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Jewel
May 2, 2009

9nine posted:

Edit: I managed to export a gif of the fishbowl, which is here.

Gah, that's mesmerizing as hell.

EDIT: Crap, new page with no content.

I like the style of your drawings 9nine, they're really simplistic, yet fairly detailed for the way they're drawn. Can't wait to see the finished movie product, the fishbowl animation is extremely fluid, and you have a nice grasp on how things move.

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Scat Cat
Mar 13, 2008
My reel which will hopefully net me an internship out west.

http://vimeo.com/8754807

lemme know what you think

hello fence
Apr 24, 2008

I'm Gonna Hurt You.
aw man, I wish I had seen this thread earlier!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uka4arveYI8

finished this last month as a final, it was my first flash class and I think I did okay, for my first "big" flash animation. coulda used more time sure, but that always happens. I'm really diggin' the program and am looking forward to using it more.

gmc9987
Jul 25, 2007

hello fence posted:

I'm really diggin' the program and am looking forward to using it more.

Man oh man, in 2 years you are going to find this quote somewhere and wonder how you could be so wrong about a program.

9nine
Sep 1, 2005

Flash is the loving bane of my existence and I hope it dies alone in a digital nursing home.

gmc9987
Jul 25, 2007

9nine posted:

Flash is the loving bane of my existence and I hope it dies alone in a digital nursing home.

It wouldn't be so bad if they would focus on fixing all the humongous glitches and bugs that have been around for 3 or 4 versions, instead of adding in new features that no one wanted and that add in even more bugs.

Seriously, if flash were more stable and could reliably export an artifact-free quicktime video I would make love to it. It has so many ideas and does so many things well that are just immediately canceled out by all the things it does horribly or not at all.

Fun story: I had to figure out this insane workaround to get a quicktime export out of flash, involving taking the SWF file into Aftereffects and re-syncing the sound manually with frame numbers. I thought, "This is stupid. There is no way this is how professional studios do it." Then, I went to comic con over the summer, and talked to Ghostbot, Inc, the studio behind the Erin E-surance commercials. I told them what I had come up with and they just laughed at me and said yep, that was exactly what they did.

9nine
Sep 1, 2005

gmc9987 posted:

Fun story: I had to figure out this insane workaround to get a quicktime export out of flash, involving taking the SWF file into Aftereffects and re-syncing the sound manually with frame numbers. I thought, "This is stupid. There is no way this is how professional studios do it." Then, I went to comic con over the summer, and talked to Ghostbot, Inc, the studio behind the Erin E-surance commercials. I told them what I had come up with and they just laughed at me and said yep, that was exactly what they did.

Good loving lord. As much as I hate those commercials, that's insane. My quicktime workaround involved a movie screen-capture program since I don't have Aftereffects. Seriously.

Flex Mentallo
Mar 14, 2001

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Scat Cat posted:

My reel which will hopefully net me an internship out west.
http://vimeo.com/8754807
lemme know what you think
There is some decent stuff in here, I really like the ball catch+roll, and the sneak is fun to look at.


Took a bunch of notes while watching, it might not make sense but here goes:
push/lift
* Anticipation at start is too off balance to be held for that long, and doesn't feel like he is getting ready to push at all. (nice music sync though :)
* Once he starts pushing it might look better if the block moved just a tiny tiny bit.
* During the "back-lift" there is no compression at all of the torso, this will look much better if he starts out squatted deeper down and then straightens up/handle resistance as he starts dealing with the weight. Also probably some kind of pause for adjusting when he gets it "off the ground" before it continues upwards.
* I don't feel the back-damage coming, his legs are struggling a bit but not the back or upper body or arms.
The damage pose+effect also feels strange, I think one problem here is that you have had him hurting his back in the way he would if he was lifting something "badly bent over forward", but in this case he was leaning back into the cube, which is a somewhat different strain.
*The way he walks offscreen would cause more strain on his back than a normal walk, so it doesn't come off as he is hurt, just like he has heavy shoes, try walking like that first, and then in a way that put as little strain on your back as possible and compare how it feels.

