Eliza and Tommy

I've been messing around in Toon Boom Animate a bit more yesterday and today. I already had "Tommy" designed as a test to see how I could rig a character and create a template that can be replicated for a theoretical series. I added "Eliza" as his cohort in trouble...whatever that means.

As I was building her rig, I found myself getting more comfortable with the tools which I remember struggling a bit with Tommy. Also another big mental leap came to me when I was working on her hair. I was thinking of ways to make the hair in the back neatly sit behind her head and not cause any odd overlaps. This is from years and years of dealing with Flash's limitations.  It occurred to me that I could have her hair sit in any fashion that I wanted as the rig would allow me to parent it in a far more flexible manner than Flash ever could. The hair is made up of four parts with the bottom part faithfully following any head animation that I will hopefully give her in the next week or so. I may still tweak her design as I'm not entirely happy with it yet, but here's my latest progress with my foray into Toon Boom Animate.

Fix it.

Today's Gestures

I won't post any more of these as I know that an entire blog filled with nothing bu gesture drawings is kind of boring. I still plan on doing these every day that I can, but I'll refrain from posting them from here on out. So here's today gesture drawings.

Gestures 11/20/12

Some gesture drawings

Here's a few gesture drawings I did from Friday and today. Cliff Roth on G+ made a post about a website, artists.pixelovely.com, that has a selection of models, clothed and nude, that flip by every 30 seconds. It's obviously not as good as working from a live model, but the website is still a very handy resource for getting your drawing arm into motion. I'm going to try to work this into my daily warm ups.

Tommy Run Test

Here's a second test done in Toon Boon Animate. I'm trying to get a better handle on the parenting system, which works well but it makes a million layers that is a personal pet peeve of mine. I'm also trying to get a better grasp on the Drawing Substitution system which can be a bit tough to wrap your head around. However, the main thrust of this test is to try to figure out the best way of creating character templates that can be shared between shot files. The BG was done roughly in Photoshop.

Toon Boom Animate Tests

So lately, I've been experimenting with Toon Boom Animate. I actually bought it several years ago while I was searching for some new software to do traditional animation. I never really had the chance to delve into it much. I'd fool around with it here and there, but nothing substantial came from it.

Lately, I've been getting tired of Flash's nonstop nonsense. I began to realize that Flash has largely remained unchanged in maybe six or seven years. I still use CS3 because frankly CS4 was such a steaming pile of trash. It is broken in many areas so I decided to not bother with any additional follow ups in the Creative Suite...though I have been thinking about upgrading to CS6 lately...

Anywho, Flash seems to have its better days behind it. Adobe really never did much with Flash when they bought it from Macromedia, and it seems web development is moving more and more to HTML5. Heck, even Adobe is pushing for AIR. It seems the future of Flash, and thus my livelihood, has its fate sealed. I can see a day in the not-so-distant future where Adobe will kill off Flash entirely. Thus, I decided to take another hard look at Animate again.

This test is me playing with the tool set in Animate. I'm working with what I know from Flash and After Effects, and trying to go from there. I was trying to test three things here. The first was to do a walk cycle using the parenting system. Its not the best walk cycle in the world and there are a few kinks in the kneee joints that I was having difficulty dealing with. The second was to traditionally animate "something". The third part, the Guy's reaction, was done in a similar manner to how I would approach a shot in Flash but still using the rigged puppet. I also wanted to see how Animate would handle a Photoshop BG so I did a quick splash card at his reaction. I did the edit in AE because I dont know how to do it in Animate yet :)