Zlogspot - animationandvideo

JAC Once again it's been a while since I posted to this blog because... well... life happens and it's been tough to get back on track and into creation mode. Fortunately I haven't been totally non-productive and this post is to get you up to speed on where my CTA2 G2, JAC character is at, that I began documenting in part 1 of this series of posts. Last time I'd drawn my seven final character view sketches ready for importing into DrawPlus for 'inking' and coloring. Maybe it's my lack of knowledge with how to use DrawPlus properly, but I just don't find that software any good for free hand drawing vector lines - which is the look I want for my animated characters. Manga Studio however is superb for 'inking' in my vector lines but unfortunately can't export images in a vector format. So I had to look for some kind of compromise. I knew DrawPlus has a trace feature for turning bitmap drawings into vector art so I decided to explore that option....

iClone Custom ToonMaker 2 Character. I've been looking around for a 3D modeling application for some time now after slowly making some headway into the world of 3D animation with Reallusion's iClone . iClone is great for 3D animation but much of the time you're a slave to whatever content you can buy from various online market places and libraries - which is pretty darn extensive I must say. However the one thing I can't buy is my own 2D character designs re-imagined as 3D characters. I can sort of make my own toon characters with Reallusion's ToonMaker and ToonMaker 2 but it's not quite the same. Whilst I'm not in a hurry to start cranking out 3D animation with my own characters it is something I'm interested in tinkering with now and then and I'd rather build my own characters. Anyone who's signed up to SmithMicro's mailing list (the makers of Anime Studio and Manga Studio ) may have come across special deals on Never Center's 3D Mo...

Happy Cat JAC by TET It's been a while since I last posted to this blog, having been busy with moving house, organizing the new house and generally not doing anything in the way of my own animation projects to report on. When I left you I had announced that I was going to dive back into character creation for Crazy Talk Animator 2 by resurrecting the Monkey character that I started and abandoned a year earlier due to technical issues. I've now had time to re-read all the documentation on creating G2 characters for CTA2 and review the monkey character and... I just can't pick up from there again. I know, crazy right? The character is so near and yet so far from being finished. The problem is I don't like the drawing style of the character. It's too neat and doesn't feel like something I've actually drawn - even though I did, just not in the conventional way. Every time I look at it I want to start again from scratch so I can get the drawing style right. Sinc...

GoHobbyist Forums Over the last couple of years GoAnimate has evolved from a site for animation enthusiasts who just want to get their ideas animated quickly to a site for businesses of all sizes who want to engage customers through animated video. As a result the GoAnimate 'hobbyist' community was slowly displaced as more and more community features were removed from the website. The final nail in the coffin was the removal of the old discussion forum at the end of 2014. A forum that had served the community since the site began in 2008. For many people the old GoAnimate forums were as much of a social hang out as they were a place to promote their latest GoAnimation. Recognizing this, a small group of well known GoAnimators got together and created the GoHobbyist Forums . They put the word out and gathered together much of the community from the old forums with many of the most well known GoAnimators joining as members. As of this post the community has more than 60 members ...

Way back in February of 2014 I began working on my very first CrazyTalk Animator 2, Multi-Dimensional character . Formerly known as the Skate Monkey , the character has since been retitled the Bored Monkey in line with a new series of skateboard graphics I'm planning to feature him on. If you'd like to know the history of the character's development you can read it in these blog posts; Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 . These posts include sample videos of the character in action. Below is the last demo video I created. By the end of February 2014 I'd hit a couple of stumbling blocks with the character that took the wind out of my sails in terms of enthusiasm for continuing to work on it. The first was an issue with character styles in CrazyTalk Animator 2. I wanted my character to be fully compatible with these but when I changed the monkey's style to line art, you can see in the image below that some body parts remained filled in with red. Changing the character to L...

Explaindio Video Creator is an easy to use presentation video creator that is geared towards marketing and sales videos but could be used to create any kind of presentation video. I was convinced by the sales pitch that it would be very easy to use and I was particularly impressed by the white board features. It also looked to be an improvement over both  VideoMakerFX and EasySketchPro two other programs that I bought and reviewed . Having now used Explaindio it is, in many ways, similar to VideoMakerFX and feels very much like an upgraded version of the same product with enhanced white board and other video features. If you purchase the program it comes with a whole bunch of extras, the most important of which is the content libraries including; graphics, fonts, music, backgrounds and templates. These are the things you'll rely on if your artistic skills are some what lacking. The claim is that almost anyone could buy this software, learn it fairly quickly and have a finished vid...

MotionArtist is dedicated composition software for creating animated comics, otherwise known as Motion Comics. That is, rather than create fully animated cartoons, it allows you to take static cartoon panels and add movement and audio to create a more engaging experience. The type of Motion Comic MotionArtist can produce falls somewhere between reading a comic and watching a cartoon but generally, feels more like reading a very cool comic than watching a severely limited animated cartoon. MotionArtist has dedicated tools for creating comic book panels with their own self contained animations. It also makes it simple to animate across multiple panels and even animate the panels themselves. Everything is done using key frames displayed on your comic's timeline with individual panels containing their own timelines to control the animation contained within it. There are three modes which you switch between that does take some getting used to. My First ComiPo! Comic. Director mode let...