Asking about 2D animation

[wose]

Hi!

To be honest I didn't know where to ask this, so i'm not sure if this is the correct sub-forum.

I know this forum is dedicated to "no-motion" art, but there are a lot of people interested in drawing and painting and may be some people are interested in animation.

Lately i've seen lots of animation videos and i'm very interested in the process of animation. I've seen flipbooks, traditional animation, stop motion, etc... But I don't know which software do the 2d animators use. I just know Macromedia Flash and the stop motion tecnique, but I want to know the programs that are used in 2d animation.

Just this. I wanted some information about the 2d animation, if someone knows something, the process, some websites, forums or whatever, would be helpful.

Thanks you very much, and sorry about my poor english ^^

[FlipMcgee]

But I don't know which software do the 2d animators use.

Lots of info (apps and some books) here: http://www.squidoo.com/2danimationsoftware

Try out as many software demos as you can.

This one's free: http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php?id=Home

Abandonware but also free if you like to animate cut-out style: http://www.creatoon.com/index.php

Also search forum for eztoon, if you're into gif pixel animation. There's a thread up somewhere in the tutorials sub-forum.

[tomwaits4noman]

by 2nd animation I presume you mean classical animation/ hand drawn,

really its only a light box... desk with lamp a paper punch and a peg bar blue pencils and an eraser.

after that clean up the images

scan each picture or use a camera

add colour in a program like Toons

what I would advise is do your key poses by hand test them get em right scan them and then clean them and colour them in flash and inbetween using flash.

check out www.animationmeat.com

and amazon for books on animation principles. etc.

[B u r l]

I'd highly reccomend Richard William's - The Animators Survival Kit. You can pick up a copy for fairly cheap over at Amazon.

[Onir]

Hey just to add on to what's already been said, if you are looking to animate traditionally (on paper with a light box, cels, stop-motion, cut outs, etc.) and you plan to shoot it with a camera, then I'd suggest looking into programs like MonkeyJam, Toki LineTest, and StopMotionPro. MonkeyJam is for windows and Toki for Macs, but both pretty straight forward and similar programs; you can shoot your shots, order your shots, time them out, and preview them with these. The websites are http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam/ , http://213.41.184.16/toki/tokilinetest/index_en.html , and http://www.stopmotionpro.com/ respectively. Outside of using a digital camera to shoot your images or scanning your images into your computer, you can also set up a video camera to get a live feed of your shots as you shoot them. I'm not 100% sure if you can do it with MonkeyJam yet, but I've worked with Toki in this manner and StopMotionPro's website has a small guide on how to set up a video camera to shoot with.

You can also take images that are consecutively numbered ( image_01, image_02, etc.) into Adobe After Effects as an image sequence and do some rough timing in there.

Hope I could help a little, and best of luck to ya :)