Getting snappy timing into poses and animation

[Inkling_Studio]

I thought this demonstration video by Jason Ryan posted on the DigiCel Flipbook site was very interesting . He applies it to Maya to show how he uses a quick 2D "stickfigure" pass to block out his action before posing the Maya rig for the final shot , but it seems like this technique could also be adapted for use with Anime Studio rigs. (watch the whole demo video to see what I mean) .

On the Digicel Flipbook site Jason Ryan says :

"Posing a character on the computer takes way too much time because of all the controls that have to be manipulated, I find that I can draw and animate a simple stick figure inside of Flipbook to represent my character and solve the performance in real time. When I'm happy with my performance then I can bring my FlipBook images into Maya as an ImagePlane and use them for reference for my CG version. All the directors love this way of working because they get to see a blue print of the shot very quickly instead of seeing a weird CG blocking pass with floaty computer in-betweens."

-Jason Ryan, Supervising Animator, Walt Disney Animation Studio

Any 2D animation application which allows you to draw directly using a Wacom tablet could be used for this technique, such as Digicel Flipbook, TVPaint , or a nifty little freeware program I found called Pencil .

Has anyone ever tried something like this with Anime Studio to get looser, more dynamic action and take the curse off of "floaty computer inbetweens" ?

[funksmaname]

Thanks for the link Inkling... i think this actually a really good way to work - i'm finding that my AS tests at the moment are becomeing almost too 'realistic' in style coz i'm moving things about without a clear vision of the animation...this is a great idea for getting the 'snap' back.

what you COULD do though, is create a simple stick figure in AS and a simple bone rig - that saves doing the '10 second stick figure' for every frame, and instead you can just pose it frame by frame by manipulating bones... (you might also want to set default keyframe to 'step' so you really get a flip book type affect so you dont over smooth everything...)

[muuvist]

Has anyone ever tried something like this with Anime Studio

Yes, I've used it with Flash. (and Mac OSX)
Roughly draw animation in flash and then export a quicktime movie. Import movie into ASpro and move it and resize it to fit your layout, then use the flash poses as a guide to posing your character rig.

I remember I had problems with the timing:
If I timed the movie in flash for say: pose 1=10 frms, pose 2=4 frms, pose 3=4 frms, pose4=12frms etc.etc. these timings were lost when I imported into AS (due to the Delta compression I guess) My workaround was to export my flash quicktime as a jpg sequence and then recompile the movie from the discrete images, that way I was sure to get 25 images per second.
You can also set the transparency in the quicktime so that you can see your bg layers in ASPro.

It's been a while since I did this so my description is a little vague but I DO remember that it work very well.

I'll try to dig out the old files and post them

cheers

[funksmaname]

edit: i've tried the stick figure in AS method - its much slower and less fluid than drawing... oh well, not every idea can be a good on! back to the drawing board... using flash might be a good idea, could you not just export/import QT movie?