newartofanimation

Fusion is a must have software for graphic artists and animators.

Do yourself a favor.  Download.  Install.  Explore.

With thousands of Hollywood movies having compositing and effects from Fusion the software is well established and proven.

Do it!

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

For the curious, here’s a demo that is a bit more tailored to the professional users but it demonstrates some of the power of fusion.  It’s not really a beginners tutorial but more of an intro to working in the v8 release.

Free.

Fusion is free for commercial use with no restrictions.

The primary differences between the free and paid (Studio) version is that the studio release adds collaboration and managment features and allows plugins and 3D stereoscopic features not available in the standard (free) version.

I have access to After Effects but given the power of Fusion I find that I never use it.

The primary thing I use Fusion for isn’t high end special effects but the adding of text, cropping images, recoloring and bringing in any additional blurs and effects required.  I’d like to delve deeper but of late have had no requirement for it.

An animated cycle of Cody from ‘Rescuers Down Under’

This morning has been quite productive.

Here’s a rough from Disney’s ‘Rescuers Down Under’** I used in OpenToonz to create the shift in color/focus to make the drawings appear to animate.   It’s a neat little illusion… the kind of stuff that makes animation possible.  None of the drawings are moving.

I was impressed by how easy it was to set up in OpenToonz.

I’ve been exploring the use of Version Control in OpenToonz (via SVN/TortoiseSVN) as well as honing in on some workflow issues.

A few areas I also learned to resolve is getting the output image to exactly the size I need as well as to the .GIF format.  (Note that currently GIF output is only in the portable version of OpenToonz.

So another fun exercise was using the regular release of OT as well as the portable at the same time to get at features that both don’t have.  In the process, I’ve been taking note of what isn’t immediately working for ideal workflow.

**Disclaimer:  This is not my artwork.  These are thumbnails by the masterful Ron Husband.  Check out his blog here:  ronhusband.blogspot.com

I ran a quick demo of OpenToonz and these guys and gals appear to have enjoyed it.  🙂

And yes, I’m drawing with a mouse.  We’ll hold off using a pen/tablet for now.

(Special thanks to my sister for sharing the photo!)

To celebrate the announcement of the return of Disney’s Duck Tales here’s a quick tracing from some promotional art recently released.  At a guess I’m gonna say this is… Dewey.

My main goal was to see how quickly I could trace and color the character.  A secondary goal was to try to perfect the technique of drawing a (non-rendering) line for use with registration of characters into scenes.  In this drawing you can see the indication of that line where he is sitting on piles of coins that would likely be part of the background image and therefore not animated.  The drawing(s) of the character is then composited over the top of the background giving the illusion that he is interacting with elements of the environment/scene.

It took a little longer than necessary because I adjusted by line style too early and so couldn’t see where gaps were still present keeping me from being able to fill shapes with color.  Then when I adjusted the lines to get better shapes or close gaps I’d lose the color I’d assigned to other shapes and have to reapply those colors again.  If doing it all over again I would keep the linework as basic as possible until the very last moment and then apply any special styles or effects.

Why is this guy yapping!

I just assisted the very talented Turtletooth with finding a problem behind (seemingly) random frames being flipped in FFMPEG export.  The new portable release with the fix should be forthcoming tomorrow.

Turtletooth also implemented a secondary request to have gif animation exports Loop by default.  So, that’s why that guy is yappin’.

So, two requested features/enhancements delivered in one day.  Wow.  These devs are awesome.  But… that isn’t all.  My stuff is truly minor and only scratches at surfaces of greater things in development.

FFMPEG export is an option that can be set in the OpenToonz (portable) preferences.  Just point the Import/Export path to where FFMPEG bin directory is and this adds several formats as an option to include .MP4 and GIF animation (both import and export/render!).   In my estimation, this addition makes OpenToonz one of the most powerful gif animation software packages available.  I can’t think of any other software that compares.

Disclaimer:  As of this moment the FFMEG feature hasn’t been incorporated into the official OpenToonz releases.  Give it time.  It’ll get there.

There are two primary reasons for this.  1) The feature requires full testing 2) FFMPEG must be downloaded separately by the user.  There are several reasons for this the first of which keeps the development track of OpenToonz free of FFMPEG related development as well as assures the folks behind OpenToonz that they aren’t running afowl of any patents or licensing and distribution restrictions.  If you need help getting FFMPEG up and running with OT I’ll be glad to assist.  Just ask.  🙂

This is to celebrate that the developers of OpenToonz implemented a suggestion I made to enhance the new Camera Capture (Pencil Test) feature.

I’m not sure I can take much credit of course because someone would have requested a timer sooner or later but now frames can be captured automatically (via timer) in addition to manually.  The devs went further and incorporated several other requests into the same basic interface options to make it easy to capture video for reference by entering zero (o) as the time increment.  If I understand correctly, that will allow capture at the highest rate the system is capable of.

Entering a number such as 10 (or whatever your desired number) will launch the timer which will visibly count down on the screen until the next capture.

This should allow hands-free capturing where the animator is freed to swap out drawings in front of the camera or to adjust assets on a stop-motion stage or (via setting of zero) video recording via webcam.

Additional  support for cameras (DSLR) is expected to be added.

So, yeah.

This guy is pretty happy.   (>:o))

So, I was doodling again…

I lost the originals of these two guys due to a crash just before saving so I redrew them quickly while their basic designs were still (fairly) fresh in my memory.

Opentoonz isn’t perfect but generally it doesn’t have to be.

A random image cobbled together from a few more tests…

OpenToonz v1.0.3 has been released and it contains many useful updates and fixes.

You are still procrastinating and not diving in?  Why?  😉

Go get it!

Announcement:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/opentoonz_en/NIdmWXMZ9-Y

Turtletooth has also (almost immediately) posted his portable version.

With a release that doesn’t even need to be installed that makes running OpenToonz all the more easy to use (for Windows users).

https://github.com/turtletooth/OpenToonzPortable/releases

Rabbit ears… because we definitely need more rabbit ears.

I should have used the paint-rigid feature on the mouth but I kind of like the furry look the distortion created.