frame editing in animations driving me crazy...

#1

Hi folks,

I am trying to get a drawn walk cycle going in Painter and the behaviour of the frame editing is somewhat confusing me atm.

I set it to leave new frames empty.

I know that when I use a layer it gets dropped and saved to the frame when I leave it to edit another frame.

Here’s what I not get:

  • why when I edit frame 12 of 12 and then move backwards through the frames does the content of frame 12 get added to each frame I click?

  • when I erased one of those frames with the eraser and then chose the first frame for editing, it got completely erased, as if the previously erased frame was inserted into frame one and thereby erased the drawing (see above problem)

I want to draw frame 1, then go to the middle frame and draw, then to the last frame and draw and then move freely to and fro between frames without having to worry about accidentially dropping previous frames where they don’t belong.

BTW, if someone knows online tutorials about the usage of Painter’s animation framework I’d be very grateful.

#2

Hi Mu,

Layers are very dangerous in framestacks; when you move forward/backward through the frames when there’s an un-dropped layer, it not only drops it on the original frame but every frame you pass through until you manually drop it. Sounds like that’s what’s happening. I’ve destroyed many a framestack that way…

Hope that helps.

©hris

#3

Hi Chris,

thanks for your reply.

I must say that I did not have the layers dialog opened and might therefore have overlooked a layer I was kind of dragging along.
I will test it again with the layers dialog open and see what exactly it is I am doing.

Another question: is Painter merely useful for linetesting and creating character animation or is there a useful workflow for combining background and foreground? Like, create an animation of the background (street which “passes by”) and then open the movie and animate a character taking a walk?

Or is this done in compositing software only?

anyway, thanks for reading and it’s probable I will be back with more questions…:smiley:

#4

Painter is very limited in its animation toolset, I normally use it for rotoscoping and find it’s safest to paint directly onto each frame without trying to do anything fancy. I always make sure there’s another version of the “background” frames saved so that if I make a mistake I can load that frame back in and paste it on top, or sync it up as a separate movie with “set movie clone source” and clone the background in over the top of the offending area. You could try experimenting with syncing and cloning, but it’s not really designed for full-on cel animation. Someone else might have some tricks for that. I suspect compositing in something else would be easier.

Not sure what software alternatives there are, but to me Painter feels like it’s just a few tools away from being a fully functional animation package…

©hris

#5

I heared plastic animation paper is good:

http://www.plasticanimationpaper.com/

#6

Hi Mu,

On the Corel site there are sometimes links for Painter IX Academic Courseware. Coincidentally, the only courseware available on for Painter IX (that I know of) is for animation. Since it appears little if anything regarding animation/movies has changed in Painter X, I’d guess this courseware should still be quite useful.

The downloads include a 108 page PDF file and excercise files for Mac or Windows.

Animation PDF by Joyce Ryan: 12 MB
Mac Exercise files SIT file: 126 MB
Windows Exercise Files ZIP file: 126 MB

At PixelAlley, look in the right column and click either the link to …All Issues Painter X Newsletter… or the link to …All Issues Painter IX Newsletter… and you’ll find the Animation Courseware info at the bottom of either page.

I haven’t had time to read through the PDF file to learn if it will answer the many questions Painter users have asked, but I hope it will answer yours.

Please let us know if it does, and if you think this courseware is worth the time to download and read.

Thanks, and good luck!

…

#7

Hi there,

Chris, cloning is an interesting idea and might indeed open up additional possibilities.
I do feel that with a few additional features, Painter could easily be one of the most attractive 2D animation ehancement tools out there.

Loolarge,

I actually tested PAP and it is indeed very intuitive. Its got cutouts (use existing movements as complete sequences and scale or rotate them! Excellent feature, imagine Painter had that!). But for the pro version with the layered technology and cutouts it was too expensive for especially as I have Painter already. I was rather focused on learning how to use what I already have.

Jin…

whoa! What a load of information! Excellent! I downloaded it and will check it out and report back in this thread along with hopefully a first walk cycle of mine. Thanks very much!

#8

Hi Mu,

I’m gonna keep my fingers crossed and hope you find this courseware is really good.

The only thought that comes to mind for now, is to suggest you take it slowly. 180 pages is a lot to digest and I’d expect it to take time for all of it to sink in and for anyone using it to realize the potential (I’m hoping) it offers.

I’d expect Painter’s animation feature to still be a bit difficult to work with, but if the courseware answers even the most commonly asked questions, it just might be a big help.

Looking forward to your report,

Jin

…

#9

Hi Jin,

this piece of information in fantastic!

I just quick scanned through all of it:

It is a from scratch breakdown of a standard animation workflow (with business case studies) explaining how to use Painter for each of the steps. As far as I can tell there are some quite enlightening chapters on storyboarding, lip-syncing, in-betweening, compositing, rotoscoping (this last one with respect to backgrounds, too) and also walk cycles.

Interesting thing is that they use layers to form a walk cycle (as opposed to successive frames in a framestack) … and if I got that right (little caveat here due to quickscanning the information I might have gotten things wrong, but I don’t think so now… ) they then save the finished walk cycle in an image hose nozzle which can then be used to draw the complete walk cycle over an background with a stroke! This is basically the cutout technique I have been mentioning further up in this thread.

Included are exercise files (brushes, nozzles, movies) for most of the chapters.

I strongly recommend downloading the files and working through them… at least that’s what I will do folks…:scream:

Thanks a ton, Jin!

:slight_smile:

#10

Hi Mu,

You’re welcome a ton, so

Have fun! :wink:

…

#11

Hi there,

as concerns my walk cycle editing especially and frame editing in general I already learned something with the above courseware.

instead of drawing the frames of the walk cycle directly into the framestack I drew them in a normal rif file in separate layers. These can do the same job as the onion skinning feature in Painter’s animation framework.

For linetesting you can then group all of the layers, create a framestack, copy the layer group and then merge it into the first frame. There you make the firsty layer only visible, then you go to the next frame, make the second layer only visible, then on to the third and so on.
That way you can easily drop all the prepared layers on the successive frames. When you’re done you press play and can check if your animation works.

This is a huge workflow improvement for me and I thought maybe someone finds this distilled info useful.

Here’s a walk cycle wip in the attachment:

:slight_smile:

EDIT: here’s an improved one (in comparison to the attachment)

#12

Thanks from me too Jin. I’ve always wanted to try animations and this gives me something to play with. It always seemed too daunting. This…well…may just be the inspiration I need. Now to try to dig up the time.

#13

Mu,

That’s just the kind of news I was hoping to hear from you. Thanks for letting us know you learned something, and especially for including a brief explanation and demo animations.

Reminds me of a project we did (Rotoscoping) in a Painter 5 class at the local community collage (Foothill, for Tom) back in 1998. If I can dig up my version, I’ll post a link.

Tom,

Hi neighbor. You’re most welcome. I think it might be a good idea to ask Corel to make this animation courseware available to download from their FTP server so in future it’ll still be available.

Let us know how it goes and show us an example (please?).

#14

Correction: My Rotoscoping project was done in May 1999, not 1998.I found the original web page submitted to the class, edited it to bring it up to date, and uploaded it to my server.

Here 't is:

[b]Muybridge Animation Rotoscoping Demo

…[/b]

#15

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