Run thing
* The way he runs feels like it would work if it was the first steps before accellerating up to speed, now however the wide gait comes off kinda strange as it just keeps the same tempo.
*Good job on the catch+roll I really like it. A few crits though:
Timing is weird at the start of the jump, he stays in the takeoff pose for a tiny bit too long compared to how quick the rest of the jump is.

The raising of the hand and throwing the ball down needs tweaking. I would say either have him "come out of the roll" with the hand already in the raised position, or come out with it lower and make the raising motion clearer/ more separate.
And the the way he moves after the ball is released is too slow, there is no "snap" in the throw.

Ball-guy
I think most of this could look really good if all the extreme-poses were held a frame or two less, it is a bit too "choppy" now

Sneak
It's pretty cool, I feel his torso might come down a bit too low, but all of it is so exaggerated that it still works.

Alienfish-guy
I don't get what he is doing at all. As for the model, it might have been easier with a different animation but the face is really hard to read, IE the eye-stalks feel like eyebrows, eye holes are eyes or holes or something and there are head-part pokey outey eyebrows that don't move.

Running woman
It's nice, the slowdown and stopping feels good.
During running arms are a little awkward though, might wanna fiddle with differing the acceleration as they go forward/back.

Swim1
Feels a little stiff, maybe you could push this a bit more towards "sine-waveyness", like starting the "next wave bending" of the character earlier to avoid the "completely straight poses". If that makes any sense at all.

Swim2
Nice, a little chest rotation would be nice since hips are moving so much up/down (i dunno how its rigged but just changing the breast outlines could add a lot)

Ghoul
Motion seems good overall, however the major feet sliding when the hands aren't moving in relation to the shoulders is distracting.

victrolaface
Aug 21, 2004
My old reel. Maybe I'll make a new one if I ever decide to do animation again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHvKx7_1JvE

Other stuff can be seen http://roblovelett.com or http://roblovelett.com/blog/

Critique or comment if you so desire.

BrokenCycle
Nov 15, 2004

A Rough Job, But...

gmc9987 posted:

Fun story: I had to figure out this insane workaround to get a quicktime export out of flash, involving taking the SWF file into Aftereffects and re-syncing the sound manually with frame numbers. I thought, "This is stupid. There is no way this is how professional studios do it." Then, I went to comic con over the summer, and talked to Ghostbot, Inc, the studio behind the Erin E-surance commercials. I told them what I had come up with and they just laughed at me and said yep, that was exactly what they did.

Is that a huge pain in the rear end, or an annoyance?

Flex Mentallo
Mar 14, 2001

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

victrolaface posted:

My old reel. Maybe I'll make a new one if I ever decide to do animation again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHvKx7_1JvE

Geisha "walk" was annoying and the ring game seemed pretty lame, but overall this was totally awesome.
I like how you have stuff in very different styles and still everything just feels quality. Nice.

gmc9987
Jul 25, 2007

BrokenCycle posted:

Is that a huge pain in the rear end, or an annoyance?

Taking the file into aftereffects, not really.

Re-syncing all of the sound again (We had a bizarre sound bug at the time that caused some of our sounds in the Flash file to be more than 3 seconds ahead of where they were supposed to be) was a pain in the rear end, since Aftereffects can't read sound data in an imported SWF file.

All in all, it doesn't add a huge amount of time to our workflow (especially now that we know to budget for it) but for a professional-level animation program with an "export to quicktime" option in the file menu, I should be able to export a god-damned quicktime video directly from the program!

tuna
Jul 17, 2003

Might as well post this. Last 5 months of animation at work on various projects. Here.

No personal more cartoony animation to show, yet, but give me a few months and I should have some of the technical stuff dealt with so I can start getting back on with animation.

