Easier South Park Animation method

[CartoonZack]

Hi, I'm a regular user of Anime Studio, and I've been working on a South Park-like series with AS, which you can see below:

http://www.hottiekawaii.com/

My workflow is as follows: Lip syncing, blocking, basic poses, facial expressions, and inbetweens (moving the head and torso a little bit every 2 frames).

I have no problem doing this, but I spend countless hours performing the last step (inbetweens), and it's something that anyone can do (just translate and rotate the head and rotate the torso in whatever direction the head moves every 2 frames). I have no problem with the key poses, but the pointless movements in between them just take up too much time, and I know I can accomplish WAY MORE with the time I waste on it.

Is there some way I can make it move automatically? I know I can either use bone wiggle or maybe create noise keyframes, but I want to hear your suggestions.

Here's a download of some of the original South Park characters so you can understand the general design of the characters (they're in AS format): http://animestudiopro101.com/downloads/ ... h_park.zip

[snathan99]

I am very new to Anime Studio - but do you think scripts might work? It might be worthwhile to explore the option. There is a webcast on Smith Micro website about Anime scripts. Check it out, it is pretty cool.

[jonbo]

There might be a couple of scripts that might help. I'm thinking about the one where it lets you create actions then use a DAT. file to activate them. Also , maybe look at using control bones. You can set the torso bone to be controlled by the head bone, so when you rotate and translate the head the torso will also rotate and translate with it.

[hnQ8100]

why between 2 frames, anyway?

[madrobot]

Norton blocked an attack when I went to your URL

[Poptoogi]

Try setting the bone angle constraint to the head to something really small like -5,5 so the tilt is minor and then go to whatever frame in the timeline your character starts talking and click the rotate bone button to create a keyframe. Right click on the key frame and select noisy and change the settings to whatever looks the best. I tried amplitude at 3 and scale at three and it looked decent but I'm sure you can play with it so it looks more southparkish. Just click the rotate bone tool again on the frame where you want the character to stop moving to make the noise stop. Once you do one keyframe of starting and stopping you can just copy and paste throughout the timeline and just adjust the spacing so it all fits. Should save you a LOT of time if you can get the noise to look like you want it to!!!! Hope that helps!!!!!