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animation

Started by skibz, May 05, 2004, 10:28:47 AM

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skibz

I'm not in multimongia often but... is anyone in here knowledgeable on computer animation packages? I'm wanting to make a short 20-min animation and i dont have a clue where to start pleeeaaseeeee help... :)

fanny splendid

What kind of animation?

What are you wanting to animate? What is the animation going to be about? What form of animation would most suit this idea? Are you wanting to use animation because it looks cool, or because it directly concerns itself, or even lends itself, to the subject matter?

Would another medium more suit your idea?





All that, and not one mention of tuition fees.

mook

do you mean Flash animation?

Have a google about for a free demo of Swish 2 (or go to the usual *ahem* retail outlets), I've never really had the patience to persist with it, but apparently it's pretty easy to use. I think that Rats' is one of the resident flash users though, so perhaps he can tell you more.

glitch

You can't go wrong with Toonboom Studio either. I know people who swear by it.

Is this a serious animation or just something to upload and e-mail the URL to your mates for some "LOL" ? If it's a serious attempt, is this 20 mins all story-boarded out and scripted? Look into getting those sorted before even thining of animating anything, and really , 20 minutes is a lot of work to animate.

Myself, I'm starting with 3D animation. Fucking difficult and I'd argue more time-consuming than drawing each frame (for me at least).

untitled_london

i'v had a pop @ flash, swift 3D, maya, & max and all are seriously enagaging tools. the learning curves are very steep (not quite as bad with swift 3d), but the results are jaw droppingly rewarding.

tutorial CDs are readily available for them maya and flash too, again at all the usual *ahem* retail outlets.

:P

Tommy_D

The learning curve on Flash isn't too bad. In fact, if you were doing very basic frame by frame stuff, you would barely need to learn 5% of the package.

Purple Tentacle

I really like Adobe After Effects, it's so flexible.

But possibly quite limited for the serious animator, but I've never made a serious plotted animation in my life, just idents, misc film stuff etc.

20 minutes is a fucking eternity in the world of animation.

ccab

You're thinking of flash. Swish is an allegedly easier, limited version of flash, but every example I've seen of it has had a homemade, rough-edged messy finish.

Flash is very straightforward and comes with tutorials that are simple to follow. It's no exaggeration to say if you bother to complete them, you'll be up to scratch with it in 2 hrs. It becomes a complicated app if you want to go on and use actionscripting - for instance to set up a custom particle engine, or complex interactivity etc. But for 2D animations it's easy & actually quite hard to fuck up - for instance the drawing tools smooth out wobbles in your sketches - which is a godsend if you draw with a mouse.  

Heavyweight 3D & compositing apps are probably not what you have in mind - 3D apps like Maya, 3DS, Softimage, Cinema4D etc do give great results, but they're tough to learn, rather long-winded to use & quite expensive.

What kind of animation do you have in mind?

Tommy_D

Quote from: "ccab"You're thinking of flash. Swish is an allegedly easier, limited version of flash, but every example I've seen of it has had a homemade, rough-edged messy finish.
Yes, Swish and other "Flash tools" usually allow you to produce often good looking but barely controllable text or simple image animation, shifting letters and pics around at the click of a button. Nowhere near the level on control you'd want for animation. Flash is still the only decent way to produce Flash animation.

I'm learning 3DS Max 6 at the mo and the complexity seems to me to come from the sheer number of functions and features, rather than their implementation. The 3DS Max 6 Bible (ISBN 0-7645-5763-7) is a good place to start but it is VERY detailed - it's over 100 pages before they even start letting you make anything.

Rats

Nah, that's all bollocks, you can take full control in swish. It's perfect for animation, rubbish for synching with audio but it can be done. Get yourself swish, it's really easy to use, just be prepared to take some time making something and do everything manualy.

Tommy_D

There you go then. Get Swish for all your silent 2D animation needs.

Rats

You can use sound easily,
http://www10.brinkster.com/rcabh2/anim/magic.htm
Just pray to god if you're trying to lip synch with long audio files because it's just trial and error and takes forever.