Create Better Flash Animation

“Stereo 3D output” is getting a lot of questions. Does “Animate Pro” do this?

I posted this video earlier, but let me do it again. The video starts out like a standard animation until the announcer removes his 3D glasses midway through. Then the video goes “double vision.”

This was actually an experiment. I created two cameras, side by side, and linked them together with a PEG. Now, the two cameras are “tied together” to create a set of stereoscopic eyes.

You must render each camera separately, but now you have video for each “eye” that you can reunite in your video editing program. 3D editing programs will soon be out and you will be ready!

So, take a look at the video, again. When this video goes “double vision,” you are now seeing the output from each of the two eyes. If I could do 3D output and you had the necessary monitor and glasses, this scene would look 3D.

Take a look at this video from about the halfway point:

In reality, I simply took each video output for each eye and combined or blended them in Adobe Premiere. In the future, I could feed the video into a 3D editing program and output 3D material.

So….the tools to create a 3D world are definitely present in Animate Pro with some improvisation. It is not “Toy Story” style, but it does create an interesting form of 3D.

Back in 1980, when I was in my final year of pre-med, I bought a pad of tracing paper and colored pencils. My Super 8mm movie camera had a macro lens that would allow close ups of a 2×3 inch square.

I decided to draw an animation and kind of let my imagination go. There was no storyboard. It was simply something I did in the ten minutes or so spent, sitting, waiting for a class to begin. Each sheet could hold about nine frames and each pad had 50 pages. At the end of the semester, I had a couple of pads with a total of about 1000 frames of drawings, all done in colored pencils.

Some day, I’ll post it on YouTube.  Unfortunately, my video copies of the movie film are poor quality.

It was an effect that always seemed interesting.

I decided to play a bit in Animate Pro to see if such a style was possible drawing directly on a Cintiq into the program, rather than scanning pencil drawings into the program. Animate Pro has texture brushes and they work rather well.

In 1982, the style was used by Dianne Jackson for British Channel 4 in a beautiful animation called “The Snowman.”

This wonderful animation is actually online in its complete form via Google Video.  This video was ranked as one of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes by the British Film Institute.

Jump ahead in the video to the 15:30 point to see a sequence that is my all time favorite for an animation.

Steven Mussey, MD can be found at www.drmussey.com

HP has released a Tablet PC that appears to be an animator’s dream.  I stress the “appears to be” because mixing hardware and software, even in the relatively stable world of Windows 7, is still a bit dicey when dealing with art projects.

 Why I am excited about this machine? 

It is called the “tm2t series” and it features several critical components making a Tablet PC compatible with Toon Boom in the same manner as an expensive Cintiq Tablet:

1. Intel Core2 Duo Processor
2. Option for a higher level of graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4550 Graphics, which is better than the standard Intel Integrated Graphics.  Be aware, you must actually order this option to be sure!  This makes it the fastest graphics ever on a Tablet PC (which is not saying much…).
3. Wacom Tablet Digitizer.  Strangely, this is not advertised, but multiple sites confirm this.
4. Price comes out at about $1000, even with all the features.  That may sound a lot for a laptop, but Tablet PC’s are never cheap and this appears to be the most powerful Tablet PC at any price.  This price is about half the going price for other models with far less capable hardware.

 I have not tested this machine and no one has tested Toon Boom and written about it online.  Many have used other artist programs on this machine with great success (Photoshop is a key one).  Wacom drivers must be installed for pressure sensitivity and these are apparently included. 

 Again, beware!  There are no guarantees in this business and “your mileage may vary.” 

 However, if I was getting a Tablet PC for artwork, this would be my choice.

 Disclaimer: This is simply my opinion and is not the opinion of Toon Boom.  I cannot guarantee this will work as an “artist machine.”  Hopefully, in coming months, I can get my hands on one of these to test it out.

 There are two sites that are indispensible on Tablet PC’s:

www.tabletpcreview.com has some of the best forums on the topic.

www.gottabemobile.com has great stories and okay forums.

Toon Boom’s “Animate” and “Animate Pro” are professional products. When you animate in this software, you might as well scream: “Disney would be proud!”

On the other hand, don’t forget “Toon Boom Studio!” After months of immersing myself in “Animate Pro” I recently fired up my copy of “Toon Boom Studio 5.0” today and looked at it in amazement.

“Toon Boom Studio” is astonishingly mature. It is beautifully assembled and integrated.

I think of “Toon Boom Studio” as the “Microsoft Word” of animation software.

Way back when “Toon Boom Studio” was on version 2.5, I made the following cartoon. Literally, almost a decade had passed since my last attempt at animation. Until I stumbled into “Toon Boom Studio,” I had been very unhappy with the state of animation software on the PC. “Toon Boom Studio” seemed like something I could use.

This was my first cartoon with a Toon Boom product and my first animation in many years. I’ve been hooked ever since.

If you have not purchased or worked with any animation software, “Toon Boom Studio” is an ideal starting point. When you are ready to advance, there are always great upgrade bargains to take you to “Animate” and “Animate Pro.” The interfaces are similar enough so you can avoid a bad learning curve.

Steven Mussey, MD can be found at www.drmussey.com

Here are some guideline drawings I use for lip synch. These seem to work well.

Recently, high definition video became available on YouTube. This includes the higher quality 1080p and it looks stunning.

This creates a dilemma for animators. In a lot of programs, you must predict the best resolution to create your animations. Up until recently, most of my stuff was always rendered in DVD quality because it seemed “good enough” and it was tough to send it to a lot of television stations in anything better than a DVD quality mpeg2 file.

