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[Thorst]

My current animation technique is to draw each and every frame.  I have heard that professional animators use Flash and in-house software to generate frames with such tricks as key frames, lever and joint systems, and speech recognition.

How can I speed up the animation process?

[Anabru]

Hey Thorst,

I'm not an animator, so I can't speak from experience, but people I know use ToonBoom. http://www.toonboom.com/main/ 

There are a lot of tutorials here:

• http://toonboomcartooning.wetpaint.com/
• http://www.connectedconcepts.net/toonboom/

The downside is this software is commercial, and probably expensive.  There's a demo though, and it should save you +ridiculous+ amounts of time if you're hand-drawing all your tweens, so it might be worth it...

-Anabru

[Inane]

Key frames are an important part of animation no matter what you're doing . You've been animating without them?

[Xion]

hah, that's what I was about to say.

Key frames don't need any kind of software.

Unless you mean motion tweening or something.

[Zaphos]

What kind of animation do you do?  Pixel?  Flash?  Is it for a game?

[Thorst]

My question may be too vague, and honestly that's because I am not sure what I want to do.  In the past, I have pixeled simplistic animations, never more than something like a five-frame walking animation.  After watching a lot of adult swim, I feel like trying a graphical style that is more, I don't know, animated.  It doesn't have to look like Disney, but maybe something like a graphical adventure game.

The express version of ToonBoom might work.  Thanks, Anabru.  Does Flash have any kind of student or home version?  Or maybe some tools aimed at programmers for generating animation effects?

I should have said tweening instead of key frames.  I do use key frames and have them partially show through to the layer of the frame I am working on.

[Shambrook]

NO! BAD ANIMATOR!

You're looking to use motion tweens and they are a fucking horrible thing. Seriously stay the fuck away from them. Yes they can speed up the animation process a lot but what you end up with is an animation that looks like someone wacked it together in 15 minutes. They are incredibly difficult to do well. To even begin to do them well you need a massively solid understanding of traditional animation.

Unless you're going for a verry specific style of animation then tweening on charecters will not work. You end up with a paper doll style animation that can't show any reall depth. It looks lazy, just stay away from it if you want to have something that looks half decent.

Yeah drawing each frame is time consuming, but what you end up with is always going to be massivley superior to something being tweened.

As far as software goes, pretty much anything'll do. I mostly use photoshop for animating, Flash is a nice cheap alternative. Haven't used toon boom but I hear it's good. If you're fine with working in black'n'white then ezytoon is a fantasticly simple little animation program, not a lot of use for making game charecters but fun for just going nuts animating stuff. For simple animation effects like smoke and shit you will wanna look at getting some compositing software. Combustion comes with some fantastic default particle effects for stuff like that, as well as tonnes of customisation for em.

[Thorst]

I hadn't anticipated clashing perspectives on this.  Is animation one of those things that is best done by hand?

How about skeletal animation?

[Shambrook]

Animation is something that will look as good as the amount of time and effort you put into it. Yeah there are shortcuts but then it will look like you've taken shortcuts.

Skeletal animation genneraly refers to 3D animation. I've occasionly heard of it being used for 2D but it seems far too complex to be of much worth imo. Never really experimented with it much though. I imagine it would end up looking simmilar to the paper doll style tweened animation though.

[Bree]

Motion tweens aren't necessarily a bad thing, Benza. After all, you can't blame the tool for being used improperly by its user; it's just doing what it's told.

An important part of 2D animation are the principles of squash and stretch. This is the idea that an object will change its size but not its mass in order to give the illusion of movement. A classic example is the red bouncing ball.



Notice how the ball changes shape as it bounces? When it's in the air, it becomes longer and skinnier (stretching), and when it hits the ground, it becomes wider and shorter (squashing). To the human eye these distortions, ironically, make the motion look perfectly natural.

Where most first-time Flash animators go wrong is when they set their keyframes. They figure, hey, the ball will be here in one frame, and then I'll move it down in another, and then back up, and bam, time for lunch. All the motion tweens do is make the ball move from one spot to another. There's no reaction to the movement- no squash, no stretch- so the ball just looks stiff, and the animation as a whole looks awkward.

What you'll need to do is learn to use squash and stretch, as well as timing your keyframes. This, unfortunately, is something that can only be learned with practice, and a little bit of patience. One book you might want to look at for reference is The Animator's Survival Guide. It's written by one of the head honchos who animated Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and had pretty much everything you need to know.

The nice thing about computer animation these days is that as the software becomes more powerful, we can do more complicated things with the models. Where before we could only make the model dance like an awkward puppet, we can now stretch and squash the model to get much more livid animation. Madagascar is a good example of this new flexibility.

[Shambrook]

Motion tweens aren't necessarily a bad thing, Benza. After all, you can't blame the tool for being used improperly by its user; it's just doing what it's told.

Ok ok, I was a little harsh. Motion tween does have it's uses but for charecter animation it's just not a good way to go.

