Webinar: Applying Animation Principles in AS

[Víctor Paredes]

Hi,
Next Tuesday, September 30, I will be giving a webinar about how to animate in AS. All my webinars have been about "technical" stuff of the software and it's the first time I will focus exclusively on animation.
It's a hard topic to cover and I'm not an expert, but I will try to do my best to explain how animation works (at least for me).
I hope you can be present that day.

http://my.smithmicro.com/webinars/anime ... index.html

PD: I bought a new nice microphone too, so the audio should be good this time

[jahnocli]

Just registered for this -- looking forward to it!

[funksmaname]

Yay! very interested in this... registered

[Undiscovered]

Thank you so much Victor for reading my post about making a webinar about Animating the basic and advanced principles of animation.
I am so excited! I will be attending!

I been using Anime Studio since version 8 and I am learning as much as I can.

I feel a webinar/tutorial based on animating principles in Anime Studio will be great for every animator even animators that use other programs like Flash/Toon Boom.
Every Animater wants to get better at animating.
Maybe the Flash/Toon Boom crowd will watch to see your Animating Principle Techniques and then realize how awesome Anime Studio is and then switch to Anime Studio so we can continue to build this great community.

The program is called Anime Studio ... Animating is the key to success, even if its a simple rig or simple drawing.. the fluidness / smoothness/realism the way the character or object moves shows how professional the animation is.

Thank you again Victor.
I can't wait to see what you will teach us next.
Mike

[lwaxana]

Yay! Looking forward to seeing this webinar. :D

[Danimal]

Ooh, this is going to be a good one! Thanks!

[Pesto]

Victor,
I thought I remember hearing you once say that the studio you work for imports your ASPro animation into After Effects. Can you go over that workflow? For instance is there anything you do to prepare you ASPro file differently knowing it will be imported into another program?

Thanks

[Víctor Paredes]

Victor,
I thought I remember hearing you once say that the studio you work for imports your ASPro animation into After Effects. Can you go over that workflow? For instance is there anything you do to prepare you ASPro file differently knowing it will be imported into another program?
Thanks

Hi, Pesto
When I work in Fluorfilms we follow that workflow. It's really nothing special or hard to do. In most of the cases I make only the character animation. So I export each character scene in Quicktime PNG with alpha. Then it's imported in After Effects, where they put the background, add effects, camera movements, etc.
In very rare cases I render as PNG image sequence, but only if I have a problem with Quicktime PNG or the scene is too long and complex and there's the danger the software could crash in the middle of the rendering (when rendering an image sequence, you don't lose the already rendered frames after a crash).

Sometimes I have to divide my render in two or three. For example, if I have two characters interacting each other they need to have each of them in different videos to be able to add shadows or other effects separately.
I always use a background image as reference to animate the characters (or a simple draw on a vector layer), but check "Don't render this layer" on it.
Most of the time I make the scene around one or two seconds longer than it should. That way there's always material to take if, for some reason (mostly client "needs"), the duration of the scenes is different from the accorded animatic. It is also useful to use only the best piece of the animation if, for example, the video must follow a rhythm.
I always work with the animatic in the corner of the screen, that way I know exactly when some actions must happen. In Quicktime Pro it's very easy to cut an animatic in scenes. I just open the animatic, select an In and an Out for the scene I want to animate and drag that portion of video to a folder. That way a new short video is created. I take that video and import it to AS.
Ok, I think that's all for the off-topic

[ARTzuza]

@Selgin,
Thank you, I will be in the webinar for sure, and I want to ask you if you can explain about the use of Motion graph for animation because, for example:

1. I like to work with bezier interpolations and to manipulate the curves in the motion Graph for more control in the interpolations and make more smooth transitions, but i see you work with smooth interpolations. And i have a lot of questions for example, if i work with beziers animating bones, i have to make my Smart bone actions with beziers too? what happend if my smart bone action is linear and in the meanline i use bezier?, ...which interpolation predominates?

2. In motion Graph is so hard to zoom for manipulate curves, for example if I have two or more curves I dont have to much control for to zoom in one point exactly. I could only zoom with the option "Auto zoom" that fits all my curves, but I have no control over this. And the other option is with the mouse wheel, but it is not very accurate. Is there a trick that I'm omitting to have more control to get closer to an exact point on the curve and manipulate it?

3. about off-topic: <EDIT> - I have read in AS for Win 64 bit there is not option for Quicktime export </EDIT>

[ErikAtMapache]

You should be able to just select the PNG option as you show in your screencap. AS should automatically apply transparency to any part of the image that is not covered by an image or object.

[Pesto]

Victor - thank you very much for the detailed reply!

[ulrik]

Thank you a lot for the webinar Victor!
I found it very inspiring, and you gave a lot of great tips!
One thing that made it so good was the fact that you animated at the spot, and that you limited the time you had, to only a few principles. Good thinking!

[braj]

I'm sorry I missed it, will it be posted to Youtube soon?

[braj]

[braj]

Victor, can you tell how you mask the wolf head so that (I assume) the eyes have masks inside the head, but display nicely without rendering? I can do similar but the eyes won't appear as being masked in the preview, only after rendering, which is really distracting. Sorry that this is off topic


Oh, I think I figured it out, you don't have nested masking, just the eye layers have a big grey square that stays in the head mask when the eyes move. That works nicely actually. I saw this pretty apparently @ 33 minutes or so. Sorry to be a distraction, just the wolf looks great.

EDIT AGAIN: How do you do the mouth as well? I would love a webinar on how to create a character like this, my attempts are pretty pitiful by comparison.