Re:Exporting Flash animation to Quicktime solutions: This is astonishing. Are the profit margins THAT THIN in the 2d industry that nobody in the entire industry can afford to hire one single tools developer to write a better solution? Quality of Adobe software asides, that is (they're notoriously oblivious to professional industries on the whole).

Nate Breakman
Oct 16, 2003
F you guys, I love animating in flash. I'm staking the next few months of my life on it by my own decision. :colbert:

gmc9987
Jul 25, 2007

Nate Breakman posted:

F you guys, I love animating in flash. I'm staking the next few months of my life on it by my own decision. :colbert:

Haha, I may have given the wrong impression. I do enjoy a lot of things about Flash, but it's the program that I've used every single day for the last 4 years. I just...well, you know when you move in with with a roommate and it all goes really great for a while but then you start to realize that your roommate never does the dishes and makes really stinky food and sometimes breaks down crying for no reason, but other than that they're a good person? That's Flash.

Seriously, I enjoy drawing and animating in Flash, it's just everything else (exporting, programming, random crashes, ghost vector points that you can't delete, and imprecise brush tool) that drives me nuts.

Nate Breakman
Oct 16, 2003

gmc9987 posted:

Seriously, I enjoy drawing and animating in Flash, it's just everything else (exporting, programming, random crashes, ghost vector points that you can't delete, and imprecise brush tool) that drives me nuts.

Hahah, this is exactly the way I feel so nevermind! Still love drawing in it, still wouldn't have finished my senior film without it, but yeah that program needs to not crash on me for undoing twice or something.

Butterflysmasher
Aug 7, 2005

I got sound syncing issues when exporting anything longer than a minute before I heard this little trick; if the fps is set to 30, for example, change it to 29.98 or 29.95.

dunno how well it really fixes things for exporting .movs, but it seems to do the trick for at least the .swfs

Entered this for a 24 hour animation competition at my school: http://vimeo.com/8792212

Flex Mentallo
Mar 14, 2001

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

tuna posted:

Might as well post this. Last 5 months of animation at work on various projects. Here.

No personal more cartoony animation to show, yet, but give me a few months and I should have some of the technical stuff dealt with so I can start getting back on with animation.
I remember a bunch of years ago when when you posted some pretty good character+dialogue animations (11-second club entries maybe?), and talked about learning animation on your own or something. Really cool to see that you are doing crazy stuff at blur now.



Butterflysmasher posted:

Entered this for a 24 hour animation competition at my school: http://vimeo.com/8792212
This is pretty rad, what software do you use for pixel animation like that?
(also unscrewing light bulb with teeth is the best idea I've seen this year)

curse of flubber
Mar 12, 2007
I CAN'T HELP BUT DERAIL THREADS WITH MY VERY PRESENCE

I ALSO HAVE A CLOUD OF DEDICATED IDIOTS FOLLOWING ME SHITTING UP EVERY THREAD I POST IN

IGNORE ME AND ANY DINOSAUR THAT FIGHTS WITH ME BECAUSE WE JUST CAN'T SHUT UP
post != edit

I don't know how I hosed that up.

curse of flubber fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Jan 18, 2010

curse of flubber
Mar 12, 2007
I CAN'T HELP BUT DERAIL THREADS WITH MY VERY PRESENCE

I ALSO HAVE A CLOUD OF DEDICATED IDIOTS FOLLOWING ME SHITTING UP EVERY THREAD I POST IN

IGNORE ME AND ANY DINOSAUR THAT FIGHTS WITH ME BECAUSE WE JUST CAN'T SHUT UP
Could I get some feedback on this?
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/507622
I made this in a rush, in about a month, taking about 8 hours a day to do it. Also please completely ignore the story, it will make no sense whatsoever.

I want to get to the level where I can do short animations for quick money for people and poo poo. I'm only 17 so I have a hell of way to go but any help would be appreciated.