Now, quality is king and even online video content is super high definition. Will you be ready?

In a bit-mapped drawing program, you may find you guessed wrong. If so, you are stuck. Your old work will stay low resolution if it was created in low resolution. This is not true for any of the Toon Boom products.

All of the major Toon Boom products: Toon Boom Studio, Toon Boom Animate, and Toon Boom Animate Pro support high definition with great ease.

Animating in Toon Boom creates resolution independent drawings and files that can be re-sized to anything from postage stamp low-bandwidth video all the way up to film quality output.

Did you create animation years ago in Toon Boom that was low resolution and now a client wants HD output? Do you want to now take advantage of YouTube high definition?

Load up your animation and simply change the settings. You are good to go!

The only caveat I learned was the issue of aspect ratio, which can throw a minor monkey wrench into your rendering. HDTV pictures tend to be wide and not as tall. You may need to move the camera a bit.

Here is my first attempt at a YouTube high definition animation. To view these in their HDTV glory, you need a faster computer and a good connection to the internet. You also must adjust the YouTube settings in the lower right side of the YouTube video screen.

Mouth positions seem to be a point of difficulty for some, even with the great lip-synch feature in Toon Boom Studio, Animate, and Animate Pro.

I use a technique that is not described in any of the instruction manuals that works almost every time. At most, I only need to do minor modifications to Toon Boom’s lip-synch analyzing.

Refer to your Toon Boom manual for doing a lip-synch. All of the programs: Studio, Animate, and Animate Pro will work with this technique.

Once you have followed the directions, you are usually left with a lip pattern that resembles this in your X-Sheet window:

This assumes, you have created a mouth position for X,A,B,C,D,E,F, and G.

This will create a satisfactory lip-synch, but look at this closer. Three, Four and even more frames have the character talking, BUT THE LIPS ARE NOT MOVING! Let’s fix this!

Go one step further. Create mouth positions for BB,CC,DD,EE,FF, and GG. In other words, create extra mouths that are very similar.

BB’s mouth is very close to B.
CC’s mouth is very close to C.
DD’s mouth is very close to D…. and so on.

Now, when you look at your X-Sheet view and you see many frames with the same letters, alternate your single letters with double letters.

Instead of B-B-B-B-B-B-B- frames in a row, make it B-BB-B-BB-B-BB-B-BB. This way, there is more movement in every frame. Your X-sheet should now look like:

Here is how I draw my mouths for a relatively happy face:

Here is a demo of the difference.
In this particular instance, I was not extremely impressed with the improvement, but in other animations, the improvement is striking. This is for 15 frames per second animation.

When the frame rate is bumped up to 24 frames per second, the lips seem to almost move too fast and have a weird vibration to them. Thus, I stick to 15 frames per second for most of my animation.

Every project has surprises and “learning moments.” The latest project: About a minute of animation and a target date of two weeks from the moment I agreed.

Two weeks to create a one minute animation?! Okay, that’s insane. I also have a day job that eats up most my life.

I used cut-out animation in Animate Pro to create what are essentially movable puppets.

Puppet design is critical. Adding unexpected parts to each puppet will help a lot: Knees and elbows.

Okay, here’s the finished animation. It’s definitely NOT Disney. But, it was two weeks from start to finish while also being a doctor full-time…. I think it turned out okay….

Steven Mussey, M.D. is a doctor in Internal Medicine in Fredericksburg, Virginia who cartoons and animates as a hobby. His work has appeared in newspapers and on television. You can visit his website at www.drmussey.com.

BACK TO SQUARE 2

I have made some big changes in my system, and it necessitated re-scanning all my drawings. But that’s okay.

The big change here is that I now have the capability of scanning full-size animation drawings. Standard animation paper is 10 ½ x 12 ½ inches (26.7 x 31.8 cm), and until recently, a scanner that would copy larger than legal size was thousands of dollars. Then a comic book artist friend told me about the Mustek scanner, which retails for $160 or less. Check it out! (Mustek Scan Express A3 1200 Pro USB Large Format Scanner)

Thus I can now do away with my awkward system of registration crosses and align the scans by their peg holes. The ability to do this automatically I have still not mastered, despite some excellent help from Toon Boom technical support, but we are working on it. In the meantime, you can see that the output for my pencil test looks a lot different and, I think , a lot clearer. I used settings that automatically filled the figures with grey. Not perfect, as some open areas got filled and some areas intended to be solid were left open, but it is certainly good enough for pencil test purposes.

ABOUT THE ANIMATION

If you compare this video with the one from my Blog Entry No. 3, you will see that fully seventy percent of the drawings have been filled in. This scene is difficult in that it is all in pantomime, with no dialog to help with timing. (It is an unspoken secret among animators that dialog actually can be easier to do than pantomime for that very reason; recorded dialog is full of timing suggestions, and a good voice actor can make an animator look very good in that regard!)

Here we have a sturdy farm couple. The man is displaying to his wife the things he has brought back from market: first a live goose (yet to be animated), then a bag of seed corn, and finally a special surprise which he has concealed under his hat.

So far it seems to be working well. I will be adding some blinks and a couple of follow-through actions not seen here, as when the farmer steps back from handing off the goose and his arm swings to a stop: I think it would be better to let it swing to a more natural stop after his body has come to rest.

NEXT TIME

Look for complete animation of the main characters, and possibly the goose will be animated as well. After that there will be a closeup sequence involving What Happens When the Farmer’s Wife Looks Too Closely at What Was Under Her Husband’s Hat.

Then I think we’ll take this whole sequence to final color and add all bells and whistles.

Watch for it!!