Moho Forum

kkrawal wrote:Thanks Selgin You pulled the crowed back toward Anime studio.
Can you Please Please Please post the file with 6.2 version.

Sorry, I can't. It is on 7.1 and passing it to 6.2 would imply to make all again, sorry. I know some people can transform the anme files to lower versions using notepad. Maybe your could ask for help on forum.

"In response to Andy's post, I made this small walk cycle test in ASP, took like 15 minutes to animate, no feet sliding and quality is awesome if you do not mind me being a bit full of myself.
http://www.youtube.com/user/GillesCharb ... R0580BZsGk "



Foot is not sliding horizontally but it's sliding vertically. Please don't mind but it's true, jerk is on the foot.

bubai wrote:jerk is on the foot.

Sorry but I find this quote funny!

The feet do have a bit of jerkiness on this test animation, but it has nothing to do with the software, I was just too lazy to animate it properly.

I can assure you that my production work is flawless, as is the work of many other ASP users.

Stop being so nitpicking and work with the software, you will see for yourself!

Gilles

bubai wrote:They've written. I've applied for that, for a demonstration and for buying the product. But no reply from them

Maybe your e-mail got stuck in our Spam filter. Did you send it from a free e-mail provider (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.)?

We do reply to all the e-mails we receive.

But you have PM'd me so I'll communicate with you via that.

selgin wrote:So, let's start by your points:

I'll not bother quoting all your post, so as to save space. Remember, I'm not criticising you or your animation - if anything, I'm just explaining the differences between an animation test and a full-blown TV quality animation production.

1. Feet sliding - Yes, of course it is possible for you to animate and lock the feet, but you didn't, I guess in order to save time, but that instantly makes the comparison less valid. If you're not animating to the same standards as Humf is, and you are choosing to avoid the time consuming parts, then you are comparing apples and oranges. To answer your question, in CelAction2D you can lock the feet to the ground so they don't move AT ALL.

2. One big texture - Again, this is a very different look to the actual Humf animation, and you did it to save time, which you would not have been able to do if working to the actual standards of our clients. Apples and oranges again.

3. Extra rigging - You may disagree, and for short-form projects I might actually agree with you, but Humf is 78 x 7 minutes, a total of over 500 minutes of animation, so that might be 5000 different scenes. Even a new rig for 10% of those scenes is a significant amount of work, and also you may lose the ability for re-use of the animation in the custom scenes, as the rigs will be different. You are talking about thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in extra work. These are the economic realities that I and my clients have to deal with. Workflows for short-form jobs do not always scale up well to long-form work. We position our software as being best for long-form work.

4. Zooming - See point 2. You're not using nearly as many HD textures as Humf has to. You might be able to do it, but you're not actually demonstrating that in your 1.5 hour test.

5. Easy rigs - At last, we fully agree on something!

To reiterate, I am not criticising Anime Studio at all, in fact I even recommend it to people who don't need the full power of CelAction2D. I am just explaining why this animation test is not actually comparable to Humf for TV production purposes.

I'll pass on your message to the King Rollo guys! I think they'll be impressed by what you've done!

Andy Blazdell wrote: Maybe your e-mail got stuck in our Spam filter. Did you send it from a free e-mail provider (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.)?

We do reply to all the e-mails we receive.

But you have PM'd me so I'll communicate with you via that.

Thanks a lot, I'm really want to see a demonstration of celaction and definitely decided to buy it. But before that just need to know the workflow.

Yes I've mailed through my gmail ID.

GCharb wrote:In response to Andy's post, I made this small walk cycle test in ASP, took like 15 minutes to animate, no feet sliding and quality is awesome if you do not mind me being a bit full of myself.

Nice work, Gilles!

Unfortunately the foot sliding is a big deal, at least to our clients, also the shirt sleeves and trouser legs are not separated from the limbs, so they look very stiff. And pretty much all that character can do is walk or move his arms and legs in that one plane. There's also no texture on it.

So while your animation is an excellent example of what can be done in Anime Studio in 15 minutes, it's not relevant in demonstrating whether Anime Studio could make Humf or not.

