hi guys,
i’m an sgi user (indy and octane) working first of all on 2d animations (but also on 3d) . i know blender for 3+ years already, have puchased the v1.5 manual and was up to date up to the v1.8, but then i lost some ground and never caught up 
the question is: is it possible somehow to do in blender 2d animations and pencil previews from scanned pictures?
the goal is in general to merge the simple animations with the real camera movie shots…
thanx in advance and have a great day 
Not a pro here, but this is what I would do:
Get Virtualdub, (free movie tool thing). Load your movie up in it and select the segment you want to work with. Select Save Image Sequence and it will convert all those frames to .tga’s.
Use some or all of those frames in Blender as background pic’s (Shift + f7) for reference and make your animation, use no global or any background.
Render the anim with the Premul, RGBA, Targa selected. PS here, there seems to be some confusion as to how to make the background transparent. NOTHING makes the background transparent for Gimp, it doesn’t like the alpha that Blender creates, but I hear that in photoshop this works fine.
Edit: To get them to be transparent in Gimp. Use another program that can convert pics, (I use XnView which is a replacement for Winodws Explorer and it rocks), convert the .tga to .png or something else that supports alpha. Then open the .png in Gimp and it will see the alpha and you’ll have a transparent background.
Now you should have 2 sequences that match perfectly,(haha), and the Blender one should be transparent except for the models! Just copy and paste the Blender ones right on top of the other’s in a photo program keeping the same file format and names the movie one pics are in. Open the first pic of the movie back in Virtualdub and it will automatically load the rest of the sequence.
Save as Avi or whatever.
Hope this helps.
@enzoblue
thanx 4 your reply. i can get around with the rendering and alpha stuff. the real challange would be if blender could do the animation from 2d-keyframes (in-betweens) . i know this is a 3d-software, but i’ve seen some old 2d stuff and wondered if that would go…
am i completely wrong here?
have fun
It sounds like what you need is a morphing program that can make animations. Blender can’t do 2D morphs, and unfortunately I don’t know of any such software for SGI that can. But there’s a small freeware program at www.xiberpix.com for Windows if you have access to a machine with it.
@ripsting
thx, xiwarp loks nice, but i don’t know if it could be able to help me with more complicated shapes.
maybe i haven’t made myself clear enough, but i intend to go as far as, say, la linea or even mordillo has gone (although in a different way 
).
to be frank i tried already (also to compile) more advanced tools, like moho (a cheap non-irix tool), anim2000, but it’s objective-c and probably won’t go with gcc compiler on irix.
nevertheless, there is a solution somewhere, i know this