Cel action

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 2:18 pm

OK. Maybe I came across as a bit shirty. That can happen... But what I mean is, work out what you want to do beforehand, then solve those problems. Don't go spending untold hours developing full-body turns if you don't need it (or can tell the story another way -- and there's ALWAYS another way).

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 2:43 pm

bubai wrote:Oh Selgin, yes it's quite impressive, but only 3/4th left to another 3/4 right turn. And I do that as well. Can you please provide a full body turn with action like the movie? If I can get the file then definitely I'll salute you

I can make a full body turn, I have made full body turns in many animations. They don't have any magic, there is no magic tool to make them (if you are working on 2d, of course). It's all simulation and dissimulation. It has to do more with your own talent and animation knowledge than with the software.
Anyway, in AS you have masking and animated layer order. Technically you don't need anything else.
I have no time to do a body turn with this character now. Making the previous examples was fun, but not anymore. I can, anyway, show you a little simple example of full body turn made on AS, Check here.
Don't look for magic on celaction, I have read about it and there's not much to see but talent of the animators. Humf animation can perfectly be made with AS, you only need talent (or get a good animator).

jonbo · Post by **jonbo** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 3:08 pm

Also, as stated earlier, Celaction has no drawing tools so the figure was created in an another application(s) and most likely was made a a 3-d figure. The industry has been moving towards this for awhile now and it makes sense since it is more cost effective to make the figure and rigg once than to pay a team of animators to re-draw the character for a 2-3 second bit. The 3-d characters today can be made to look 2-d with the software out there now and even Anime Studio can do this in a way with their poser interface.

bubai · Post by **bubai** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 5:08 pm

selgin wrote:I can make a full body turn, I have made full body turns in many animations. They don't have any magic, there is no magic tool to make them (if you are working on 2d, of course). It's all simulation and dissimulation. It has to do more with your own talent and animation knowledge than with the software.
Anyway, in AS you have masking and animated layer order. Technically you don't need anything else.
I have no time to do a body turn with this character now. Making the previous examples was fun, but not anymore. I can, anyway, show you a little simple example of full body turn made on AS, Check here.
Don't look for magic on celaction, I have read about it and there's not much to see but talent of the animators. Humf animation can perfectly be made with AS, you only need talent (or get a good animator).

I see.

Andy Blazdell · Post by **Andy Blazdell** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 8:34 pm

I can give you a few insights about the production of Humf and the use of CelAction2D.

Firstly, that's nice work Selgin! Especially for such a short amount of time!

However, there's a few important things that you are missing in your animation that our clients (King Rollo Films) would not find acceptable. I'm not saying you can't fix them, but it would add considerably to the time spent creating what you did. And please don't take this as criticism of your work, I'm just trying to explain the conditions we are expected to fulfil.

1) No feet sliding

2) The texture must move with the animation

3) There must be no extra rigging to perform particular moves, it all has to be possible in the original rig

4) It must be able to be zoomed in on at HD quality and still look good

5) The rig and animation style must be easily learned by animators of differing ability and experience, so that they can all produce good quality animation

There's other stuff as well, but these were the first things that sprung to mind. Selgin's animation is close in look, but it's not as perfect as the real Humf needs to be for TV series production.

One thing to consider is that when studios are testing for a new project, they do look at the software available out there, and try to get the results they need. I would say that most of our clients have tried Anime Studio, and certainly all of them have heard of it. Our software is a lot more expensive than Anime Studio, and I know that if our clients thought they could get the results they want using Anime Studio, they'd drop us like a shot. Some indeed do use Anime Studio in their pipeline to create certain assets.

To respond to Jonbo, no 3D software was used to make this character, it's all drawn in Photoshop at high resolution.

Don't look for magic on celaction, I have read about it and there's not much to see but talent of the animators. Humf animation can perfectly be made with AS, you only need talent (or get a good animator).

I'll end by responding to this quote by Selgin. No, there is no magic in CelAction2D. What there is, is power. And it's that power that is required by production companies when they are producing big series for big broadcasters. I'm not saying you can't get Humf-like animation in Anime Studio, but the question is, is it as cost-effective when you're making a 78x7 minute series? The cost of software is negligible when compared to how much money it can save in animator time.