In your particular case of taking a Ponyo rig and animating a walk cycle from that, I have seen people do that quicker than 15 minutes in CelAction2D (with zero foot slide), but you're probably not working at maximum speed (since you're not getting paid for it! ). I originally thought you meant 15 minutes to draw it and animate it, then I saw your Making-Of video and understood. But I'm sure there are certain cases where Anime Studio would be faster at doing things from scratch. The important thing to note is whether a speed up in one area that is used rarely, is better than a speed up in an area that is used all the time. Our clients look at the big picture, and make their decisions accordingly.

In CelAction2D, you spend time making a robust character rig (from hours to days - I'm including drawing all the parts), but then you can re-use it forever, at HD, with over 50 characters animated on screen at once, with all the effects you want.

People normally turn to CelAction2D once they've hit the boundaries of other software. For a lot of people, our extra power will never be needed, and we have no intention of selling to them when there are other great tools like Anime Studio that will do the job they need it to do. But for the others who do need the maximum amount of power, we're here for them.

So I hope that doesn't look as if I'm saying anything bad about Anime Studio - I only show up on these forums to correct mis-information about my own product. I believe people should use the right software for the job in hand - there is no All-in-one software for every type of job.

Both Anime Studio and CelAction2D do what they do very well.

Andy, you mention the feet sliding in Gilles example. He could have corrected that easily if he'd just spent a little more time on it. Also, likewise with the trouser legs. Gilles could do another pass and animate the points on the trousers and they'd look a lot better.
You mention that the feet sliding is a big deal to your clients but if you watch any character walking in 'King Arthur's Disasters' the feet slip about in quite a distracting way. When they are standing still it's fine.
CelAction and Anime Studio are both only as good as the animators using them.
I have looked on your site but I can't find anything that demonstrates how the rig was set up for the Humf animation. I'd love to get an idea how it was set up as I remember trying out CelAction and only very basic cut-out animation was possible at that time. Obviously it's improved a lot since then but it would be great to know how.

AmigaMan wrote:Andy, you mention the feet sliding in Gilles example. He could have corrected that easily if he'd just spent a little more time on it. Also, likewise with the trouser legs. Gilles could do another pass and animate the points on the trousers and they'd look a lot better.

Absolutely correct. But it all adds to the amount of time taken to make the animation. Therefore Gilles' 15 minutes and Selgin's 90 minutes are not valid points for comparison, when compared with Humf, because they're not being held to the same standard. We can never get a truly fair comparison unless someone does exactly the same series (>500 minutes) in both programs.

AmigaMan wrote:You mention that the feet sliding is a big deal to your clients but if you watch any character walking in 'King Arthur's Disasters' the feet slip about in quite a distracting way.

All I will say is that the client chose to do it that way, and it would not have taken them any more time to have the feet locked in position. So it was either a stylistic or political decision.

AmigaMan wrote:I have looked on your site but I can't find anything that demonstrates how the rig was set up for the Humf animation. I'd love to get an idea how it was set up as I remember trying out CelAction and only very basic cut-out animation was possible at that time. Obviously it's improved a lot since then but it would be great to know how.

Actually, Humf uses a lot of the basic tools to achieve its look. There's some masking in there, and heavy use of Actions, but it mostly boils down to great planning and drawing. It has a LOT of Elements and Shapes (I guess you'd call them Layers and Switch Layers, that's the closest analogy I can think of), but the way CelAction2D handles them makes it easy to manage large numbers of drawings.

If you look at the Little Princess case study on our website, you can see some of the numbers involved in the complexity of a CelAction2D TV series.

As you say, it's only as good as the person using it, but we aim to not limit the artists, so they can do whatever they want to without the software letting them down.

Back again!

I re-rigged the Sasuke character and used capricorn33 aim_at script.

This time the animation was much quicker, much less keyframes and no jiggling of the feet that I could notice.

Unfortunatly I am using 7.1 and therefore the software crashes at render time because the script is embeded, bleh, me think I will revert back to 6.2, hence another nail on the 7.x coffin!

Here is the file though for those who would like to have a look.

http://cid-8bd0b09b32a83184.office.live ... aim-at.zip

Andy, I doubt that anyone will produce 500 minutes in both software just to see which is best at production.

As far as Celaction being better then ASP for large productions I will take your word for it, but there is no way I will use part of my funds to test it out, but thanks for your inputs on your software.

Will be on the other forum if anyone wants to chit chat!

Okay, back to oblivion!

Here I am again!

Actually got it to render in 7.1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzcf-zn-3SU

Gilles