Top-five tips to animate your comics
Linked by Eugenia Loli on Fri 20th Apr 2012 07:19 UTC
Multimedia, AV I recently delved into the world of hand-drawn comics-style animation, after a lifetime of just sketching on paper. While I have a long experience with video editing, I had no experience with video animation of that kind. When I first got the idea to do the video it felt like a mountain to me, excessively complex. But the steep learning curve got easier with time. This is my top-5 cheat list to get you up and running.
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RE[2]: Comment
by DeadFishMan on Fri 20th Apr 2012 13:40 UTC in reply to "RE: Comment"
DeadFishMan
Member since:
2006-01-09

There are a few really good tools out there. Of them, the Moho "continuation" product is really worth looking at (though it is now unfortunately called "Anime Studio", which gives the wrong impression completely.) It is a really simple to use vector based animation suite, and the kinds of things that take countless hours using Eugenia's techniques, actually take next to no time in AnimeStudio. It runs on Windows and Mac and is really reasonably priced. The older version worked on BeOS - maybe even Linux. It's really worth looking at. You get a lot of the more complex aspects of animation for free, or at a really rapid rate. I can't rate it enough. Amazing software.


Agreed. Moho had a "skeletor tracking" feature that worked in a similar way to most 3D packages rigging tools: you draw your (vector) character, then define a basic skeletor and then "attach" each part of the character to the corresponding skeletor piece. Then it was just a matter of defining keyframes by changing the skeletor on different points of the timeline and Moho takes care of the tweening. I know that Flash may have similar features but Moho was (IMHO) better suited for classic animation.

The results may look somewhat stiff when compared to a carefully drawn frame by frame animation done on something like Toon Boom in the same way that some modern cartoons look "odd" compared to classic Chuck Jones and Tex Avery stuff but it makes it a whole lot easier and look quite good for today's animation standards.

Eugenia,

Loved your hand drawn characters. They kind of resemble Seth MacFarlane's characters in a lot of ways. And I remember that I loved your Vision you showed here on OSNews a few years back. Have you done or considered doing any web comics? I'd love to check it out if you did.

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