We have stands at FMX and Annecy, where you can see the software for yourself and talk (or indeed argue) with me.

Hope to see some of you there.

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 10:22 pm

Thanks for your comment, Andy. I was reading your old posts just yesterday and thought you maybe would appear in this thread in any moment.
I know I'm not a super pro animator and I'm always reading and testing new ways to get better animations, so don't worry, I can accept your critics, even more considering the time I spend making this Humf tests.

So, let's start by your points:

1- feet sliding: when I'm animating for serious projects, I'm very careful about floating movements. For walks I first create a linear movement base to get both feet moving at the same linear velocity.
Anime Studio has no "official" tool to get no feet sliding for walk cycles, but the solving is easy enough to make, so there is no mayor problem there. Now, AS has the bone locking feature which I use a lot for small walks or almost any action which requires to get feet fixed on the ground.
Has CelAction any way to automatically keep feet no sliding in premade walk cycles? It would be interesting if does, but if not, then it only depends of the talent and knowledge of the animator.

2- For time, I preferred to apply just one big texture over the character, but you easily can apply a texture of each shape or layer. You even can animate and bend the texture using bones. A video can be used as texture too, so you have many features and ways to work with textures in AS.
In which way Celaction works with textures? Are they painted on each part from Photoshop or similar or you have texture features directly on CelAction?

3- No extra rigging for particular moves. Here I just don't agree with you. Of course your rig must be good enough to make as many actions as possible. Actually, Anime Studio works very fine with that, you have the possibility to make incredibly flexible rigs.
Now, I don't agree with you because we are talking about 2d animation, not 3d. Many times you have certain specific takes where is much easier and faster to work with a new simple rig than adjust your most used rig (for example, an angle shot). We have discussed this point a lot here in forum and, from my perception, it's the most accepted sentence.
In Anime Studio you always can modify the rig and add new stuff to it. It doesn't matter how advanced be your animation, the rig construction is always flexible enough.

4- Zooming. The character I made is all vector, so you can zoom as much as you want. The texture is an image, so it has obvious limitation. Anyway, you can use a huge image without problems, so there is no problem on this point. I imagine CelAction manages the sizes in similar way.

5- Rig and animation style must be easily learned by animators. That's truth. I have worked as principal animator and rigger and always try to let the rigs as easy to use as possible. I work in reusable animations too (like walks), so anyone who receives the rig can easily use it. About style of animation, it depends of the talent of the animators, in that aspect there is no magic or power which could help.

As you can see, I'm very happy with Anime Studio, it gives me good quality results in very little time, which is great. But I'm also very interested in CelAction, so it would be great if you could answer some of this questions and give us some lines about why CelAction is so cool as we read. I have no way to compare it to Anime Studio more than seeing the videos on gallery and youtube. The videos are really cool and very well animated, but I can't easily see anything I could say "Wow, I couldn't do that in Anime Studio" or "Doing that would be extremely hard in Anime Studio".

I agree with you about Jonbo comment, I think he is just confused by the quality of the animation, thinking this is 3d is certainly a compliment for the animators. As compliment from mine I can say I had to watch it very closely to get convinced this wasn't made in frame by frame.

I would love to see you and the software in Annecy or wherever, but sadly I'm very far from there. I repeat I'm really interested in CelAction (and its power), but have no possibility to move too much from Chile. Sorry and thank you for the invitation

PD: Of course my animation is not as good as the original Humf, as I said before it's fantastic and to me it produces admiration more than anything else. Please, if you see the King Rollo guys, tell them they have a fan in Chile.

jonbo · Post by **jonbo** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 10:52 pm

No Selgin , I wasn't confused about the quality, just an observation. The 3-d element has been becoming more common in animation and Cel Action claims it can utilize this and 2-d to give you many options. So I wouldn't have been surprised if Andy had said some 3-d work was involved.

bubai · Post by **bubai** » Fri Apr 22, 2011 6:32 am

Andy Blazdell wrote:I can give you a few insights about the production of Humf and the use of CelAction2D.

Firstly, that's nice work Selgin! Especially for such a short amount of time!

However, there's a few important things that you are missing in your animation that our clients (King Rollo Films) would not find acceptable. I'm not saying you can't fix them, but it would add considerably to the time spent creating what you did. And please don't take this as criticism of your work, I'm just trying to explain the conditions we are expected to fulfil.

