Does anyone use Retas Studio?

[JetT]

What I did can be done with the Standard TVP (I didn't use any Pro features as far as I know, maybe when I set layer mode to sub at the end), though I think it's a bit dumb selling it as being only 32-bit, makes them look outdated and actually made me buy something else when I was deciding to buy it the first time.

"Hey guys, spend $600 more and you can use all that RAM you already bought!"

If you're new to animation then you can download the demo version of DigiCel FlipBook, this allows you to save your files and come back to them with the limitation of having a watermark on playback. Make sure you turn color-mode off when you're drawing or your strokes/undo will lag (click the palette icon). To open tool properties just right-click their respective icons. It's old software, they supposedly have a new version in the works I've been told, whether that is a minor upgrade or a major upgrade is to be seen.

Also you can download something better than After Effects for free - Fusion.

[basementProductions]

Yeah, your probably right... Gah! Now I am really confused! I guess I will have to try everything before I buy one
But here's another issue I just now thought of: What about collaborations? If I'm using something nobody else uses, how can I collaborate with other animators? Everything would have to be disassembled and reassembled by frames to go to a different program, wouldn't it?

...I could easily create "anime" characters both in As and TVP if a client would ever ask for that.

Heh, I might be looking at this through an "anime" filter, as it is the style I am enamored with right now. If Disney or Pixar did something 2d once in a while....
Actually I just found this independent film 「Teku Teku Temp」 on Youtube the other day supposedly made with AS.
Trailor
Making-of[loudness warning]

EDIT: pardon my French, but holy crap where has Fusion been hiding? The only other free effects engine I have seen is Jahshaka, but I'd rather not relive my experience with that.
My only question is how well does it run on my machine and will I even be able to add effects to a short clips with it.
I picked AE 7.0 because of its age. "New wine in old wineskins" was the idea.

[JetT]

You can read the Fusion User Manual Here for system requirements.

I highly recommend studying animation old school or at least with software that is closest to old school as possible, you want to nail the fundamental principles down, which sad to say you don't often see in mainstream Japanese (or American these days) animation. So although Kill la Kill is extremely exciting to watch, usually only a handful of scenes have any real work done on them, most of it is sliding, reuse and holds.

Look at this animation:


Everything is there, anticipation, secondary animation, follow through animation, appeal, squash and so on. Learn to animate like this and what software you pickup won't matter. Japanese animation often looks extremely polished, but check under the hood once in awhile.

Aaron Blaise (of Brother Bear) sells a pretty good Full Animation Course that can teach you all the above (in TVPaint no less) and CartoonBrew is running a discount on it at the moment. If I were in your position, I'd follow those videos with the DigiCel FlipBook Demo or if you can hold down your lunch long enough to reach the checkout page, you can buy Autodesk (blurgh) Sketchbook Pro which I imagine is what TVPaint Debut would look like, but test the free version first, it can be a flaky software for some.

[synthsin75]

Heh, I might be looking at this through an "anime" filter, as it is the style I am enamored with right now. If Disney or Pixar did something 2d once in a while....
Actually I just found this independent film 「Teku Teku Temp」 on Youtube the other day supposedly made with AS.
Trailor
Making-of[loudness warning]

That guy used to post here, and even posted some of the AS files from that making-of video. Don't know if they're still available. You might also what to check out Technotise. It's a Serbian anime that used AS for character animation.

In Anime Studio:
https://youtu.be/Tf-dTZoQaXY?t=4m2s

[basementProductions]

I just want to say thank you all so much for the information, it has been very enlightening so far.

You can read the Fusion User Manual Here for system requirements.

Yeah it's looking like a "no" for my lappy so far...

I highly recommend studying animation old school or at least with software that is closest to old school as possible, you want to nail the fundamental principles down, which sad to say you don't often see in mainstream Japanese (or American these days) animation. So although Kill la Kill is extremely exciting to watch, usually only a handful of scenes have any real work done on them, most of it is sliding, reuse and holds.

Right. This is why I picked Retas, I had heard it is what they use for a lot of traditional today.
It is unfortunate that most of today's animation... doesn't actually move. However, in some cases, good cinematography and direction can make up for it.
Kill la Kill is probably not an example of this ability, however.
If you want a real example of limited-animation Japanese film, I don't recommend Detroit Metal City, by Studio 4C------------------------------

EDIT: On second thought, after watching a couple episodes, this turned out to be pretty NSFW, so I'm not going to bring it up again.
But the original point was the animation is not even on par with most anime, let alone anything old-school.

My first trade, or great interest, I guess, is comics and graphic novels; and coming from that, I know that most independents do all of the work from layouts to pre-press themselves, on a very small budget, though making a good comic can be another thing entirely. So, doing the bare minimum of research, one finds out that an animated film is really a monumental task in comparison, far more suited to a large group.

That all being said, if an individual were to turn out piece that was half as polished as any new Japanese series, with music, sound, video effects, cgi etc.
Wouldn't that be quite an accomplishment, even if it was mostly slide and camera work?

Aaron Blaise (of Brother Bear) sells a pretty good Full Animation Course that can teach you all the above (in TVPaint no less)

I will have to check that out. What's everyone's opinion on Tony White's four instrucional books?

