Does anyone have any ideas/tutorials on how to rotoscope an image quickly? My Illustrator skills are not very good so it takes me hours to do this by hand.

Post the image - or a smaller version of it - I think the limitations in the forums is 1024x768? And lemme know what you wanna do with it exactly.

Let's see what we can come up with.
-Lew ;-)

Well, I wanted to do it on any one of my people renders. I was thinking something along the lines of the look of "A Scanner Darkly". I found a couple of tutorials on it but my Illustrator skills stink.

This is the setup I came up with: live trace the image using the attached settings in Illustrator, then export the image back into Photoshop and use Poster Edges on it.

I tried it on this render here, tell me if you think it is on the right track.

Cool image! Looks kinda like the Posterize Filter in Photoshop. Scanner Darly had fewer colors for gradation - try lowering the colors from 36 to 12 and see what happens?

Linklater hand-traced each frame of the movie (it was shot with only a Panasonic HVX100 if you wanna try it yourself) - and while i think there was custom software involved, he controlled the thickness of the lines for a cartoon-like look.

Cool start with the image, though - maybe even try lowering it to 8 - really get some thick banding going and it might make your tracing of lines easier to do to control thickness?

Good luck-

-Lew ;-)

Attached Link: Bob Sabiston interview at Planit 3D

. You might find this interesting, we did an interview with Bob Sabiston, head of animation for 'A Scanner Darkly'. Yes, he did use software he's developed over many years 'Rotoshop' but that helps with 'tweening not with the tracing. His answer was the same as yours, "takes me hours to do this by hand" :biggrin:

That's a really cool article.

I guess the best way is to practice constantly and maybe I'll get better at it. :)

Akhiris, maybe you figured it out from the above article but if not here is my opinion as a person who has spent way too many hours/years rotoscoping by hand and with splines. First, maybe we are divided by a word, rotoscoping. Your goal is a look akin to Scanner Darkly and they used rotoscoping but ... Rotoscoping is just the act of tracing the motion of the photographic elements so they can control the image. If you're doing 3D renders like "Lost" then there is no need to rotoscope. One, its a still image and two, your 3D app will output any matte file you would want to exert the control you would need to process the image in the way that you want. Doing anything by hand would be insanity. Unless... you wanted to render your character and then redraw by hand a completely new head, body, whatever. Rotoscoping was mandatory for Scanner Darkly because it was all live action and came with no mattes for seperating all the elements. I'm not sure if any of this gets you closer to what you're aiming for. I hope it helps.

I know what rotoscoping is, but arguing over semantic meaning is well, meaningless. You can call tracing over stills inking if you want, but they are both still tracing. The effect is the same when viewed as a single frame.

Anyways.  I can get Daz Studio to output toon renders but this still takes hours and "it looks like a computer did it". Using Illustrator to turn it into a live tracing is faster, but still suffers from the second condition.

So I'm back to where I started, this tutorial. I'm not going to worry about the speed anymore.

No no, not trying argue anything let alone semantics. The tutorial is good, short but good. I just used the Poser output to swf mode two days ago and thought that it also got close to that Scanner Darkly look. But I ditched it in the end because it wasn't really solving my problem either. All the automatic effects just aren't personal enough to give that organic look. The thought of working four to five hours per image @ 24 frames per second. It would be my worst rotoscoping nightmare, almost. There were some very nice looking scenes in that film. Good Luck with yours.

I used  about 4  layers.

top layer is a FIlter>sketch>photocopy of the original image....  layer blending mode Multiply.
middle layer(a).  Image> adjust> poterize> 7 levels.. layer blending normal   opacity 30%
middle layer(b).  Image> adjust> poterize> 5 levels.. layer blending normal   opacity 50%
Background layer, original image...

 cheap nasty but somewhat effective, it won't look like a flash re-trace but meh... 

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1550750

By hand, 8 hours.

Karosnikov, I know you said "cheap nasty". And I'm going to agree with you. The tutorial image was quite tasty where your 4 layer version has a completely different flavor. Depending on the style of the story, sometime one needs nasty. But Akhiris is clearly going for that clean look without sacrificing the detailed line work. I've been dissappointed with the sketch functions in PS and Poser. Edge detection most often will introduce noise that I originally sought to flatten or break the line once I have reduced the noise. Akhiris, by hand, 8 HOURS! Can you imagine working on an animation @ 24 frames per second? If you go for it, my recommendation would be to first reduce your animation by a third, do the rotosoping, and then multiply your rotoscoped frames X 3 to get the speed back to what it was. It will be a little steppy but you will save a third of your lifetime for soaking your wrist in ice. ; ) I had to rotoscope all the major events of the 20th Century and compress them into a 1 minute open. I had two other artists assisting me with the roto and an editor to help measure the timing so we only rotoscoped the bare minimum. Most of the "events" were done on twos or threes. It took about a month to complete. But we also didn't have any software to do tweening.