AS has potential really but......

[Rasheed]

Talent as a draftsman. Essentially, having at least one functional hand, one functional eye, and a brain that is able to see proportions through the eye and depict that with the hand. Also the brain has to be able to transform an image through imagination, adding and omitting parts of the image (and movement) to create something that is meaningful in its context and is appealing to the eye on its own.

[cribble]

And talent, I would like to add.

i have no talent, yet i like to think that i make up for the lack of talent with my enthusiasm!

[artfx]

I used to believe in talent. Was told I have it all my life. One day, though, it was made clear to me that a genius at hard work and effort will eventually surpass that which is called talent.

Today I truly believe that drawing and animation, as well as many other things normally attributed to "talent" are skills which can be learned and mastered by anyone willing to put in the work and effort, regardless of how easily it comes to some.

[mudbubble]

Today I truly believe that drawing and animation, as well as many other things normally attributed to "talent" are skills which can be learned and mastered by anyone willing to put in the work and effort, regardless of how easily it comes to some.

point taken and an interesting debate - but i know people that could practice their entire lives, attend all the classes in the world taught by all the best teachers and still not have the ability to draw a stick figure. I really believe it is an innate skill that often times needs training to be brought to the surface so that it can be fulfilled to the best of ones ability - but we're all different - even within the artistic circle, some are simply better than others mostly due to their own personal approach and style.

I have seen some wonderful artists who have been trained all their lives, and draw in a way that would be considered generic (think clip art). I have also seem untrained artists draw things that astound me - mainly due to the fact that they were never trained to draw a certain way - so their approach is untainted and unique - from within - even if it's "wrong" by certain standards (perspective, form, composition, realism, etc...).

-regards

-c

[Rasheed]

@artfx: You probably assume that you learn from your mistakes. I'm a bit challenged in that area. Certain mental illnesses make it very hard to learn from your mistakes. I constantly make the same mistakes and learning goes really, really slow. I have tried to create computer animation since the Commodore 64, and I haven't succeeded in creating anything appealing until now.

I think I have the will power and determination to draw and animate, but that stupid disease keep preventing me from improving. I've read somewhere that most people with my particular disease (schizophrenia) learn 10 times as slow as "normal" people. So I think I may claim that my talent for drawing or anything that I haven't mastered before the illness started (at age 20) is very limited.

I have attended a drawing class for several years with a professional visual artist (a painter), who was highly recommended. I constantly saw new people coming in and surpassing me after a few weeks, again and again. It was a very frustrating experience, those three years. But I managed to draw a vase in the right perspective in that period. Most other students had figured that out in 3 or 4 months (or even weeks if they were talented).

Most people with my illness are retarded, because they have lost a lot of their mental abilities. Luckily, I had a lot of reserve in that area, so my intelligence dropped from genius to average. Only now and then I'm able to draw from my lost genius, in flashes of brightness.

Talent and sharpness of mind really do matter.

[bupaje]

@Rasheed - I have some similar struggles of my own, partly why I am back in school at 47 to study animation after years doing everything else you can imagine. Persistence and hard work do pay off eventually.

Some people may be born with talent, a fortunate aligning of certain neural pathways that enable them to visualize or accomplish certain things easily. But neural pathways are also created and strengthened by doing (and seeing others do if I undertood Scientific American's recent article on mirror neurons). So even if you weren't born with a facility for something, you may be able to develop a facility for it if you are diligent -enough so that people will say you are talented or gifted in that area.

I also think it is possible to develop certain weak areas by relating them to areas you are strong in -for example if you are very strong in math but weak in art, and can learn to visualize art from a mathematical perspective, you can use your strong neural pathways to augment your weaker ones -in essence shuttling some traffic from your smaller 'dirt roads' (weaker paths) to your larger super highways (stronger pathways). Hope this makes sense as I tend to speak in the visual terms I think in.

[pabmove]

Look guys, I mean I appreciate the earlier constructive comments but if you're not going to add anymore more to this thread can you please go somewhere else......grrrr

[Rasheed]

This subject has come up over and over again, and has been discussed almost to oblivion. Think Saturday morning cartoons, I should say. That surely will bring some relief from your frustration with the user interface and tools.

[bupaje]

@pabmove - I hear you but you'll find dozens of threads saying the same thing. I think everything that can be said on the subject, has been said -both for and against the tools. If you want to spend a few hours reading to a search for "drawing tools" and you'll see 20+ pages of threads related to this.

[GCharb]

Hello all!

Interesting thread in a way.

Been testing AS for work and myself, we mostlly do 3D and video/movie montages.

To me the drawing tools of AS are adequate for the job it is suposed to do, which, to me at least, is the creation of cartoons.

You laydown the curves, turn them into fillings and line drawings, tweak line width as needed and then you rig/animate.

To me it feels more like 2D modeling thenm actual drawing.

I believe this way of working is more suited to anyone while a package with more advanced tools would probablly appeal to a more artistically oriented crowd (Not that AS users aren,t artists by any means).

This is my first work with AS a bit ago and only after a very few hours of testing.



I positivelly love the ammount of tweaking I get with the line width, I can achieve any looks I want so far!

I have shown AS to some of the artists we have and they grabbed it in a very short time, very encouraging.

Of coursae better tools might help achieve more complex looks easier and quicker, but I think that a tool gets in the way if it gets too complicated and swamped with tools all over.

My two cents.

[slowtiger]

Wow! That's the kind of work I'd expect from a pro. Not that this is my favourite style, but it does the job, and with a clever script it can be highly entertaining - I like Dexter's laboratory, Teenage robot and such, and you character is in that level already.

You're absolutely right about "2D modelling" - if you go this way with all the rigging, it is more of an engineering job than doodling in an artistic way. As I said before, the artistic part has to be done in advance: in character design and in scriptwriting.