn the behind the scenes techniques used for Scanner Darkly and see if you can figure out how to apply their methods to blender compositing or even a different compositor. Sorry I wasn’t much help. It is a cool looking effect though cause the longer you watch the less you look at it as animation and take it as real when done right.

That’s what I’d like to do. How would I draw over the characters in blender to make them look cartoonish/comic book?

Maybe something along these lines as far as drawing in blender over video. Cell animation and since Blender does have onion skinning I am sure you could probably get as fancy as you wanted with the grease pencil sketching.

I took your advice, and have been giving HitFilm Express a go. I’m really enjoying the cartoon filter, definitely what I’m looking for, or at least close enough to it. I’m having a bit of trouble with the outline color, any good suggestions for what would work best? Also, not to sound like a broken record, but does blender have anything similar to HFE’s cartoon filter?