Frame by Frame and Descisions

[Joofville]

Hello.

What are you impressions of frame by frame animation? Lately I've been learning this art using products like Flash and Toonboom and after much effort I think I am finally coming to terms with it, key framing and in betweening. It's a very different style to Anime Studio which I have been using for almost a year. Is this a lost art form or are there any of you who still use it and enjoy it's freedom? I'm kinda leaning more towards this style. In fact my next animation is completely FBF.

[jahnocli]

Why don't you get in touch with mikdog on this forum? He has been through a similar process, and may be able to give you some tips. He also lives in South Africa, which may or may not be relevant!

[Joofville]

Why don't you get in touch with mikdog on this forum? He has been through a similar process, and may be able to give you some tips. He also lives in South Africa, which may or may not be relevant!

You're the second dude to recommend I chat to Mikdog, so I will. Thanks man.

[Mikdog]

BOOM. Saw your short that used FBF Joofville. Nice.

Well, if only AS had better fbf integration. How was your experience doing it in AS?

I generally do the animation frames in Photoshop and then sequence them with switch layers in AS. One thing AS has that I like (and I don't think ToonBoom has) is the easy-to-use cycles, to keep animations looping without copying and pasting loads of keyframes. And I generally like AS' animation tools. The engine is really great for working, it's snappy and responsive.

Interested to hear your thoughts. I think AS could be KILLAH if it had raster drawing tools similar to Photoshop, or even more intuitive vector drawing tools akin to Toon Boom, where fills are easy to create and erase without selecting shapes... I know it's the way AS works, but still. It'd be awesome.

[dm]

... Is this a lost art form or are there any of you who still use it and enjoy it's freedom? I'm kinda leaning more towards this style. In fact my next animation is completely FBF.

Lost art form? What do you base that on? There's lots of frame by frame in the world. Try going over to tvpaint.com.

I do mostly FBF. A lot of it with actual ink and paint on cels, no less. Also TVPaint, and Toon Boom Animate (new version out recently, by the way). It's really hard to get the 'life' and 'texture' of traditional animation from 'puppet animation'.

I agree with Mikdog. And, I can't stand the drawing tools in Anime Studio.

[heyvern]

Here is a link to a layer script I created a long time ago for DK. It might be of some use for those of you using Anime Studio for frame by frame image sequence animation.

image-layer-sequencer-layer-script

Basically all it does is replace the source image of a single image layer in Anime Studio based on the frame number. So if you have a folder with a numbered image sequence, you would only need the first image as an image layer, embed this layer script, and then when you play or render the animation each frame will show the next image in the sequence. You only need 1 image layer so there isn't a huge memory overhead loading a pile of images.

Currently It doesn't have any options, just playback from frame 1 of the sequence. You can change a single variable in the script file to change the playback frame rate (updates the image every X frame instead of every 1 frame).

I want to add some new features to make it work better based on for example, layer visibility or switch layers. So maybe you could have a series of short sequences in a switch layer, each one linked to a different image sequence, that only playback when activated (one image layer in the switch with the embedded script). I could add in the ability to loop a sequence or offset the start and stop.

The tricky part is this is a layer script so I would need to use the metadata storage for layer settings and values. Probably would need a new tool to go along with it to change values. I don't actually do any fbf animation with Anime Studio but this script was so simple and fun I should take a stab at making it more useful. There seems to be a lot of people who need this functionality.