Illustrator files VS Redrawing in AS? Pros and cons

[chumamania]

Great community. I've learned a lot from these forums just lurking around the past few years.

I'm animating some characters that were all designed in illustrator. I want the character animation to be very fluid. I don't want it to seem like every layer of the character is separate from one another and moving around a pivot point.

Will the animation look better if I redraw the characters in AS?

Also can anyone lead me in the right direction for some threads or videos that cover rigging really well.

Thanks

[neeters_guy]

AI/SVG import helps the process of art creation, but it's not perfect. Tweaking is fairly common, so I'd recommend drawing in AS from the beginning. Also, you can import raster images but it may not be fluid enough for your taste. (Although cut-out isn't necessarily limited. Check this thread: Cat Out)

ASP allows you to bind bones in several ways, so rigging tends to depend on individual preference and work style. It's not uncommon to have multiple rigs of the same character depending on the movement required. Your best bet is to do the tutorials that come with the software and be thoroughly familiar with following concepts:

*Layer Binding
*Point Binding
*Flexible Binding
*Region Binding
*Bone Offset

Once you understand these, check out AmigaMan's character creation guide:
http://anime.smithmicro.com/tutorials/t ... acters.pdf

With the sufficient knowledge, you can pretty much deconstruct any rig, such as those that are bundled, on Content Paradise, or from the Character wizard.

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I see you've been around for awhile, so my advice might seem basic. Still it might be useful to someone.

[chumamania]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll be going over all of the tutorials.

One more question, do you find it realistic to build a full rig out of png files in AS? Or am I walking up a dead end street?

By redrawing the images in AS I lose shading and textures, however if the animation is better looking I'll probably end up tracing everything.

I posted an ad on hiring if your interested.

Thanks again

[SpaceBoy64]

One more question, do you find it realistic to build a full rig out of png files in AS? Or am I walking up a dead end street?

By redrawing the images in AS I lose shading and textures, however if the animation is better looking I'll probably end up tracing everything.

That depends on how complicated your textures are. I drew this entirely in AS without any photo textures:


I have found that rendering bitmapped material takes longer than vectors, and it limits your ability to scale up your animation.

I have had to do lots of importing from Illustrator files recently. It works pretty well, if the files are simple. If you have lots of layers upon layers in the Illustrator file, you may want to reduce them to their most simple form first before importing. These imports tend to have way too many control points, which means you'll have to go in and delete points manually and adjust your curves to keep them in the same shape. There is no easy way to do it with a script that I've found. Still importing will probably save you time.

[chumamania]

Thanks SB. Nice drawing. I have my work cut out for me that's for sure, going to dive into some tutorials now.