Moho Forum

buy it
its good to have by your side rather than on a monitor

and its about 300 pages which would be a rather hefty print job

idragosani wrote:It can be done with vector animation, you just need more keys and use breakdown postions and not rely on the computer to do all of the in-betweening

I meant not the standard walk cycle, but the more interesting ones, of which the principles are described in the book, and you have to design yourself, to fit the character and mood of the scene. The implementation can be done with vectors, but the design is so much easier with pencil and paper (or perhaps a specialized pixel based pencil test application). Deforming vectors is just being too technical and hinders your creativity. Once you know how to do it, implementing it in vectors is much easier, I'm told.

I was thinking of a program like TweenMaker, but that program is still in beta and has some serious visual bugs on my system. Perhaps TVPaint Pro is a better solution (there is an update planned in November 2006) for creating roughs, although it is not cheap.

Amazon has a great price on the book and also sells used copies

http://www.amazon.com/Animators-Surviva ... 41-7208160

I think the school bookstore charged me about &75 for this a year ago and amazon.com has it for about$20 new or $14 used.

Rasheed wrote:

idragosani wrote:It can be done with vector animation, you just need more keys and use breakdown postions and not rely on the computer to do all of the in-betweening

I meant not the standard walk cycle, but the more interesting ones, of which the principles are described in the book, and you have to design yourself, to fit the character and mood of the scene. The implementation can be done with vectors, but the design is so much easier with pencil and paper (or perhaps a specialized pixel based pencil test application). Deforming vectors is just being too technical and hinders your creativity. Once you know how to do it, implementing it in vectors is much easier, I'm told.

I was thinking of a program like TweenMaker, but that program is still in beta and has some serious visual bugs on my system. Perhaps TVPaint Pro is a better solution (there is an update planned in November 2006) for creating roughs, although it is not cheap.

My characters are all imported png files controlled by bones. I'll see how it goes with different styles on other characters.

Can anyone point me to any impressive walk cycles done in Anime Studio on this forum?

Rasheed wrote:

idragosani wrote: I meant not the standard walk cycle, but the more interesting ones, of which the principles are described in the book, and you have to design yourself, to fit the character and mood of the scene. The implementation can be done with vectors, but the design is so much easier with pencil and paper (or perhaps a specialized pixel based pencil test application). Deforming vectors is just being too technical and hinders your creativity. Once you know how to do it, implementing it in vectors is much easier, I'm told.

I was thinking of a program like TweenMaker, but that program is still in beta and has some serious visual bugs on my system. Perhaps TVPaint Pro is a better solution (there is an update planned in November 2006) for creating roughs, although it is not cheap.

FlipBook by Digicel can be used for this kind of thing also... the Lite version can be bought for $69 and is great for doing pencil tests.

thanks, i'll see what to do to get the book, but i have no many money.

Rasheed wrote:I meant not the standard walk cycle, but the more interesting ones, of which the principles are described in the book, and you have to design yourself, to fit the character and mood of the scene. The implementation can be done with vectors, but the design is so much easier with pencil and paper (or perhaps a specialized pixel based pencil test application). Deforming vectors is just being too technical and hinders your creativity. Once you know how to do it, implementing it in vectors is much easier, I'm told.

I was thinking of a program like TweenMaker, but that program is still in beta and has some serious visual bugs on my system. Perhaps TVPaint Pro is a better solution (there is an update planned in November 2006) for creating roughs, although it is not cheap.

with the Fazek's Replace Line tool, which is inside his tools script, Anime Studio becomes in an excellent alternative to tween maker and softwares like this.

idragosani wrote:FlipBook by Digicel can be used for this kind of thing also... the Lite version can be bought for $69 and is great for doing pencil tests.

Alas, I have no credit card and no OS X Tiger.

[edit]
I saw in the downloadable instructional video of DigiCel's Flipbook, that the pencil tests and inked drawings should be imported from paper (either with a DV camera for speed, or an A3 scanner for quality). While Flipbook has some tools to modify animation, it is not intended to create an animation cycle, like a walk cycle, or a jump cycle.

This means that it is no replacement for pencil and paper.
[/edit]

Another solution could be Plastic Animation Paper, when a Mac version is released, that is. There is a Windows and a Linux version, with an unlimited trial version (like Moho used to be).

http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/

Rasheed wrote:

idragosani wrote:FlipBook by Digicel can be used for this kind of thing also... the Lite version can be bought for $69 and is great for doing pencil tests.

Alas, I have no credit card and no OS X Tiger.

Another solution could be Plastic Animation Paper, when a Mac version is released, that is. There is a Windows and a Linux version, with an unlimited trial version (like Moho used to be).

http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/

I checked out Tweenmaker... some interesting things about it (like the tween spacing tool, although they should make it horizontal so it is more familiar to animators who use the little frame graphs), but the UI is very kludgy and not terribly intuitive. For instance, the timeline would work better, IMHO, below the animation window, not above, and should be much much larger; this is pretty standard in just about any kind of software of this nature, kind of silly to change the layout and force the user to adopt a new workflow.

idragosani wrote:I checked out Tweenmaker ... , but the UI is very kludgy and not terribly intuitive.

And the point was just that: find a program that allows you to create walk cycles intuitively, similar to using pencil and paper. Perhaps it is possible to using traditional animation techniques for the important poses and a few inbetweens to test, and do the bulk of the work in your favorite animation program, because supplies for traditional animation are truely expensive**. I will look into this further. Perhaps there is a way to use traditional animation techniques with cheaper materials than the professional grade.

** I saw that for 500 sheet 12 inch field round or ACME pegs, excluding sales taxes and shipping, you pay 18 USD. The separate (plastic) peg bar isn't too expensive (few dollars) and you can build your own light table, using one of the DIY projects in books or on the web.