1) No feet sliding

2) The texture must move with the animation

3) There must be no extra rigging to perform particular moves, it all has to be possible in the original rig

4) It must be able to be zoomed in on at HD quality and still look good

5) The rig and animation style must be easily learned by animators of differing ability and experience, so that they can all produce good quality animation

There's other stuff as well, but these were the first things that sprung to mind. Selgin's animation is close in look, but it's not as perfect as the real Humf needs to be for TV series production.

One thing to consider is that when studios are testing for a new project, they do look at the software available out there, and try to get the results they need. I would say that most of our clients have tried Anime Studio, and certainly all of them have heard of it. Our software is a lot more expensive than Anime Studio, and I know that if our clients thought they could get the results they want using Anime Studio, they'd drop us like a shot. Some indeed do use Anime Studio in their pipeline to create certain assets.

To respond to Jonbo, no 3D software was used to make this character, it's all drawn in Photoshop at high resolution.

Don't look for magic on celaction, I have read about it and there's not much to see but talent of the animators. Humf animation can perfectly be made with AS, you only need talent (or get a good animator).
I'll end by responding to this quote by Selgin. No, there is no magic in CelAction2D. What there is, is power. And it's that power that is required by production companies when they are producing big series for big broadcasters. I'm not saying you can't get Humf-like animation in Anime Studio, but the question is, is it as cost-effective when you're making a 78x7 minute series? The cost of software is negligible when compared to how much money it can save in animator time.

We have stands at FMX and Annecy, where you can see the software for yourself and talk (or indeed argue) with me. Hope to see some of you there.

Good critique. I was also thinking about foot sliding on his example. But considered that may be he have no time to do that. But foot sliding and working with big image is all time problem in anime studio. Bone locking feature is not work well like true Ik system. I think cel action has that IK kind of stuff.

I'm interested to see the software and applied for a demonstration, but no reply from them

Poopee · Post by **Poopee** » Fri Apr 22, 2011 12:29 pm

I crossed searched bubai and celaction on google and came up with this!

http://forum.cgpersia.com/f19/celaction-2d-25208

Your antivirus may block this site, as it seems to be a heavy warez site.

Poop

AmigaMan · Post by **AmigaMan** » Fri Apr 22, 2011 10:59 pm

I did this example in Anime studio 6.

http://www.youtube.com/user/DaleAmigama ... Ez9Fm9CJJE

To be honest, if you watch most 2D animated content, it's very very rare that you will see a full body turn. However, whatever you want to do it is possible in AS. You just have to plan accordingly.

bubai · Post by **bubai** » Sat Apr 23, 2011 4:23 am

Yes I saw this before, it's good for snappy animation but need smooth like humf

DK · Post by DK » Sat Apr 23, 2011 4:58 am

bubai.

On that thread that Poopee posted I read your requests asking for pirate versions of the CelAction software. Why is that when you can clearly get a demo?

CelAction writes:
Get a demonstration of CelAction2D
Contact us by email at info@celaction.com and tell us your location so that we can put you in touch with your nearest CelAction representative.

D.K

bubai · Post by **bubai** » Sat Apr 23, 2011 5:05 am

DK wrote:bubai.

On that thread that Poopee posted I read your requests asking for pirate versions of the CelAction software. Why is that when you can clearly get a demo?

CelAction writes:
Get a demonstration of CelAction2D
Contact us by email at info@celaction.com and tell us your location so that we can put you in touch with your nearest CelAction representative.

D.K

They've written. I've applied for that, for a demonstration and for buying the product. But no reply from them

DK · Post by DK » Sat Apr 23, 2011 5:21 am

I also read on their site:

Is there an evaluation version of CelAction2D available?

There isn't a downloadable demo version of CelAction2D on the internet for public download. However, if you are a production company or film-maker with a proven track record, you can contact us for a special demonstration kit. See Getting a demonstration of CelAction2D.

Getting a demonstration of CelAction2D.

Contact us by email at info@celaction.com and tell us your location so that we can put you in touch with your nearest CelAction representative.

Maybe they came across your request for a pirate version and will not answer your email for fear of piracy?

D.K

bubai · Post by **bubai** » Sat Apr 23, 2011 5:23 am

I don't think so.