Also second the recomendation for Animators Survival Kit. Fucking awsome book

[Zaphos]

The nice thing about computer animation these days is that as the software becomes more powerful, we can do more complicated things with the models. Where before we could only make the model dance like an awkward puppet, we can now stretch and squash the model to get much more livid animation. Madagascar is a good example of this new flexibility.

Sederberg and Parry's freeform deformation paper was in 1986, so I think we've had pretty powerful squash and stretch for a long long time.  What new tools are you thinking of?


2D skeletal animation should be basically paper doll animation with some smoother bending at joints (if desired).  If you're working on a game where the character will always be in a side view, it can work decently well.  (For example, Aquaria had paper doll-style animation.)

For an adventure game, where you have a character walking toward and away from the screen, it probably wouldn't be very helpful.  Perhaps if your skeleton was allowed to move in 3D, and you laid out a different set of drawings along the skeleton edges for each walking direction?  But probably not.

I think after effects has some tools to help with tweening for rotoscoping?  Certainly there's an animation style there -- Waking Life used proprietary software for it, but demonstrated some looks you could go for with that.  I think Out of this World (or Another World) also used rotoscoping for its animations (with less computer help)?

After Effects cs3 also has an implementation of 'as rigid as possible shape manipulation' that they call the puppet tools, which allows nice 2D deformations of something you've drawn ( see http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WSB2E4332E-8EA6-4fa2-AF6F-D50C22088EE3.html )

[cmspice]

If you're talking about sprite animation you can sometimes sorta kinda cheat with adobe illustrator and it's blend tool and it doesn't really help that much and you need a lot of experience with illustrator on top of that. I use illustrator for all my sprite animation but they are very non-traditional sprites.

If you're talking about normal animation than lol yeah. You draw every damn thing by hand. Tweening isn't going to DRAW anything for you. It'll move one object from point A to point B which is pretty useless and you can do this by hand reasonably fast with more versatility (the flash format is pretty restricting and you'll have trouble outputting it in the format you want).

[Eclipse]

I hadn't anticipated clashing perspectives on this.  Is animation one of those things that is best done by hand?

How about skeletal animation?

skeletal animation is for 3d models, for 2d well.. isn't called skeletal animation, but only various sprites moving together.
If you're going to do with big, hires characters, you can use it just making different parts and animate it like a puppet, you can even mix two things changing also the various part sprites while you're animating, like in Odin Sphere for ps2.

If you want to have pixel art, do it by hand

[deadeye]

skeletal animation is for 3d models, for 2d well.. isn't called skeletal animation, but only various sprites moving together.

Actually there are a few programs out there that do skeletal 2d animation.  Anime Studio is the one I can think of off the top of my head.  And even though it can deform, say, an elbow bending with bones, it still looks like tweened Flash animation.  Sure, it bends better, but it still has the same feeling.

The only way to really get away from the paper-doll look is to animate your frames by hand.  The term "tweening" comes from hand-drawn animation anyway.  The key animator would create the keyframes first... just the extreme poses.  For instance, if the character was raising their arm, they would draw one frame with the arm lowered, and one frame with the arm raised (say, frames 1 and 16).  The drawings would get passed off to the breakdown artist who would fill in a few frames of finer detail (say frames 4, 8, and 12).  Then the inbetweener would draw in the rest of the frames, in between.  It's a good method for animating because you can more easily see where your next frame is headed, and keep track of timing better than with just straight-ahead animation.

So employing this method of key-framing your main poses first might speed things up for you.

[Zaphos]

Actually there are a few programs out there that do skeletal 2d animation.  Anime Studio is the one I can think of off the top of my head.  And even though it can deform, say, an elbow bending with bones, it still looks like tweened Flash animation.  Sure, it bends better, but it still has the same feeling.

Yes, this is what I was referring to.

Eclipse mentions Odin Sphere; that seems to be a good positive example of how 2D paper doll / puppet animation can work well with custom animation per part.  That seems like a good approach for side scrolling games, especially because it cuts down on the amount of animation data you need -- storing animations for individual parts is cheaper than storing whole character animations -- and can allow some procedural elements in your animations.

The only way to really get away from the paper-doll look is to animate your frames by hand.

This is not really fair -- People seemed to be quite happy with the look of Odin Sphere, so I think you can do a lot from the paper doll starting point.  I also think adding some basic 3D information and non-rigid deformations could also help a fair amount ... I don't know of any tools that do this in the way that I'm thinking of, though.
And also, as I mentioned, a computer can do tweening automatically to some extent if you're rotoscoping.

[Thorst]

I shall look around for a copy of the survival kit.

[neon]

i have it, and it is the most useful book on animation i have ever read, and the second most useful book on drawing i have ever read, second only to loomis' stuff.  GET IT, IT IS AWESOME.

[Zaphos]

Moving Sketch seems pretty cool; gives an easy user interface for animating with the 'as-rigid-as-possible manipulation' stuff.