Hello,
I am looking for a software that can help me in an animation project I'm working on.
I've started with the most simple and basic animation process: frame by frame drawings by hand ON PAPER. I want to turn this into an animation short. I can draw major changes but NEED something to fill in the gaps between(eg. I have a hand in up position and the next one halfway down, how could fill in the frames with a smooth transition move?). Do you know anything that could help? Morphing software is kind of what I'm looking for but the ones I can find are too basic for this work. Is there a powerful editor that one can get for such jobs?
OR
Is there any way I can "digitalize" by scanning them into the computer and make them editable as if they were drawn on the computer. Say make them vectors? The hard part to that is that I have drawings of characters that are very detailed in color and lines. I want to be able to make slight changes to them.
Thanks for your help!
I have suggestions for both ways you want to try:
1 - Use something like Adobe After Effects to create long smooth frame blends, it might work and look quite nifty.
2 - Use Adobe Streamline and Macromedia Flash to vectorize and edit your drawings the way you want them.
I´d personally stick to option 1 and see how it goes =)
danielpoeira.org
I have experience with Flash, Toon Boom, and Fipbook. Several years ago, before I got any training or literature on animation, i tried using After Effects, which seemed clunky, but I bet it works as well as Daniel says once you've gotten the basics down.
Flipbook is very kind to your pencil art, keeping your lines and edges as you drew and scanned them. It also works great as a pencil tester if you have a camera hooked up to your computer. Flipbook has some great tools to integrate with your camera and scanner, as well as some terrific ink and paint tools. You can even change the color of parts of your drawn lines with the trace tool so your outlines won't always be strictly black. Inking is simple and features the ability to paint regions over multiple frames. With a stylus pad, you could do some of the inbetweens in the program. I like to do as much inbetweening on paper as time permits. Do you have a disk and/or light table? You could get a starter for as little as $30-$40.
As much as I like Flipbook, I am at the moment doing my production in Toon Boom. It also features tools for paint, but isn't so hot when it comes to dealing with scanned drawings, though it is good enough. It gives you full reign with frame size and rate, and outputs to Quicktime or .SWF.
Toon Boom works in many ways like Flash, but allows you to create color palletes (in Flipbook you can do a color model of your character). In addition, it allows you to work out your animation with 2D items in 3D space as well as using pegs for whatever you want, and to have an actual camera (static or dynamic/zoom) to move through the scene. Flipbook can also do pegs/camera moves.
Cartoon Thunder
There's a little biker in all of us...
What version of Toon Boom? I'm using TB v2.0 and found a few things missing. (I heard the new version is muh better) I'm using CTP1.3 to scan and clean the drawings (there I just draw the shadow lines in red and come out in a separate layer. Then I render the layers as .bmp images and then import-vectorize them in toon boom. I still haven't mastered the use of templates though.
I'm using 2.0 also, on Windows XP. I understand 2.5 for the mac has a few more bells and whistles, like scanner interface.
Truth be told, I'd love to do my work in Flipbook instead, but my budget at this point doesn't really have room to get the package I need for what I'm doing. A few years ago I'd have just gone for it, but we got us a baby on the way in a few months, so I make do wit' what I gots.
Seems like I tried a demo of CTP, but I can't remember what its full name is... what does it cost? I seem to remember it looked pretty good...
Cartoon Thunder
There's a little biker in all of us...
Thank you, guys! I appreciate your input.
Flipbooks a fantastic peice of software - i've never really used toonboom. But The guy at Digicel Kent, is a really nice guy and helps you whenever.
Second that. Kent is terrific. The only reason I don't use Flipbook is money, but I think I can scrape together enough to buy the current FB studio for $497, a great deal that has 6 levels, can do up to 1000 frames, and run at standard TV resolution/aspect.
Later I'd like to add the widescreen option since I hope to enter some film festivals with my project. I've slowly started to realize that one cool thing about Flipbook is you can almost do it on layaway, the way I built my Harley-- one part at a time until I had what I needed.
...jeez I sound like a cheap sob....
Cartoon Thunder
There's a little biker in all of us...