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October 12, 2010#

Pencil 2D Animation Software Revisited

Well, maybe i should have found out about it sooner, but i just jumped straight in and began drawing… didn’t look at te size of the area i was working to, just pushed through to about 1500 frames (no, not every frame, just the animatic…).

So, then i try to export and it can’t handle a file over about 700px wide it would seem. Fine, i’ll render it at 600 wide. But now the animation is really small, and can hardly be seen.

Try camera layer, you say? Right! Oh, hang on now nothing renders, though i do get a folder with an image sequence of the entire thing….

I think this may not be for me.

In import into Flash proved difficult with 1500, 1000px wide jpg’s, and after a whole lot of crashing, went and batch resized the images for import in Photoshop. A million years later, importing a few humdred at a time seemed the best way.

Then came the deleteing of static frames – when pencil spat out the jpg sequence the were 12 frames or jpgs for every second that the picture stood still as well as for motion. This was expected but it did lead to a bit more arseing around than i was perhaps wanting.

Is there a lesson learned?

Yep.

Anyway, here’s where it’s up to now spat out by Flash… the timing is still pretty bad but it’s progress people, progress!

October 2, 2010#

Pencil 2D Animation Software

I’ve down load the free 2D animation software, Pencil. So far it’s actually pretty impressive, and i appologise to the guy geeking away in his room for no money to make it, but i wasn’t expecting much. But i’m kinda into it now….

Issues i’ve come across to date:
- Adding length to timeline doesn’t always work. Toggling scrub size, and actually resetting the number in the timeline length field seemed to trigger it to work properly. eg i’ve upped it to 1000 frames one time, then dropped it back to 900 another.
- Re-opening the file causes the timeline to revert back some default length eg, my animation is currently about 600 frames, but i cannot scrub past about 280…
- Marquee tool to copy doesn’t disappear automatically. To make it work select object to copy -> ctrl-c -> click another part of the screen to deselect before trying anything else… like pasting whatever it was you wanted wherever it was you wanted it.
-Adding a new key frame adds a blank keyframe. This requires one to redraw the whole frame again (unless you want to go copy the previous)…. would rather it set a key frame with what is in the previous, allowing you to erase the parts that need to be altered, eg: hand or foot or face. Maybe i should be putting all this on separate layers, but sure….

Anyway, these issues aside it’s great fun so far. Zero crashes, software freezes etc.

Keep you posted.

Until then, here’s what i’ve been doing. It’s a kinda detailed animatic (work in progress….) for a future attempt at animating the Acrobat image i did recently…

Blogger has compressed it , so it doesn’t show up too well at the moment, but when it’s actually inked in, it’ll be much more visible.