I think this is really cute and wonderful. I think there's some room to improve here, e.g. an AR ghost overlay of previous frames as well as ML extracted frames from pure paper without having to print a template (both of which I believe are feasible). But overall I love that people are experimenting with this stuff (and wouldn't want to react negatively here in any way to discourage this type of work).
Some might argue moving from digital to pen and paper is a step down but I'd argue the opposite. I'd love and look forward to a possible future where we move digital advancements into the analog world in this way. As Theil says you can barely tell the difference between this world and the 80s if you remove cell phones and computers, but things like this are a cool way to hopefully get us closer to computers aiding more natural forms of interaction.
I love this project! I agree support for arbitrary grids would add a lot to the user experience. You might not even need ml for that. For instance, look for the blob of uninterrupted color that occupies the largest contiguous space in the image and interpret cell order within it by a function of their midpoint and filter for size. You could draw missing outside walls via convex hull generation first.
You can a get cheap portable light table. I have a Huion one I use for making papercraft greeting cards (I sketch the shapes before transferring to colored paper via tracing).
I don't know what they've done, but eventually it unsticks if you just keep swiping. Then it gets stuck again, then it scrolls again. It's navigable, given sufficient patience and effort.
https://brush.ninja/ is fast and nice if you just want to do quick stick figure type animated gifs. Start by drawing something simple in the current frame, then down at the bottom, use the "duplicate" to make the next frame and add some changes, then rinse/repeat.
Very neat idea, definitely going to try making few gifs myself :)
Just found a minor issue, when we click on any image on templates page, it gives a "Not found" error. May be you can link the image to PDF so that user can click on image to open the pdf.
I've seen various tools that let you take a picture and that then automatically align the paper to scan it (sometimes with and sometimes without QR codes in the corners) and I wish there was some general "how to" tutorial out there for that kind of trick
A long time ago I did something like this with ImageMagick using what it called "Extract SIFT Correspondences". I don't know if that still exists, but the homography feature in OpenCV looks like the same idea: https://learnopencv.com/image-alignment-feature-based-using-...
It's like taking something that's decades old, trying to make it look fresh. One can do this easily in paint.net using the animated gif plugin, without being required to draw into a grid and without requiring an internet connection to be productive.
I agree that this is arguably more about "wow, it's cool and maybe more fun to draw on paper" than "this is actually the easiest way to draw animations in 2022 for most kids".
Most kids have access to a phone/tablet and would probably do better with something like this?
Then again i guess it's easier to draw with pens, pencils, markers, crayons than it is to draw on a phone/tablet.
But yea, it's super cool to do it on paper too. I'd be nice to make the site mobile friendly. Of course this requires access to a printer. I haven't owned a printer in 9 years :( Maybe the next version could use ML or something to let you hand draw the grid.
Some might argue moving from digital to pen and paper is a step down but I'd argue the opposite. I'd love and look forward to a possible future where we move digital advancements into the analog world in this way. As Theil says you can barely tell the difference between this world and the 80s if you remove cell phones and computers, but things like this are a cool way to hopefully get us closer to computers aiding more natural forms of interaction.