That guy used to post here, and even posted some of the AS files from that making-of video. Don't know if they're still available. You might also what to check out Technotise. It's a Serbian anime that used AS for character animation.

Wow, small world huh? I will have to check that out, as well.

[slowtiger]

Have a look at http://www.tvpaint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9218, there's even more tricks TVPaint is capable of ...

[basementProductions]

Wow, that's really awesome, slowtiger, I really appreciate all the information everyone has been sharing.
Really have my work cut out of choosing something, when I get the money.

That's the price for the Pro version with all the bells and whistles. You can work with Debut as well, it doesn't have the camera tool or the multiplane tool and only loads 1 soundfile per project, but since you have AS and a video editor this is not a problem at all. I do my camera moves in AS anyway.

I have to say though, it's going to be hard dubbing and adding fx without multiple sound layers, although a good video editing tool like FIlmora could probably solve that. But no camera tool? How do you do pans and Bourne-like camera shake? <You can tell I'm interested in action shows ahaha>

[JetT]

Have a look at http://www.tvpaint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9218, there's even more tricks TVPaint is capable of ...

Oops, I don't think Elodie liked some of my comments. It's only because I care Elodie!

The problem with using CTG is the fill shapes are inconsistent, it's otherwise a good system and similar to Retas but in an anime art style that has a lot of shadows, on playback it looks bumpy. Here is an example of a black circle with a blue circle inside created using the Sketch Panel RGB. Look what happens when I take the lines away:

TVPaint using CTG:


Retas PainMan using the exact same lines exported from TVPaint:


No matter which tool I use I get the same result. CTG doesn't give me a clean boundry and is difficult to predict which side of the line is going to get most of the fill.

Here is a video I made of how to color in Retas using the same image from the previous TVP example I did (which was made with TVP):



This is why Retas is such a boss. We need a comparable system in the West. If anyone can do it then surely the guys at TVPaint can.

[slowtiger]

JetT:
What's CTG? I don't know that term.

basement:
I do FBF in TVP and export as video, which I load in AS to do (complex) camera work. Sounds I do in Logic (producing) and Finalcut (sync and mix).

[JetT]

What's CTG? I don't know that term.

The "Colo & Texture Layer" from Pro 11. It's basically an automatic LazyBrush.

[basementProductions]

Ahh, Logic and Final Cut both look like a good programs, how does Logic compare with FL Studio, do you know? (I'm a Windows/Linux user)

JetT,
Thanks for the demonstration, if you don't mind me asking, where did you get your copy of Retas and did you have to do anything to change the interface to English? Also, how fast is rendering/exporting in TVPaint and Retas, respectively?

[dkwroot]

You guys should take these suggestions and send them to the Krita team. Krita is an open-source drawing program. They recently had a very successful kickstarter campaign and are working on adding Animation into the program. I think they would greatly benefit from the input that you guys can provide.

Krita Site: https://krita.org/

Krita forum: https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=136

[JetT]

Thanks for the demonstration, if you don't mind me asking, where did you get your copy of Retas and did you have to do anything to change the interface to English? Also, how fast is rendering/exporting in TVPaint and Retas, respectively?

My PC is really fast so I don't know what to tell you about render times. I got Retas in Japan and it's Japanese only, in the above examples I used the English Demo so people could see what I was doing, there's no way to change the language.

I asked some friends who use Retas Studio about PaintMan and what was discussed in this thread, apparently what I've been trying to explain has a name, it's called the "automatic color trace" function, I got shown a video.

Skip to 0:30:


All of the same opinion, there is nothing better out there for coloring this style of animation as fast and as accurate. One also made a good point about why you would even use this system, in anime style when you have animated the character and cleaned it up, you'll also animate the shadows as secondary animation "these aren't soft Disney form shadows which have no meaning, they're properly animated by line, the line makes up the absolute shape just like the black outline does for the character itself, coloring only an approximation is not good enough, you've drawn the shadow already, you've checked it works, the program must therefore use it as is".

Here is a real time example of what TVP Colo & Texture Layer (CTG) gives as a result:



Ignore the white gaps as those are easily filled, pay attention to the sharp angles on the blue lines such as the tips. The color becomes rounded out and jaggy (I'm not referring to pixelation, but sudden sharp curves in an otherwise smooth line).

And here is the same image painted using Retas:

You guys should take these suggestions and send them to the Krita team. Krita is an open-source drawing program. They recently had a very successful kickstarter campaign and are working on adding Animation into the program. I think they would greatly benefit from the input that you guys can provide.

Wow Krita looks great, I've heard of it before but didn't know they were working on adding in animation.

[dkwroot]

Wow Krita looks great, I've heard of it before but didn't know they were working on adding in animation.

Their recent kickstarter was very successful. They're currently working on huge performance improvements and frame-by-frame animation. I really think you guys should make a thread on their forums showing how Retas works and some of features that Krita should borrow from them. Just make sure you demonstrate the features in a very clear way, showing how it's implemented and how it improves workflow. I imagine you'll get a positive response from them. I think you guys would get a lot more done talking with them than you could here.

[slowtiger]

That Retas example looks like it uses jaggy lines, whereas TVP uses anti-aliased lines. Of course it's easier for software to fill aliased areas. Can you say anything about Retas' image resolution? Like, is it something more to 4K which later is rendered in 2K, which I suspect?