Animation in Adobe CS3-End the Tyranny!

[cout<mecha]

:mouse:
Somehow someone somewhere knows why Adobe is against people actually creating animation in 2D. Every program they create stops just short of allowing users to express themselves in this great new medium. I will give you examples from each of the new CS3 Suite of programs of how it seems as if Adobe has created a conspiracy to stifle the creativity of the WORLD'S 2D animators.


Freehand-seems the logical choice in name and in practice for creating 2D animation. However even though you can toggle pages quickly light using a light box, and create near perfect blending, blends that are near each other or even on different layers break up when too close to other blends.

Illustrator-This program can also do blends which is a fancy way of saying 'animation tweens' but will animate blends in the order they were made not in layers like Freehand. And I have two words for this interface as I zoom away from using it for animation...ONE page!

Photoshop-Although it has a new animation interface, Freehand would have been a much better model for animation. The best thing about it is being able to import movies and color them. Otherwise it's kind of like having a small version of After Effects as it will only animate layer options.

Flash-Will simply not effectively animate or morph between shapes whatsoever, but ironically most people use it to create animation these days. Go figure...

After Effects-The only reasonable way to animate in this program is with masks. The masks move like they are made with rotoscoped oil, gross! Also the vector paint and paint filters are kind of self defeating as one is missing onion skinning while the other updates as if a turtle were moving across the screen at 0 degrees.



All in all the CS3 release is really Flashy and well packaged, but once again won't do the job for 2D animators... The question is why?

:404sign:

[Bendragon]

!Because 2d animation is old fashion! :P

[bigzax]

what do you sugest new comers like me should use, bcuz i was just starting
to learn "flash". advice me o! great one.

[ChaoticKnight]

I've tried Digicel flipbook, and for all intensive purposes seems pretty great. Biggest problem?
Importing backgrounds or other elements and compositing.

The animation is great, but you cant bring in a background from photoshop, and you cant export the animation easily into aftereffects or even premier. Methinks this isn't digicel's fault, its more adobe's incapability to let anyone else's program fit with theirs. Bleh

But, if you can paint the backgrounds in flipbook and animate and do little to know compositing, its fine.

[Muz]

Ive managed to kind of get animation working in photoshop before, its not easy but its doable.

You have to make sure you are in the right animation mode. Make a new layer by going to layers>video layers>new blank video layer.

[Onir]

Well to be fair to AE you can animate with parented images kinda like paper cut outs reasonably (you can also do that in Maya but yea) :P

When you're using flash and these programs are you redrawing every or at least part of each frame? Kind of like how you would approach animation with a light table? I find PS and Flash to be decent for those honestly; the thing that bothers me about PS is that to do it effectively (in my experience, I could just be doing it wrong) you have to work through layers like you've mentioned then import each layer as a frame in imageready or PS CS3's built in animation tool (which seems to be imageready anyway). To onion skin I usually have to drop the opacity of each layer as I work on the next one (which gets pretty tedious), but it works well enough.

Flash is nice in my opinion because it lets you work with layers while still allowing you to onion skin and color easily. My biggest annoyance with flash is that it vectorizes each line; it's not a HUGE thing, but when trying to do quick pencil tests and such having to redraw a line a few times really slows thing down. As for tweens, I only usually use them for something like a background pan or moving an in place walk cycle. I am approaching this more traditionally, though.

I haven't used Digicel, so I can't really comment on that, and Illustrator just seemed like a program I shouldn't really animate with lol :shrug: In the end, though, pencil and paper are still the best for this sort of thing in my opinion. Can always just do it traditionally then ink it digitally ;)

[egerie]

Speaking of tyranny, Outlook 2007 doesn't support animated GIFs no more. I'm so sad... all these great animated signatures and tongue in cheek images.... :(

[HunterKiller_]

To be completely honest. I don't think you know what you're talking about.

Flash and AE are industry standards for a reason, and the reason is that they're excellent pieces of software.

A couple of my friends have their own studio and they animate everything in AE and the results are beautiful.

Many of the special effects in high budget movies you see these days are done in AE.

Learn to use the software before you bad mouth it.

If you really want a software that's completely dedicated to 2D animation, you could fork out 3 grand for Toon Boom digital pro.

[cout<mecha]

Topic

[ANN] Adobe’s Customer Research team wants to see your SWF content!

Marianne Berkovich - 10:25am Jun 4, 2007 Pacific

Adobe’s customer research team is collecting an assortment of SWF content. We are looking to get a wide range of content for a variety of purposes so that we can better understand the types of projects people are working on, and better support those projects that are not always posted on the web. We are especially interested in uses of SWF beyond web sites and advertising – such as (but not limited to) presentations, e-learning, character animation, prototypes, games, rich internet applications, etc. We’d also like to get representation of a variety of skill levels, so feel free to submit your project even if you are not an ActionScript user.

For every 50 submissions we receive, we will select one at random to receive an Amazon.com gift card for $50 (US dollars). You can submit as many projects as you like!

For each submission, please send the following to flashresearch@adobe.com by July 6, 2007:

• Your SWF or a link to your project or a screenshot of the project
• A brief description (3 to 4 sentences) describing the audience and purpose of the project
• Descriptive tags to categorize the project’s content and purpose – Use as many or as few tags as you like, and feel free to make up your own. Some examples tags are included below.
• Percent of all your projects that are SWFs
• Percentage of time you spend writing ActionScript
• Percentage of time you spend using the timeline
• Your name
• Your job title and company
• Your phone number (so a member of the Adobe’s customer research team can contact you for a quick 15 minute phone call if they need more information)

Please feel free to forward this message to others who might be interested or post it on your blog.

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Adobe Customer Research Team

[revelarts]

2 other good full blown digital versions of traditional 2d animation. Built from there, more or less, rather than making PS or Afx sorta do it are Mirage/TVpaint and Plastic Animation Paper.

I am/was using Mirage a very rich 2d bitmap based animation studio and effects program. But the U.S. company has sort of imploded and reverted back to it's Euro source company. Which will support the product from now on and but the cost has gone up about 1000 dollars to around $1500. Name changed to TV Paint (http://www.tvpaint.com).
anyway
There is another full blown bitmap 2d animation program call plastic animation paper (http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/) that seems good on the PC side but they've had a beta version on the mac side for almost 5 years, there's a real issue here.

Not much experience with vector but I've heard good things about toon boom (http://www.toonboom.com/main/).
The Tab is another vector based program thats 2d. Here a little forum comparison of both. AWN forum (http://forums.awn.com/showthread.php?t=593).
MoHo is another 2d vector animator with some interesting features. MOHO (http://www.lostmarble.com)

Anime studio pro (http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/animepro/index.html) says its 2d vector but it's a unique 2d vector with /3d bones mix (similar to Moho) -price is right for testing-$199-- sample (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tVPWnsW7Qs&feature=related)
.
Pencil (http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php?id=Home) great bit map quick start fun.

others for fun
Pivot http://www.snapfiles.com/GeT/sTiCkFiGuRe.html
Snfig -vector- http://synfig.org/Main_Page
toonka -vector- http://ktoon.toonka.com/