I'm doing part 2 now which will make a lot more sense and hopefully be funny and interesting. Gonna try and put a whole bunch of 3D poo poo in there too. If anyone's interested, here is some documents I'm using to help me with part 2. It's super poo poo because I have to put a whole bunch of useless crap in there for my extended project.
http://www.zshare.net/download/7134109142bb281d/
I'd appreciate criticism of the story since I am a terrible writer. The story is in terrible note form as well.

tuna
Jul 17, 2003

Flex Mentallo posted:

I remember a bunch of years ago when when you posted some pretty good character+dialogue animations (11-second club entries maybe?), and talked about learning animation on your own or something. Really cool to see that you are doing crazy stuff at blur now.

Thanks. I struggled trying to find a job in London and after 3 years of repeatedly being fobbed off without any communication I applied for work in America and landed a job immediately. It was a little rough for a while but now I seem to be getting settled and couldn't be happier. gently caress London.



Megaspel posted:

Could I get some feedback on this?
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/507622
I made this in a rush, in about a month, taking about 8 hours a day to do it. Also please completely ignore the story, it will make no sense whatsoever.

Honestly it made no sense and that's a bad thing and means that it boils down to very simple shapes that you moved around the screen in uninteresting ways. Spend 8 hours a day doing much, much smaller scale projects and get the quality to a much higher degree. Try learning some animation methods, do tests, experiment. You're wasting your time doing lame repeated stuff like this. If you're getting paid for it then that's one thing, but on your own time? Do something worthwhile.

I don't want to sound overly mean, or say you're poo poo or anything. It's just I've seen a lot of this sort of flash animation "for the internet" and its always terrible. Don't fall into that self-congratulatory group of teenage kids who think 3 "tweens" in flash and a picture of a flying monkey is the epitome of bizarre animation comedy. Keep it simple, do it well.

hello fence
Apr 24, 2008

I'm Gonna Hurt You.

a bunch of people posted:

flash sucks

aw rats :(

well, I DO know that it's not perfect, I had a heck of a time trying to render out a file that I could upload to youtube, and it looks like exporting is where a lot of the hate is coming from. I've also seen it crash on people, but not on myself (yet!) but I mean, other than that I've had only minor troubles so far. at the very least I find it fun to draw in, and I have an okay time animating. I guess I'll just enjoy it while I can!

victrolaface
Aug 21, 2004

Flex Mentallo posted:

Geisha "walk" was annoying and the ring game seemed pretty lame, but overall this was totally awesome.
I like how you have stuff in very different styles and still everything just feels quality. Nice.

Thanks. If I ever finish some stuff I'll probably be taking out those two mentioned and other stuff for another reel.

As far as flash being a lovely program on these forums, I'd have to agree. Adobe needs to adopt a better upgrade philosophy instead of pumping out yearly builds. Flash CS4 is basically unusable the amount of times it has crashed on me. I don't even use the quicktime export, but usually a png sequence and put it into after effects. Toonboom seems to be a better alternative every day.

victrolaface fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Jan 18, 2010

Vaporware
May 22, 2004

Still not here yet.

Nate Breakman posted:

Hahah, this is exactly the way I feel so nevermind! Still love drawing in it, still wouldn't have finished my senior film without it, but yeah that program needs to not crash on me for undoing twice or something.

I have an instinct now. That instinct is that I almost always save my file before I hit ctrl-z. I've even had a spidey sense moment where I knew flash was going to crash based on wonky text input response and it did.

tuna
Jul 17, 2003

From the poo poo I've read Adobe developers say, I am fairly certain Adobe currently hire a bunch of liars and criminals who are permanently on drugs. They release "updates" based on technology that better developers made 5-10 years ago before they fired them and took up their halfway house status. They have no concept of how any of the industries they cater for work, and insist that their methods developed back in 1989 are still groundbreaking.

HOWEVER, I can't blame them entirely. This is the position any company ends up in after they buy up all of their competition. I'm more ashamed that nobody else has risen to the challenge of bloodying Adobe's nose.

tuna fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Jan 18, 2010

Butterflysmasher
Aug 7, 2005

Flex Mentallo posted:

This is pretty rad, what software do you use for pixel animation like that?
(also unscrewing light bulb with teeth is the best idea I've seen this year)
I used flash and a pixel art extention

Happy the Pirate
Oct 2, 2009
The biggest problem with flash is that it's not really meant for animating. But it works pretty well once you figure out how to use it.

Still, I see little reason to use any version beyond 8 for animation.

Has anyone here used TVpaint? It looks pretty cool, but I haven't tried it yet.

curse of flubber
Mar 12, 2007
I CAN'T HELP BUT DERAIL THREADS WITH MY VERY PRESENCE

I ALSO HAVE A CLOUD OF DEDICATED IDIOTS FOLLOWING ME SHITTING UP EVERY THREAD I POST IN

IGNORE ME AND ANY DINOSAUR THAT FIGHTS WITH ME BECAUSE WE JUST CAN'T SHUT UP

hello fence posted:

aw rats :(

well, I DO know that it's not perfect, I had a heck of a time trying to render out a file that I could upload to youtube, and it looks like exporting is where a lot of the hate is coming from. I've also seen it crash on people, but not on myself (yet!) but I mean, other than that I've had only minor troubles so far. at the very least I find it fun to draw in, and I have an okay time animating. I guess I'll just enjoy it while I can!

Develop a ctrl+s twitch. This advice will save you days of work.

As for exporting, Flash is fine with that, usually, but it doesn't animate movie clips. Basically, what you see when you preview the animation with enter is what you'll export. So either use lots of graphics instead of movieclips or export it as a SWF and get a SWF to video converter.

Chernabog
Apr 16, 2007



It does, you just have to turn them into graphic symbols and change the drop down box on the properties screen to loop (or play X times).

curse of flubber
Mar 12, 2007
I CAN'T HELP BUT DERAIL THREADS WITH MY VERY PRESENCE

I ALSO HAVE A CLOUD OF DEDICATED IDIOTS FOLLOWING ME SHITTING UP EVERY THREAD I POST IN

IGNORE ME AND ANY DINOSAUR THAT FIGHTS WITH ME BECAUSE WE JUST CAN'T SHUT UP

Hackuma posted:

It does, you just have to turn them into graphic symbols and change the drop down box on the properties screen to loop (or play X times).

But then they're not movie clips anymore, and are graphics, like I said.

Megera
Sep 9, 2008
Maybe I'm missing something, but I was able to export a .mov of an animation with movie clips.

Vaporware
May 22, 2004

Still not here yet.

Butterflysmasher posted:

I used flash and a pixel art extention

Don't use this with CS4. It just doesn't work.

Butterflysmasher
Aug 7, 2005

Vaporware posted:

Don't use this with CS4. It just doesn't work.

As in it's buggy to the point of not being useful or it doesn't work period? I was using cs4 and it seemed alright.

v v I completely forgot about the compile errors. I had to drag the output dialog to the corner so it wouldn't keep popping up. v v

Butterflysmasher fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Jan 20, 2010

Vaporware
May 22, 2004

Still not here yet.
I remember it gave me some errors on every startup & compile, but I can't remember the specifics of any crashes or major problems. I found out the developer abandoned it and I gave up after hitting a few bugs. I didn't give it a fair shake, but since it was unsupported I wasn't willing to spend any time learning why it was giving me problems.

BrokenCycle
Nov 15, 2004

A Rough Job, But...
I'm interested in learning more advanced animation techniques in Flash (CS4). I thought Flash was a good animating program when I took a class on it, but always felt conflicted: I didn't want to do the work because it's a computer program, and I hated my work because I couldn't do exactly what I wanted.

