Frame by frame animation

[Furpuss]

Hello all-

I knew that the Anime Studio folks stress that they do not recommend their software for 'frame by frame' animation. I have been using AS for less than a year now and have grown increasingly aware that there might be some potential here that has not yet been explored. So I decided to see how FBF would work. My goal was to make it look as much like traditional hand-drawn animation as possible.

The animation was drawn first on paper and shot on video which I brought into my project file to work on top of. The AS color animation took me about 35 hours to complete.
I think this is cost-effective for some type of projects with modest budgets. There are no bones used here. It's all just shapes. Yes, its a lot of work but animation by it's very nature animation is very labor-intensive. The best part about AS is that the in-betweens are free whereas in traditional animation they still have to be drawn, inked & colored.

You can see it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBpkp0n ... e=youtu.be

Thanks-
Furpuss

[ddrake]

Excellent.

[EHEBrandon]

Yeah I do frame by frame in Anime Studio as well... I never really did rigs with my own animations just because it looks funny to me. But I have made some really good rigs. When you did frame by frame.. Did you do point animation? Like dragging each point to match the next drawing or did you use switch layers? I usually use a combination of both depending how complex the scene is.

[neeters_guy]

Really good.

The idea of using AS as a sort of paint-and-ink system has been proposed before, but I agree there's some unrealized potential here. Joey Gates (the guy behind Double Rainbow Guy) advocates the use of point level animation. No bones, just points: "Anime Studio Pro 8" Joey Gates' Original cartoon rig test - Part one.

Looking forward to more explorations.

[Little Yamori]

I don't think I'll ever have the time to do FBF, but wow is it smooth. Great movements

[synthsin75]

Great example, and good illustration of a point I made in another thread. AS saves tons of time over even just traditional inking/painting.

[3deeguy]

Furpuss, you are an excellent animator. You clearly have extensive training in traditional animation techniques. I can only admire FBF. I would never attempt it. Pencil drawing, light boxes, stop motion requires a staff in my estimation and once the timing needed to be adjusted I might abandon the project.
The computer makes it possible for untrained people like me to animate. Nice work.

[Danimal]

Wowsers! This is awesome!

[Furpuss]

Thanks for all the interesting replies. My thinking is that Anime Studio is nothing but a big toolbox and the tools can be used however the user wants. AS can be customized to suit all kinds of styles depending on the user's background, skills, tastes, etc. I think it's far more versatile than the other vector-based applications.

Synthsin, you are so right about the advantages of point animation over traditional animation techniques. Not only is clean-up, ink and paint combined into one operation but all the in-betweens are free! Most hand-drawn animation is on twos (for economic reasons) but with AS you can put all your animation on ones, which makes it much smoother, at NO extra cost!

Although I am retired after being in the animation industry for 40 years, my friends still working in the business are somewhat suspicious of vector-based animation software probably because they see all the limitations of Flash animation. I'm on a quest to show them that by utilizing vector-based animation techniques they can still do high-quality work faster and cheaper.

My thanks to some of the Forum members for helping an old dog learn some new tricks. I'm very optimistic about the future and looking forward to seeing new developments yet to come.

Furpuss

[heyvern]

sorry to "double post" but I posted this in the other "Frame by frame" topic and thought it might be helpful:

http://lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 61#p150061

It's about a script I created to playback image sequences without a lot of overhead in the application.

[sargumphigaus]

When I first started animating, I was using bone rigging, but in the end, I knew that the only way I could create exactly what I wanted to see, I would have to get behind frame by frame. I was originally going to scrap this program in favor of flash or toonboom because Bone rigging looked way too specific and stylistically damning to me. Lack of funds stopped me from doing that though, and as a result I began to develop my own style through the switch layers. Now I can't see myself using anything other than this program. AS really does have great potential for fbf. The Switchlayer is one of the greatest parts about this program to me.

Your video looks amazing. Very smooth and fluid. It's perfect.

I'm glad I'm not the only one playing with the fbf possibilities.

[willf]

How many layers did you use? Or, if only one layer, how many different shapes did you use to make up the pitcher?

[Furpuss]

I used 27 layers as you can see here. The hands and feet needed several layers. My biggest problem was changing layer order because sometimes, for example, an arm might work behind the torso and sometimes in front. The problem was they wouldn't stay put and I had to go back and put them in their proper place several times. Does anybody have any insight into Layer Ordering and how it works? It would be impossible to do something like this without jumping layers.

Also, you can see the video animation I worked over in the screenshot.

[EHEBrandon]

I used 27 layers as you can see here. The hands and feet needed several layers. My biggest problem was changing layer order because sometimes, for example, an arm might work behind the torso and sometimes in front. The problem was they wouldn't stay put and I had to go back and put them in their proper place several times. Does anybody have any insight into Layer Ordering and how it works? It would be impossible to do something like this without jumping layers.

Also, you can see the video animation I worked over in the screenshot.

Very interesting thanks for sharing that.

[synthsin75]

My biggest problem was changing layer order because sometimes, for example, an arm might work behind the torso and sometimes in front. The problem was they wouldn't stay put and I had to go back and put them in their proper place several times. Does anybody have any insight into Layer Ordering and how it works?

Adding or deleting layers after they have layer ordering animation keyframes will foul up those keyframes.