CGTalk - Painter X animation

shaneandhisdog

10-17-2007, 10:03 PM

Not sure whether to put this in the Painter forum or here so apologies if I was wrong.

I'm looking to get into 2d classical animation and have investigated a few options so far.

I want to do it entireley digitally (haven't got the space for proper animation equipment), but maintain a hand drawn/painted look, hence my desire to use Painter for the bulk of the animation.

Therein lies the problem, Painter X's animation capabilities are basic and unreliable at best. So here's what I want to do (excuse my nievity, I only started researching this yesterday!);

Step one - Create a complete line art animation in an animation app (not Painter) using two layers (background and characters)

Step two - Export the background animation separately from the main character animation,
then import them into Painter X to render

Step three - Recomposite the rendered background and character animation into one complete film.

What I need to know is if this is the best way to do things and what will be the best animation program to use with painter?

Hop eyou can help.

timkallok

10-21-2007, 09:32 AM

That sounds like a pretty complicated workflow to me. In my opinion, the more simplified you can make things, the more sanity you will have by the end of the project. I can see a few problems you might run into from the way you described things. Mainly, you might have a problem with consistency when painting the line art. I haven't used Painter for animation before but I think getting a consistency between frames could be pretty challenging especially if you are going to make the characters fairly detailed.

I'm not sure if you are familiar with a program called Mirage (http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/products_mirage_studio.php), but from what I have heard, it is a good program for 2D animation, plus it has natural media drawing/painting tools built in to the program. I don't know how they compare to Painter, but it might save you from having to use 3 different programs to complete your project.

If you are bent on using Painter to do ink & paint, either Mirage (http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/products_mirage_studio.php), Plastic Animation Paper (http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/) or ToonBoom (http://www.toonboom.com) would be good for animation. Then you would need some sort of compositing software to put it all together. Something like After Effects or Combustion would work well.

Hope this helps.

shaneandhisdog

10-22-2007, 08:14 PM

Thanks for the reply, some very helpful info in there.

You're right, the less steps the better. I'm messing with PAP at the moment (still trying to get to grips with layers). The painting style I'll be using will be a bit sketchy, giving a sort of flickering look with each frame (kind of like "The Snowman" hopefully). Mirage does look very promising though, I'll be sure to test it out.

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10-22-2007, 08:15 PM

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