Help with 2D animation, please...


#21

whoa! thanks Kaiskai!

that sure was a detailed post, and very helpful. thanks a lot. :applause:

Hope this informatin helps you guys out. If you want to know more about other classical animation tools like Discs, Desks, Paper pencils pegbars all that feel free to ask, I could try to make a list of those as well.

that would be very nice. since I have no experience in 2d animation, only 3d.


#22

Cleaining is sort of my issue as well, I find tablets alone are not steady enough to get a good line quality, when I clean with a pencil I typically use a 0.3mm mechanical or a really sharp 2b and feather the strokes to get thick and thin. No way I can really get that kind of control with a tablet.

As for not having the blue pencil you could use the layout pencil adn draw over that. as well if you keep drawing your lines slowly fade I noticed. I drew a sketch of Silver from Treasure planet, and noticed that lines I had really built up were light grey as I was working on another area. neat feature IMO I see a lto fo potential, but I see a lot of problems. Just curious if they have considered the risk in their marking menu system which could land them asuit from Alias wavefront. The limted resolution is kind of annoying and as you mentioned doesn’t work on widescreen, also causes colour and resolution problems on the second monitor of a dual display system. would be cool if you could draw like its currently set up, and then clean over top in a vector line. The current system cause me to be looser and rougher than I am in flahs and Toonboom, but for cleanup and output, vector has distinct advantages, as well it could be exported to any vector program like flash for easier painting frame by frame than say photoshop.

Great program in the works and glad to see it being developed by Danes :slight_smile: perhaps I wil finally get some approval from my father when he sees that a piece of software I’m using is danish. Do you know any classical stuidos in Denmark hiring classical animators. I’d still love to go visit, though my family didn’t teach me very much danish.


#23

Originally posted by steveblake
Without the blue pencil. I’m thinking that maybe saving out the frames and then loading them back in as a sequence in the background, for tracing over.

Is that possible??

In the Shareware version you can not load other formats than PAP animation. In the commercial editions of PAP you have plenty of ways to do the cleaning.

But if you want to stick with the Shareware edition, you could use the lighttable or layout features to trace rough drawings from one frame to another - doing the cleanup. I.e. add blank frames between all the rough ones and do the cleanup on the blanks using the lighttable. Then delete the rough frames and you’re done.

Um, also… on a technical note. I seem to have had no luck running shareware PAP at work. I think the problem is that we have widescreen monitors, at home my tiny monitor seems to ‘flick’ over to PAPs resolution and back. At work I just get an error… Any thoughts?

Did you check if your graphics card is able to run 800x600 in 8 bit mode? Sometimes it’s a matter of screen drivers.

Anyway, I will check if there’s a problem with PAP running on a widescreen - and get back to you with an answer…


#24

Curious as to why they chose such low settings, I know that many newer cards actually perform slower at extremely low settings compared to medium settings


#25

Originally posted by Kaiskai
Curious as to why they chose such low settings, I know that many newer cards actually perform slower at extremely low settings compared to medium settings

You are maybe right - I don’t know about the differences in specific graphics cards.

Because PAP has been around (in Denmark) for many years, it was an early decision we (I’m the producer of PAP) made to make sure everything would run very quickly and smoothly on those old computers. Today the “standard” computer is much faster and we could have done things differently, by pushing the modern computer more.

We will though - in the next major release (4.0)!
:bounce:


#26

Even as it is now, PAP is great. A simple idea executed very well indeed. The fact that there is a Shareware version at all is a great bonus.

I think that I’ll be using it quite a bit at home, so will probebely register for the shareware version very soon…

…and If I could get it working here at work, I’d be fiddling around with it in my lunchtimes.

Good stuff!


#27

Originally posted by steveblake
[B]Even as it is now, PAP is great. A simple idea executed very well indeed. The fact that there is a Shareware version at all is a great bonus.

I think that I’ll be using it quite a bit at home, so will probebely register for the shareware version very soon…

Thank you very much! :slight_smile:

I asked our programmer and PAP should work fine on widescreens. It must be at matter of the driver. Did you check if it allows 800x600x8?


#28

Did you check if it allows 800x600x8?

Hey

Actually yes i did and… no it doesn’t. Sadly.

Only works with 32bit True Colour, looking at my Display properties, it’s a ATI Fire GL2 card. Has anyone had any success with these?

If it did work, It’d good if I didn’t have to setup my screen each time too, since it’s a bind having to realign my icons around the desktop each time… Still, that’s just me…

(Thanks for your thoughts on this. I’ve tried to pursuade our resident 2D animatorizer to have a go at this unfortunately he’s too busy and probebely benefit from me giving him a demo.)

:slight_smile:


#29

being ATI don’t you have an option to remember icon placement, using a single monitor with ati 9000 I have no problems, except the colours on the second screen, but now knowing thta it performs at 8 bit, thats all thats wrong with the colours on the second screen.


#30

being ATI don’t you have an option to remember icon placement, using a single monitor with ati 9000 I have no problems

icon placement? Don’t think so. Right-clicking on the desktop the only relevant options I get are to lock, arrange and line them up…

anyway don’t think this card supports 8bit. But maybe I’m wrong…


#31

this thread has been a great read. thanks for contributing to it guys…

:beer:


#32

So um. Anyone managed to get PAP working with a ATI Fire GL2 card??


#33

Hi Steveblake!

This is what I got from our programmer… :slight_smile:

According to these specs, this graphics card only works in 24bit modes:
http://www.ntsi.com/3d_graphics_cards/Video_Cards/FireGL2_specs.htm

This discussion suggests hope, but I wouldn’t count on it:
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=pw_monitor&message.id=350

Thus, running PAP in its current form will not be possible, but we are considering developing a windowed version of PAP, which you will be able to run.

I’m sorry steveblake, but please keep an eye on http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk for any news on the windowed version! Thanks.


#34

Hey, I appreciate the help anyway!

I hope PAP does develope into a windowed app. From what I remember reading on your site, it seems you’re thinking of implementing some new features too, so that’s got to be worth the wait!

By the way, out of interest, is PAP being used in many 2D animation studios??

Thanks for listening…


#35

Yes.

Denmark is a great animation country, with great schools and lots of studios and animators. Most of them know PAP very well and most of the studios have licenses. Many of the most “digitally involved” studios are using PAP as their only way of animating 2D. :slight_smile: Also danish gamecompanies are using PAP extensively.

We only released PAP for the world wide audience a couple of weeks ago, so we are very excited about the hype and nice comments we recieved about it already!


#36

Hey! Steveblake and others!

We have just uploaded a beta of PAP which runs in 24 or 32 bit screen mode!

So people who had problems with the 8 bit mode, please visit our forum for more info!! http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/forum

Thanks!


#37

oh man now you guys rock :slight_smile: By the way have you seen Aliwas Wavefront’s new app sketchbook. THey don’t have the animation abilities, but the app is almsot the exact same in drawing, but they have multiple brushes and colours.


#38

Brilliant! Downloading now…

I’ll post some feedback to the forum and possibly here, for those that are interested.

NielsKM, thanks to you (and the programing team)


#39

could we find a 2d animation app like old autodesk animator pro, animator studio or deluxe paint these days? I don’t like the way painter or paint shop pro’s animation shop handle things. I prefer a software just like the animator studio or deluxe paint but in XP!


#40

Have you tried PAP ila_solomon ?? It’s very good indeed.

Still, I have tried Pro Motion once or twice, that seems a bit more more like Dpaint. Just didn’t click with me tho…

:slight_smile: