Penguin Snowball Tennis

[Alpicat]

I've been trying to learn to use Anime Studio Pro on and off for a while, and have finally posted some work online which I'd like to share! I'm now using Anime Studio Pro 11, but started with version 10. I wanted to see if it was possible to rig and animate characters drawn as raster images (done on Manga Studio), rather than vector line drawings. It took time to figure out, but it seems to work.



Also here is a collection of earlier animation tests I did with the penguin characters, called Alpicat and Pinguin!



Let me know your thoughts! Look forward to making more of these.

[Pinesal]

Hi, your animation is really good for a "test". I find that Anime Studio can be very good for animating raster graphics. I deal almost exclusively in animating photos.

Here is a couple of my most complicated projects so you can get an idea of what's possible.

[Alpicat]

Your animations are funny and well made, thanks for sharing! I can see that it's possible to do things like turning the character's head, which really adds to the whole thing. I know it's possible to do that with vector drawn characters but hadn't thought about whether it could be done with raster graphics. Also the mouth movements on your characters look amazing.

I've called the second video a test because I was trying different drawing styles for the background images (either done on a wacom intuos tablet with Manga Studio, or hand-drawn on paper and scanned in, and then coloured in using Manga Studio). Also I was figuring out how to make the characters walk across a scene, and make their arms move and bend - which took me some time to work out.

The first video (snowball tennis one) is pretty much completed, not a test. If possible I might try to add a conclusion to it.

I recently found someone else using raster graphics on anime studio, which looks very nice also - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9laCCipOaY

[Pinesal]

Yeah, the head turns are possible simply by using photos of the head at different angles and then using a switch layer for each degree of turn. You also need mouths for every turn too so you end up with a TON of layer.

So learn how to use switch layers!

[Alpicat]

Thanks that makes sense, I'll look into the switch layers - I don't think I've ever tried using them from what I remember, but I know what they are. It's something I just need to research and spend time watching tutorials. I imagine it must take a lot of layers to do this!

[neeters_guy]

Even though this example uses 3D cgi, see how effective the figures in particular are animated using "cut-out" style:

Notice how the camera work and timing of the switches enhances the animation.

[Víctor Paredes]

That is very good. Thank you for sharing it and welcome to the forum
About head turns, just remember you don't need to draw every single angle in between. For this kind of projects, usually works better to make a quick head turn from one frame to other. If the headturn is well anticipated, it will be believable.

From my experience, Anime Studio works great for images. I think the most complex project I have worked using that technique is this one:

For the head turns of this project, I asked to the artist who made the characters in Photoshop to paint the exact same head twice, keeping the same layers, but with different illumination on each one:

That way, to create a head turn I just switched from one head to the other and at the same time flipped the main head layer (all that using a single Smart Bone). The illumination change was enough to convince that head rotated and not just flipped. The whole rig was the same for both heads (the head is full of bones to move the skin, the hair, the mouth, etc.), so I only had to animate "one" head