When should you animate by manipulating the vector shapes, and when should you animate with the drawing tools? Any general tips and suggestions? Basically how would a professional do it?

gmc9987
Jul 25, 2007

BrokenCycle posted:

I'm interested in learning more advanced animation techniques in Flash (CS4). I thought Flash was a good animating program when I took a class on it, but always felt conflicted: I didn't want to do the work because it's a computer program, and I hated my work because I couldn't do exactly what I wanted.

When should you animate by manipulating the vector shapes, and when should you animate with the drawing tools? Any general tips and suggestions? Basically how would a professional do it?

Well, it depends on the style you're going for and how you draw normally. Flash can be used to pull off some surprisingly good animation (despite the reputation it gets for having crappy web cartoons on newgrounds). Something like this radiohead vid was probably done without tweaking the vector shapes for a more natural look, whereas this cartoon probably had a lot more vector manipulation going on to keep the shapes simple and smooth. Really, your animation and drawing techniques depend more on the type of cartoon you want to make than the program you use to make them.

The Mobile Sponge
Jan 23, 2010

Scat Cat posted:

My reel which will hopefully net me an internship out west.

http://vimeo.com/8754807

lemme know what you think

It was very good, your anticipation delivery with your 3D animation could use some tweaking to get the full impact of what your trying to get across, but other than that, there all great with a good personality you have expressed through the characters

Unfortunately, I've been getting my AA over in Florida for Art, so I have nothing recent to show of my animation capability, but I do constantly practice to increase my artist skills through this blog, I am trained in traditional animation, and my only real hope of getting into the biz besides illustration is advertising :[
http://mobilesponge.blogspot.com/

The latest animation project I took part of was this collaboration, I am "The Mobile Sponge" animator, I believe you can view just my two scenes, this was a pixel tool collaboration, so I can't even show off my actual applicable skills
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/touchdownturnaround

Feel free to critique any of my works, I'm new to the Something Awful artistic community, but I can already tell you guys are hard working artist willing to improve your body of work, which means the world when your trying to get into the professional line of work

mynameisbutt
Jun 19, 2007

Special persons invites club, that is what I'm talkings about!
I love flash, I use it for most all animating I do. I've done a lot of cool things with it and while flash crashes or flash decides to do something totally weird at inopportune times, I've stuck with it for going on about 3 years now. I got my first taste of it while working on my first professional animation job in 2007. The entire show was done in flash, from design to storyboard to final product. We had some 3-d elements and the audio had to be added in afterward in after effects, but everything else was 100% flash. It was highly effective and incredibly fast work. On the 2nd flash show I worked on, our team cranked out 3 full half-hour episodes in two months. A lot of us slept in the studio and spent a lot of late nights and weekends in the studio only to be fired as soon as our deadline was met, but flash helped us all hit that deadline.

Here's my reel / youtube channel --

http://www.youtube.com/gr8ball

got a lot of flash in there, but there's also some after effects stuff.

neonnoodle
Mar 20, 2008

by exmarx
Just dropped by here to mention TVPaint (formerly Mirage). It is by far the most powerful raster-based frame animation software around. The learning curve is like woah. It is as difficult to learn as your average 3D program. It is not intuitive or user-friendly AT ALL at the outset, but once you get a handle on it, it's infinitely customizable. Multiple workspaces (like, you can have one for your timeline, one for fullscreen drawing, one for background painting, each with separate interface and palette elements); customizable keyboard shortcuts; plugins; video capture (excellent for stop-motion or for classical 2D on paper); storyboards and animatics...it will do pretty much everything you want it to do.


(this isn't my drawing, just a screenshot of what the interface looks like)


I have been struggling and flailing around with Flash, Flipbook, Pencil (a worthy open-source app that has fallen by the wayside), and Plastic Animation Paper, and none of them holds a candle to TVPaint.

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tuna
Jul 17, 2003

Ah so that's where Mirage went. I was looking around for it a while ago and could only find this semi-related anime suite, of all things.

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