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 :)