Hand Drawn Animation Made of Nodes

A year ago, a buddy of mine made a node for Nuke that would recreate an image completely out of Dot nodes.

Credit to Isaac Criddle

By doing this to individual frames of a video and taking screenshots of each frame, you end up with an animated video!

But what about hand drawn animation?

Taking inspiration from a tutorial by Hugo Léveillé, I got it working so that when clicking and dragging in a panel, it would place nodes in the node graph. I set this up with Dot nodes of course, but you can use any node type.

From there, I added additional colors:

And brushes:

And even this weird spinning brush I thought would be a good idea:

This got me thinking.... what if I used this to draw a frame from a movie....

Can you recognize what I'm drawing?

Actually I had to draw a lot of frames....

By doing enough frames, I ended up with this:

And there we have a rough idea of how hand drawn animation could be done with Nuke's dot nodes! If I was able to recreate this scene in a couple of hours, some dedicated soul could definitely make something really cool!