Moho Forum

I've been tense lately because I'm so new to animating in 2D, and so long away from animating, that I underestimated the time it's taking me to complete a project.

So you've seen a flurry of panicked posts as I got up to speed with Anime Studio Pro. Now I have a small success story to report, for a change.

Checking out the user manual in Safari, I saw a script mentioned that exports each layer in a Photoshop file to a separate PNG, then creates an Anime Studio Pro file containing each, as its own image layer in ASP, grouped under one bone layer, ready to import as one object.

My training 'toon will use lots of bullet-point text popping up between the scenes of characters interacting, and I have lots of work ahead of me, so I found a way to save time by letting this script do some work for me.

Rather than hand-draw all the letters, or tax Anime Studio Pro's memory usage by using its own text tool [actually, it doesn't work with the font I want, anyway], I decided to break out a beautiful little tool that came free with my MacBook Pro: Comic Life, by plasq.

I used it to make a set of fat, toony-lettered titles, and found that all I needed to do to import each into Photoshop CS2 was to create a "Lettering" text item in Comic Life, do CMD-C to copy, and switch to CS2, make a new doc, and CMD-V paste the text. It pasted as a "vector smart object", quite large, but I resized the document to something sensible later, then rasterized. Before I did that, I selected each new text item in Comic Life, copied, pasted, and had a CS2 document with a Comic Life-generated, toony line of text in each layer. I named the layers to match the text in each, resized the CS2 doc to suit me, rasterized all layers at once, and ran the script that came with Anime Studio Pro called "Export Layers to Anime Studio Pro". A few moments later, it was done, and here's the result:

http://www.mooncaine.net/rec-ctr-trng-t ... ntell.html

This process will save me tons of time, time I can focus on character animation instead, as with this brief [and humble, I know] scene, which shows what's really been taking up my time:

http://www.mooncaine.net/rec-ctr-trng-t ... cerpt.html

Since making that scene, I've gotten better, I think, at animating the faces and hands, esp. the eyes and eyebrows, so I hope to go back over this later and do a beauty pass, but for now, it's usable and I'm moving on. Just wanted to share some positive news since most of my posts recently have been about problems and challenges.

The letters animation look so good although I feel it saves you a lot of work It was a path a little complicated isn't it?

Regarding to the character animation they look great! The only bad comment from my side is that I feel that the mouth changing is so quick and stressed (and I a cannot imagine why)

-G

Thanks for the feedback, Genete. I don't like the mouth motion, but I feel I must use it unless I have time at the end to improve it. It's done with Anime Studio Pro's automatic, loudness-driven Switch layer method. Later, I'll look at that, and either go over the keyframes manually, or use Papagayo. For the long stretches of dialogue I am doing, Papagayo is painful to use -- takes me too long and sometimes, words get "stuck" where I can't drag them again and I must edit the keyframes in Anime Studio Pro anyway. Hmm, maybe I should just do it that way: let Papagayo screw up those few words, but export the dat file and fix it in Anime Studio Pro later....

I know the lettering method looks complicated, but it takes longer to explain it than to do it. I don't have to draw anything [which takes longer], yet I get a toony, hand-drawn style. It's actuallly quite fast and now that I have a Comic Life file and a Photoshop file already made, I can make the next set of titles even more quickly. I tried to find a simpler way to use Comic Life lettering, but this seemed the best way to get the lettering in, with transparency, without requiring me to work on cutting out the letters from a background. I'd like to thicken the lines, or maybe thin the lines of those little cartoon bullet-balls, so that the bullets and text match line styles better. Other than that, I'm happy with the shortcut and the time it'll save me.

Hey - my 2c

the closness of the eyes on the characters really bothers me... it makes ME feel cross eyed just looking at them i really think thye should move appart - and make sure the pupils are aligned to eachother...

Regarding papgayo, i dunno if you know, but if you put line breaks all over the dialogue, it is analysed as a 'part' for each line, which makes it easier to move around... this might halp you, although it is a fairly long process the results are deffinatley worth it.

good luck with the project

Thanks, Funks, I'll think about those eyes. I kinda liked 'em that way because I found it comical, but honestly I didn't give it much thought.

To me, an internal training video works best when it has some things about it that make it cheesy and [seemingly] unintentionally funny... that way, employees laugh and share jokes about how laugably bad that training video was.... but the joke's on them, because that actually makes them remember the training better.

But the eyes weren't part of that scheme. Some corny jokes are, though.