Moho Animation Forum

Salutations. Now I have a few questions, being brand new to this Anime Studio. I was recently givin Anime Studio 5 by a friend, apparently they were on the cheep and he decided to give me a copy due to my interest in art and animation. A very generous offer mind you, even if outdated. Though by the looks of examples I have seen, the animation seems more flash related, and shall we say, psudo southparkish. No offence to those who do work hard with this program, just not my cup of tea.

My question is, how closely to traditional hand drawn animation can I achieve with this program? Thats always been my passion, growing up on classic animated films and cartoons on TV, though sadly I never had much of an oppertunity to attend a school, but I have read up the basics and have always wanted to give it a try.

As I said, from alot of the examples I have seen, I'm not givin the impression that it is very likely to do. Well... all except for one example I could come across. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjmMuMhRvFo .
This so far seems to be similar to my interests, the nicely panted background, individual frames when the head is turned from side to side and lip movement. Though I can still tell there is use of Bone Rigging, though it still has a late 90s dreamworks quality to it.

Even if I have to put in all the extra effort to draw frame by frame, cell by cell, this would hopefully be a nice means to achieve those ends. And a way of professionally publishing them out with decently defined settings.Am I going to get far useing this and trying to animate frame by frame? Or am I better of trying to achieve that with another program?

Thank you for the time in reading my long post, and good day.

It's quite easy to do traditional animation in AS. I use Switch Layers.
You simply scan in your drawings, trace them in vector, and place them on seperate layers in a group below a Switch Layer.

Name your layers, f1,f2,f3,f4 and so on. Then simply create keyframes for the Switch layer by right clicking on it and selecting the frame you wish to display at the correct area of the timeline. Then press play.

What I do is use a hybrid of traditional animation and AS computer interpolation to create animations.

Here's a sample of a frontal walk I did for another thread. I roughly drew the character keyframes on paper, scanned them in and then used the scanned frames as reference to create the animation. It mostly uses point manipulation but the Switch Layers technique would still work just as well.

http://www.wienertoonz.com/DKWALKFRONT2.swf

EDIT:
That example you posted from youtube was done by Greykid (now Freakish kid). They do not use bones at all. All their animation is done with poit manipulation.

Cheers
D.K

Actually its bone and point animation. It moves so nice because our animators are extremely talented. AS allows for such fine control yes, but if you cant draw......

Right now we are producing a new show is AS. We have full turnarounds of each character. After the animatic is produced, any new poses we need are drawn up then built in AS. Animation goes through a first rough pass with bone animation only, then after approval we go through a point animation pass. This is where AS sits on top of the pile. This is what lifts the quality up. Last year I directed a Flash show with a far bigger budget. The animation on this Anime Studio show is far more sophisticated. Thanks to AS and the extremely talented team.

Another thing to note is we don't use any complex bone rigs.

ta

Jez

You have to divide your "classical animation look" into two parts: one is the look, the design of characters and backgrounds. This definitely is possible to do in AS (and quite simple).

The other part is the movement. Some of it may be achieved as easily within AS (walks, lipsync, mimic and gesture), some requires frame-by-frame animation, as you already know - and this is AS' soft spot: it's not designed to do FBF easily. (And "classical" animation includes Max Fleischer as well as Chuck Jones - Jones is easier to do in AS since he already reduced movement to a minimum.)

Depending on your experience in animation you might be able to do all your animation in AS, even the hard parts (like head turns). Personally I prefer to use the right program (= the most comfortable to work with) for every task, so I do my FBF in another application, named TVPaint, and combine it with the parts I created in AS.

There's more to consider: do you want to do just one short film, or do you plan a series, is your budget that restricted that you must go for the cheapest software, do you work alone or within a team etc.

AS offers very good abilities for very small money, it is fast and reliable. But some tasks are done faster in other software. South Park and the like cleverly made the restrictions into a style, and it works for them. Maybe you should make a storyboard on paper first, then check each scene and movement how it can be created in AS.

And you will still need some editing program to combine video and audio professionally.

Jez: would you mind to share how many positions you create for a turnaround? My usual setup uses 5 of them:
- front
- 3/4 front
- side
- 3/4 back
- back
and flips them in animation where needed. I do fast turns without interpolation, but I think you're doing slower turns?

they do not use bones at all

I stand corrected. I would LOVE to know more about the rigs you guys use.

Cheers
D.K

Hi Slow. Yep thats pretty much what we do. Although we cant flip any characters because of their design. So we have to do full turns. Forgot to mention also we have a texture pass after animation lock. Thats not usual, but something specific to the design of this show.

We also pop into turns yes, but have some very subtle slower turns when needed. Whatever the scene calls for. Its a very dialogue heavy show so a lot of acting. We can get away with re-posing from the turns for most of it. We also have a lot of multiple character scenes. As I said the team have knocked it out the park. Some really subtle business going on. I better mention that the animation team is the fantastic Man and Ink.

DK wrote: I would LOVE to know more about the rigs you guys use.

Disappointingly un-complex DK
Hopefully you can see for yourself at some point.

Probably as disappointing and un-complex as mine knunk

Here's a pic of some characters I'm working on for Nickelodeon AU. This animation style is not as fluid as traditional styles influenced by Flash but quite easily and competitively reproduced in AS.



Cheers
D.K

I love your Character's DK

Jez - Thanks for talking a bit about your animation process in AS. I really enjoyed looking around the A Man And Ink site too.

Someanimator - On the above site there are some AS tutorials, one of which details their method for producing traditional looking animation in AS. Very similar to how I work.

Find the tutorials here...
http://www.amanandink.com/09site/?s=anime+studio