I was watching South Park last night and decided to try and make a little Cartman inspired Avatar as a first small animation test. I also wanted to set out and see if I could actually get .swf files to import into wordpress. They did, but it broke the validation of the site. I will have to figure out a work around.
(toon done in AS)
Last night I finished redrawing Bert the dog in AS. Didn’t take too long, but I spent a lot of time trying to match the line thickness of the original Xara drawing. After reading more on the AS studio forums I found out that these line thicknesses don’t export to SWF.
I’m heading to bed early tonight, didn’t get much sleep recently. I’ll work on the mouth phonemes tomorrow when I’m a little more bright eyed.
Here is a new toon that will be used in a few micro animations called “Bert Speaks!”. This image was made in Xara Xtreme, a nice little Vector drawing program which is a lot cheaper and easier to use then Illustrator. Oh yea and did I mention is was a LOT cheaper then Illustrator.
I’ll be taking him into Anime Studio to be redrawn for the animation. I have the basic version of the program which does not allow for vector import which sucks but on the good side they have a few nice tools for drawing. One of the coolest tools in AS is the line width tool. All you need to do is click on a vertices and drag the adjust the width of the line at that point, nice!
I have been a little burned out lately on 3d and decided that for the summer of 2007 to take a break, loosen up a bit and try my hand at some 2d. I have felt myself in need of something new and last Friday I discovered a program that was just that.
Following a random course of unrelated links I fortuitously ended up at Anime Studio. With a little time on my hands I decided to download and play with it a bit. WOW Is all I can say! I have not really been a big fan of 2d cartoons but this bone based software made it so easy and fun to animate that I couldn’t help but buy it.
The outcome of my first test with the software is a little on the annoying side (my fault completely for the voices), but it at least hits a little of the main techniques of the software (this is a personal study only, the tutorials are much better than this example). In about 30 minutes I was able to draw and animate a very simple lip sync and get the basic of the drawing tools.
I’m not worthy to giving a full review at this time, but lets just say that I have not been this excited in a software package in many years. The freedom from the complexity of 3d software is a nice change and I intend to explore this software in great depths over the summer.
If you would like to see the what this software is capable of in skilled hands just take a look at the Anime Studio Gallery.
Animation Test: “Yack” (00:03)
