jinxtigr
January 3rd, 2008, 10:40 PM
One- I've just discovered the Daily Sketch Group. I am _excited_ as my best skills are only at sketch level, but my imagination is beginning to come on line, plus I know lots of weird little detail things that can sometimes help me get an effect (and am falling back in love with Photoshop after some years away from it)
And two- I finally got up the chutzpah to buy a copy of Shake (from Apple), and I'm even more excited about this. The thing is, it's like a demented node-oriented Photoshop layer nightmare that MOVES, plus there's a little thing I've discovered that might be extremely awesome- namely...
I'm using a free program called 'Pencil' to draw animation in. It lets you draw really big pictures also in many layers (so underlying guide layers are possible) and appears to save all the files it uses as numbered PNGs which are extraordinarily small for what they are. AND, they appear to come with alpha channel.
Shake opens numbered files like that as animations, automatically. So IF it can open those right out of the Pencil temp folder, AND also brings in whatever colors those cels have but also uses the alpha channel- well oh my GOD would that be a workflow from heaven, not only in terms of not having to sit around converting and importing files, but also because Pencil likes working with oversized images, and reducing them/respeeding them etc in a hotshot compositing program like Shake would give me way prettier results than trying to draw at the output resolution. Not to mention Shake also has all the timeline positioning/resizing/whatever anybody could want :)
That's all, I just had to post because the prospect is so thrilling- in case anybody else is working in the same area I thought it was worth tipping people off. I'll have to follow up when I have tested these things out. If it really works, I could rapidly throw together something to show people.
The only thing about it is, the combination of apps (if it works!) will be only suited to people interested in traditional full animation and the old multiplane camera stuff, because everything is totally bitmap with no vectors, bones or rigging :meow:
And two- I finally got up the chutzpah to buy a copy of Shake (from Apple), and I'm even more excited about this. The thing is, it's like a demented node-oriented Photoshop layer nightmare that MOVES, plus there's a little thing I've discovered that might be extremely awesome- namely...
I'm using a free program called 'Pencil' to draw animation in. It lets you draw really big pictures also in many layers (so underlying guide layers are possible) and appears to save all the files it uses as numbered PNGs which are extraordinarily small for what they are. AND, they appear to come with alpha channel.
Shake opens numbered files like that as animations, automatically. So IF it can open those right out of the Pencil temp folder, AND also brings in whatever colors those cels have but also uses the alpha channel- well oh my GOD would that be a workflow from heaven, not only in terms of not having to sit around converting and importing files, but also because Pencil likes working with oversized images, and reducing them/respeeding them etc in a hotshot compositing program like Shake would give me way prettier results than trying to draw at the output resolution. Not to mention Shake also has all the timeline positioning/resizing/whatever anybody could want :)
That's all, I just had to post because the prospect is so thrilling- in case anybody else is working in the same area I thought it was worth tipping people off. I'll have to follow up when I have tested these things out. If it really works, I could rapidly throw together something to show people.
The only thing about it is, the combination of apps (if it works!) will be only suited to people interested in traditional full animation and the old multiplane camera stuff, because everything is totally bitmap with no vectors, bones or rigging :meow: