Pink and Ain't

I just burned through about five character-seconds of animation in about five days.  That feels really good.  It’s significantly faster than my general rate that I’ve been keeping up ever since I resumed keeping track in April.  When I finish a scene I get to mark it off in the spreadsheet I created for the task, which always feels great.  It’s all set up with color-changing fields that give me pleasant feedback when I finish a scene.  They say, “Hey David, you’re doing a great job!  Look how much you’ve done in the last five days!”

Part of what let me get through these two scenes so quickly was that I was able to re-use some stuff.  For the first scene the framing was very similar to an earlier one, so setup was fast (pretty much just copy the previous scene’s file and the new scene is set up).  For the second it was even better.  I was able to use a side-view walk cycle that I created a long time ago for another scene, with only slight modifications.

One of the great advantages of Flash animation is the ability to adapt old animation for new scenes.  That’s a major reason why it’s a good medium for television animation.  When I worked on Foster’s we tried our hardest to find reuse for as many scenes as we could.  We had libraries of walk cycles, character poses, hands, arms, legs, and endless gobs of uncategorized old scenes that the animation director was able to help us find if we needed them.  The thing that’s great about it is that it’s not carved in stone.  It’s pretty easy to make little tweaks to old animation in Flash.  Need that old walk cycle but with the head looking to the side?  No problem.  Different lip sync?  Easy.

Unfortunately reuse hasn’t been as helpful on Don’t Fear the Sitter, since it’s just this one episode.  If I could stretch it out into a series that would be great, since I wouldn’t have to build the character models again, and I would have a bunch of reusable animation from the first one.  I may some day try and figure out a way to adapt it into a series, particularly if the short ends up doing well on the festival circuit.  If it comes to that, I’ll definitely be glad I made this thing in Flash.

Today I’m going to introduce you to a tool I developed a while ago that I finally got ready for public release.  It’s a modification of the concept of the V-Cam, a tool that’s been around for a while in the Flash world.

“V-Cam” stands for “virtual camera.”  It’s a tool that lets you define the viewport of your Flash movie with a rectangular “viewfinder”, rather than just with the location of your subject on the stage.  This means that you can leave your drawing in one location on the stage, then animate the V-Cam all over the place, including rotation, skewing, etc, and that view will be the one you see in the final product.  It’s a very useful tool, making framing much more intuitive. (more…)

Some of you may have heard about the kerfuffle in the last few days between Apple and Adobe. Briefly, Apple made a change to their developer agreement that makes it against the rules to use any language other than C, C++, Objective C, or Javascript when making applications for the iPhone/iPod/iPad. Furthermore, they’ve disallowed abstraction or compatibility libraries. The practical upshot of this is that Adobe’s most-touted feature in its new version of Flash, the ability to compile directly to an iPhone, is now pretty much worthless. Have no doubt, this was a change directed firmly at Adobe, and it encroaches into the region of Evil and perhaps Monopolistic. This post at the Flash Blog pretty much sums up my feelings.

One of the main things I was thinking of doing to improve the Art Brush tool was to give it the ability to add vertices to the brushstroke.  That would mean it could more easily follow the paths the user defined without requiring the manual addition of vertices to the brush symbol.  Well, it turned out to be pretty easy, and I implemented it yesterday and today.  So as of now, the Add Vertices tool is no longer necessary.  I’d encourage anyone who downloaded the Art Brush tool before Wednesday April 7th to re-download it.  It’ll be a significantly friendlier tool to use, and no more will you have to think about whether your brush symbol has enough vertices to follow your complex path.

For convenience, here’s the download link again:

Art Brush installer

Well, the art brush is working and I think it’s in a good state to release.  There’s a good chance I’m going to do more work on it eventually but I think it’s to a point where people will be able to use it productively.  As another example of what you can do with this tool, I present the following eye candy that I knocked together real quick-like:

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As I mentioned in a previous post, for years I’ve wished for the ability to use art brushes in Flash.  I’ve found, though, through years of wishing and hoping followed by disappointment, that the Flash development team is very unlikely to add in new features that are likely to help me as an animator.  They’re too focused on supporting Flash as an application development platform, not as an animation medium.  I think on their list of priority customers, animators who target non-interactive media are near the bottom.

That’s a big reason why I started creating Flash extensions — to fill in the gaps that the Flash development teem is either unaware of or is unwilling to address.  Well, a short time ago I realized that I could probably create a tool to perform one of my all-time wished-for features: art brushes.  Illustrator’s had them for a long time.  They’re very useful in there, and they would be similarly useful in Flash.

After about a week and a half of work, I’ve attained success!  My art brush experiment has blossomed into an actual usable tool!  It turned out significantly better than I had hoped, with fairly quick runtime (even before I’ve done any optimization) and very good visual results.  It’s not quite ready to post for the general public but I’m interested in getting people to test it a bit and give me feedback — Tell me what new features it needs and let me know if you run into any bugs.  If you’re interested, please let me know either in the comments or via email.

To give you a tantalizing taste of the possibilities, here are some actual examples of what my new Flash art brush tool can do:

Oh my goodness, I’m so close. You don’t even understand. For the last week or so I’ve been using all the spare time I could find to work on a new Flash command. It’s so complex that the source file is now more than 1000 lines. To put this in perspective, I’ve never seen any jsfl command that comes even close to this length, apart from my own autotweener. To put this further in perspective, this tool will do something that Flash has never been able to do, and for which I and many of my Flash animator friends have been clamoring as long as any of us has been using Flash.

Curious yet?  The tool that I’m working on will map arbitrary art onto an arbitrary path.  That means you can create “art brush” symbols and then apply them to any path and have the brush bend itself to follow the path.  For instance, if you’re animating a tiger with a wagging tail, you’d just animate a line, then apply your tiger tail art to your lines.  Boom, you’ve got a wagging, serpentine tiger tail.

I haven’t got the tool finished yet but I thought I’d put up an image to illustrate what I’m talking about.  The image below is from the Art Inspires blog (see the original post here).  It’s a screen capture from Adobe Illustrator, which has had this feature for a long time.  I’m kind of skeptical that I can make my art brushes look as good as Illustrator’s, and it will certainly be slower (since it’s written in Javascript), but either way it’s going to be awesome.  Seriously, this is sharks with frickin’ lasers territory.

I mentioned in my last post that I was working on a new Flash command that several people had requested, and that I’d like to have myself.  It feels good to be able to help people out with stuff like this, particularly when it also helps me   Anyway, I thought I’d talk about it a little.

Several graphics programs, particularly ones that deal with animation, have a feature where you can rotate the canvas to an arbitrary angle, in the same manner as an animation disc.  It’s very useful when you can’t get quite the right curve to a line unless your drawing is positioned at a good angle.  Unfortunately, Flash won’t do that.

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Today was a good day.  Let me list a few of the reasons:

1. Kung Fu Panda World went live.  I’ve been working on this virtual world since January of Last year and it’s very satisfying to see it “ship”.  This is also the first game I’ve shipped as an animator.  Long ago I was a software engineer and I shipped one game while I worked at Treyarch Studios.  Maybe you haven’t heard of it? (more…)

For the folks who aren’t Flash animators but would like to see a little bit of my process when animating, skip down and watch the movie that I link to below.  Starting at around 4 minutes in you can see an example of how I animate one of my characters in a simple motion.

Anyone who’s followed my blog so far and read the entries on Flash commands (not sure if there’s anyone like that yet – I have an admittedly small audience) will have seen me mention the Autotweener.  Well, today’s the day – I’m going to tell you all about it and post it for download.

The autotweener is a tool that does many of the same things as Flash’s built-in motion and shape tween functions, but it works in a fundamentally different way.  It’s incredibly useful, simplifying tasks that used to be difficult or impossible.  For my own animation process it was revolutionary – it totally changed how I do things.  I now rarely use motion tweens and even more rarely shape tweens – the autotweener has taken over almost all the tasks I used to use those for.

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