cut-out animation: Cut-out animation is a method of animating which subdivides characters into many individual parts each of which can be animated separately. The number of parts used and the way the character is rigged, constructed, is very much a function of how the character is going to be used in the production of the animation. Rigging is a term that probably originated in puppetry. Basically in TBS it is being used to talk about assembling a cut-out character into an easy to animate template. There are numerous ways to rig or construct a character. The way a person chooses depends on how they plan to use the character and what sort of movements they plan to animate with the character. Now one misconception that many people have when they start trying character animation with cut-outs is to think that they only will be building one rigged version of a character. That might be true for a character that you plan to use very minimally but in general if you are planning to spend the time to design and construct cut out characters you plan to use them extensively and therefore need to build many different rigged versions. You will want versions from several points of view and for each point of view you may need several different rigged versions. The points of view that most people start with are profile, perspective, front/back views. Then you will have different style rigs for walking type activities and other activities like bending or sitting activities. Then with in a single rig you will have multiple versions of various parts like mouths, facial expressions, hands. As you can see, although cut out animation may allow fewer drawings for many movements it has a high up front cost in terms of planning and designing and building rigged versions.

When designing a cut-out character each of the character's parts are separated on to individual elements. A single element may contain many variations of its specific character part, for example a "right hand" element might have many different right hand poses which can be interchanged via cell swapping. Cut-out characters are normally assembled in a hierarchy using pegs. The rig of the character is broken down into logical parent and child relationship groupings based on how the character designer plans to use the character. The completed rig is normally capped off by a peg element designated as the main character peg. This top level peg element is then collapsed and through a process of "drag and drop" the cut-out character rig is moved as a template to a library where it can then be reused in actual productions. The main method of animating a cut-out character is called keyframe animation.

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