HOME | DD

SpatialHeather In reply to duckinatorr [2012-12-13 00:50:28 +0000 UTC]

well, i first sketched out what the character would look like, or at least her body, like a base. Then I built her, part by part, like she was a mannequin, with overlapping parts at the joints. I didn't use any 'anchors' because I don't know if those exist in photoshop, but i sure wish they did. Then I figured out what I wanted her to be doing, tried to find some refs of the different inbetweens, and then then worked my way 'in' from the two extreme frames, until it looked smooth enough. Basically just nudging and rotating each group or piece at the joint in as natural a way as i could figure. The hardest part was her hair, and timing each frame.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

duckinatorr In reply to SpatialHeather [2012-12-13 01:34:07 +0000 UTC]

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the explanation. That's pretty neat.

I just have the foreground and background for each frame as layers in GIMP. The tedious part I mentioned being exporting each of those as an image (PNG, specifically) and onion skinning. I draw the next frame by manually attempting onion skinning by fiddling with opacity on a few layers. I thought about trying to automate exporting the frames, then realized my idea for that wouldn't work if the background ever changed...so I'll need to sort out the details for that and try again. After I get the PNGs I just use a little script I wrote which uses ffmpeg (rather awesome image/audio/video converter) to convert it to either a GIF or MOV file.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

SpatialHeather In reply to duckinatorr [2012-12-13 01:53:11 +0000 UTC]

are there not any free programs built for animating? even limited animation?

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

duckinatorr In reply to SpatialHeather [2012-12-13 02:56:28 +0000 UTC]

The ones I've tried seem either broken or to be a giant kludge piled on top of a bunch of smaller kludges. Right now I'm messing with Synfig Studio, and it does that silly thing GIMP used to do where they separate everything into its own window. Other than that, and the fact that the working files won't work in any other software (though the renders, obviously, do), it seems pretty decent.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

SpatialHeather In reply to plzexplode [2012-11-09 00:25:23 +0000 UTC]

[link]
after that its a lot like other frame-by-frame animation stuff. I just messed around with it a bit.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

plzexplode In reply to SpatialHeather [2012-12-02 15:06:54 +0000 UTC]

its surprising how much I don't actually know about Photoshop, I only just found out that it has a 3D modelling tool in there similar to google sketchup

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

SpatialHeather In reply to plzexplode [2012-12-02 15:36:15 +0000 UTC]

woah, really?

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

plzexplode In reply to SpatialHeather [2012-12-02 15:53:26 +0000 UTC]

yeah I know right! PS Extended has a 3D option in the toolbar next to Window

👍: 0 ⏩: 0