cartoon animation

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ronik15

Well-known member
I would like to know what software to use if I want to do a cartoon animation for a movie intro. Any idea how to do it?
 
I don't want a 3D animation like Ace Age but I mean something like The Simpsons or any looney tunes programs. Are they also made with a 3D software?
 
This is very nice work! This is exactly what I was looking for but I can't figure how to do it with flash.... is a your animation or you found it?
 
ronik15 said:
This is very nice work! This is exactly what I was looking for but I can't figure how to do it with flash.... is a your animation or you found it?
Click to expand...

No, its not mine. It was an existing online example so you could see that Flash allows you to achieve what ever quality level your skills are up to.

You can scan drawings into your computer and vectorize them with something like Streamline, import the artwork into flash and colour it... or...

bring the drawings into flash and work on converting them into vectors there, (much more time consuming), and colour them in.

Its really up to you. If you can't draw, then software won't turn you into an artist.
 
I use Studio Artist for "autorotoscoping", turning 24P video in animation. It's not so much geared towards "cartoon" looks though, a little more on the natural media side, like if Corel Painter actually moved. It can also be used to draw by hand, like Flash, if that's your bag, and for processing a la After Effects or Photoshop. It generates Vectors with each paint stroke, or with the dedicated Vectorizer. To top it off, it comes with Supersizer now, which is basically like Photozoom, useful for uprezzing footage, except it's integrated into this enviroment which is already geared towards movies as opposed to still images, so no more batch processing frames and all that noise. It was designed by the guy who freaking INVENTED Pro Tools and so it kind of uses a lot of audio paradigms in it's functional terminology. It is highly processor intensive though, just bought another computer a Dual 2.7, to use along with my three others to animate my feature. Check out Studio Artist at http://www.synthetik.com/ If you do get it, there's a great board for tips, and the program's inventor, John Dalton, ALWAYS answers questions promptly. Since it's a real small user base, feel free to pick my brain as well about it, I'll tell you my experiences good & bad.
 
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I use Studio Artist, too. I include it in my seminars on occation (I'm a cert'd Apple Trainer). It's a killer app!
 
cartoon animation

Toon Boom Studio is a good one.

There's a cool, free, open-source vector animation program called Synfig that I've been meaning to try out. There are some great demos for it, and it won't cost you anything but time. Looks fantastic.
Check out the galleries and clips:

www.synfig.com

There's great software out there, but it takes a lot more than that to make a decent animation. That's just to say, animation is an art and craft of its own, requiring some degree of talent and a lot of time all by itself.

If you're truly interested and have the desire, good luck, and have fun! If not, then you'll likely to give up in disgust. Here's a test: can you create a satifying (if simple) animation with nothing but a stack of index cards and pencil?

To give yourself a good head start, I'd suggest picking a good book or two on the subject. A great animation can look deceptively dead-simple, but there's a lot of technique hiding behind that simplicity.

Cheers,

Mike
 
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