VisionaryVanGogh
March 25th, 2009, 12:34 AM
Hi everyone, I'm a student studying animation. I have been looking all over the place for a 2D classical animation program that efficient and intuitive. I do not want vector-based software like Flash. When you want to work using more traditional techniques, (like hand drawn inbetween drawings instead of tweening) you have to work against the nature of the program.
I have tried other 2D animation programs like Toon Boom, TVPaint, and a couple of others. I have even tried the open source program Pencil. But they are counter-intuitive programs that put the emphasis on the wrong things. The most important thing to emphasize in an animation program is the timing. This is how animation works:
Animators usually work in 24 frames per second. But they don't usually make one drawing at a time in a linear order. They draw "key" drawings first. Important closely related moments in an action. Like a character getting out of a chair. You draw the character in the sitting position, then you draw the character standing out of the chair. Then you draw the inbetween drawings, showing the way the character gets out of the chair. The more inbetween drawings you use, the slower the character will move. And when using a computer program, it's important to be able to do things like "hold" a drawing, so that it plays for 1/12th of a second, instead of 1/24th. Sometimes you might even want to "hold" an image longer, like 1/8th of a second.
With all of the well-known commercial 2D animation programs I've tried, timing the drawings is an inconvenient process, when it should really be easy. There is one, lesser known animation program that I use, called CTP Pro, which is fairly decent. Scanning in the drawings, then timing them is easy and intuitive. Animating a character to voices is easy because of the ability to see how you drawings are timed with the sound on a chart. And there are a lot of options for moving a background when a character is moving.
Unfortunately, the program lacks when it comes to other features which I think could be very useful, like customizable onion skins when drawing in the program using a tablet.
If anyone knows if there are any open source 2D animation programs in development besides Pencil, kToon, and Synfig, I would really appreciate more information about it, and how I can contact the developers. If you want to ask me any animation-related questions I'd be happy to answer.
-- Visionary Van Gogh
I have tried other 2D animation programs like Toon Boom, TVPaint, and a couple of others. I have even tried the open source program Pencil. But they are counter-intuitive programs that put the emphasis on the wrong things. The most important thing to emphasize in an animation program is the timing. This is how animation works:
Animators usually work in 24 frames per second. But they don't usually make one drawing at a time in a linear order. They draw "key" drawings first. Important closely related moments in an action. Like a character getting out of a chair. You draw the character in the sitting position, then you draw the character standing out of the chair. Then you draw the inbetween drawings, showing the way the character gets out of the chair. The more inbetween drawings you use, the slower the character will move. And when using a computer program, it's important to be able to do things like "hold" a drawing, so that it plays for 1/12th of a second, instead of 1/24th. Sometimes you might even want to "hold" an image longer, like 1/8th of a second.
With all of the well-known commercial 2D animation programs I've tried, timing the drawings is an inconvenient process, when it should really be easy. There is one, lesser known animation program that I use, called CTP Pro, which is fairly decent. Scanning in the drawings, then timing them is easy and intuitive. Animating a character to voices is easy because of the ability to see how you drawings are timed with the sound on a chart. And there are a lot of options for moving a background when a character is moving.
Unfortunately, the program lacks when it comes to other features which I think could be very useful, like customizable onion skins when drawing in the program using a tablet.
If anyone knows if there are any open source 2D animation programs in development besides Pencil, kToon, and Synfig, I would really appreciate more information about it, and how I can contact the developers. If you want to ask me any animation-related questions I'd be happy to answer.
-- Visionary Van Gogh