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Animation Tools Review
May. 23rd, 2010 04:16 pmWorked with Paka yesterday on the oilslick animation and I think things are going pretty well. We discussed story ideas and decided to go with something he presented which wasn't quite the story I had originally envisioned but it is a lot more focused than my idea and I like that. Paka penciled out most of the opening sequence for it while I worked on parts of later sequences.
Decided to cheat a little and use some roto of 3D animation to get some of the bigger stuff to look good in a timely fashion. I was able to find 3D models for a few of the things I wanted but they were in 3ds format. Happily, in the Maya Bonus tools (which requires only a painful navigation of Autodesk's poorly organized site) there is a tool to convert 3ds files to maya files. So woot.
This morning I started by animating part of the next sequence and then turned my mind to import of the images (My animation stand is in the basement and not presently set up or easy to get to) ... So... I have this fancy new sheet-feed scanner and I was thinking that it'd be nice to see if I could use it for animation anyhow. So I've been fiddling around with that.
I thought that there was a scan and orient feature in ToonBoom Studio but it's not in my current version and only exists in their pro version. Not sure if I'm smoking crack about it having ever existed in my copy or if was a feature that was moved out in the forced-upgrade version due to OSX. Anyhow. Searched around.
There are several expensive solutions that I did not try out but I did eventually find two that are reasonably priced.
One is DigiCel Flipbook Lite at $80 http://www.digicelinc.com/ It's my favorite. It worked out of the box with imperfect levels of black behind the holes (I stuck a piece of gaffer's tape to the inside of my scanner where the autofeed sheets come through) It also seems to have some smarts that make it do good contrasting for line drawings on white paper, giving me nice-looking lines. It can also do the multi-page import and correction directly in the program via TWAIN libraries. When I have a little extra money if I'm doing a lot of animation again, this may be the route I go.
The second solution is 'ScanFix' ( http://people.rit.edu/dpalyka/ScanFix.html ) It's freeware beta but you have to e-mail Duane for a copy of it. He's a pretty nice guy. Scanfix is not quite as friendly or instant as Flipbook. I had to tweak my scanner settings a bit to get it work properly but now that I have a profile created for it, it cranks along nicely. I also found some minor bugs when trying to have it automatically rotate the cel counter clockwise but that's no biggie. I can script rotations in a number of different aps.
The scanner I'm using is a Cannon Artisan 810. I'm very pleased with its behavior. Scan rate at 150 DPI is around 8ppm which isn't blinding BUT it's about as fast as I could photo stuff on my animation stand and, unlike the stand, I just drop the pages in the sheet feeder on the scanner, start it going, and work on something else while it's doing the work and I now have the option of going resolution crazy and throwing in stuff at much higher resolutions.
Of course, I still prefer to work 12 field and my scanner isn't that big so it won't work for all of my stuff and I'm not giving up my animation stand just yet, but this is definitely a nice solution for quick pencil tests.
Decided to cheat a little and use some roto of 3D animation to get some of the bigger stuff to look good in a timely fashion. I was able to find 3D models for a few of the things I wanted but they were in 3ds format. Happily, in the Maya Bonus tools (which requires only a painful navigation of Autodesk's poorly organized site) there is a tool to convert 3ds files to maya files. So woot.
This morning I started by animating part of the next sequence and then turned my mind to import of the images (My animation stand is in the basement and not presently set up or easy to get to) ... So... I have this fancy new sheet-feed scanner and I was thinking that it'd be nice to see if I could use it for animation anyhow. So I've been fiddling around with that.
I thought that there was a scan and orient feature in ToonBoom Studio but it's not in my current version and only exists in their pro version. Not sure if I'm smoking crack about it having ever existed in my copy or if was a feature that was moved out in the forced-upgrade version due to OSX. Anyhow. Searched around.
There are several expensive solutions that I did not try out but I did eventually find two that are reasonably priced.
One is DigiCel Flipbook Lite at $80 http://www.digicelinc.com/ It's my favorite. It worked out of the box with imperfect levels of black behind the holes (I stuck a piece of gaffer's tape to the inside of my scanner where the autofeed sheets come through) It also seems to have some smarts that make it do good contrasting for line drawings on white paper, giving me nice-looking lines. It can also do the multi-page import and correction directly in the program via TWAIN libraries. When I have a little extra money if I'm doing a lot of animation again, this may be the route I go.
The second solution is 'ScanFix' ( http://people.rit.edu/dpalyka/ScanFix.html ) It's freeware beta but you have to e-mail Duane for a copy of it. He's a pretty nice guy. Scanfix is not quite as friendly or instant as Flipbook. I had to tweak my scanner settings a bit to get it work properly but now that I have a profile created for it, it cranks along nicely. I also found some minor bugs when trying to have it automatically rotate the cel counter clockwise but that's no biggie. I can script rotations in a number of different aps.
The scanner I'm using is a Cannon Artisan 810. I'm very pleased with its behavior. Scan rate at 150 DPI is around 8ppm which isn't blinding BUT it's about as fast as I could photo stuff on my animation stand and, unlike the stand, I just drop the pages in the sheet feeder on the scanner, start it going, and work on something else while it's doing the work and I now have the option of going resolution crazy and throwing in stuff at much higher resolutions.
Of course, I still prefer to work 12 field and my scanner isn't that big so it won't work for all of my stuff and I'm not giving up my animation stand just yet, but this is definitely a nice solution for quick pencil tests.
