Poll of the Day > Anyone got any tutorials on how to animate?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I only know how to manually draw every frame with onion skins and that's it... which is about as brute-force manual as it gets when it comes to animation, being the digital equivalent of a paper flipbook.

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Lokarin posted...

I only know how to manually draw every frame with onion skins and that's it... which is about as brute-force manual as it gets when it comes to animation, being the digital equivalent of a paper flipbook.

That IS one way of doing it though. You could read up on the 12 principles of animation if you want a little more grounding in the theory of animation. You're working digitally, so you might want instruction targeted to your set of software. Otherwise it depends on the tools you have at your disposal, your workflow, and your goals.

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https://youtu.be/nE0ElmZm-6c

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with flash (or whatever its modern replacement is) you can manipulate 2D shapes

whichever approach you use, there is the notion of "keyframes", where you spend the most effort only on the most important frames, and then fill in the gaps with less quality frames.

in 3D and I think flash, you can use "interpolation" to fill in the gaps between keyframes automatically, though it won't necessarily look great, and can require some manual adjustment, or more keyframes, to look better.

one of my projects that I want to work on but don't have the time and energy for is to write a DSL for animation. I had a system for this a very long time ago that was working, but had a clumsy editor for it, and wasn't as good at writing UIs as I am now and didn't know what a DSL was.

I now realize that it should be converted to a DSL (domain-specific language), and that if you got that working the right way, you should be able to make awesome 2D animations that you can manipulate in real time using code.

(hard to say how good the final effect would be though... it's easy to imagine it working great, but really I'd need to get it working first and then see what I can do with it or what other possibilities emerge from there)

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I used to use 3D Max/Viz in school... but in retrospect I wish they taught 2D animations instead

I don't need high quality - old school flash or something like the SimpleHistory videos is about the quality I'm going for.

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If you want to do something like SimpleHistory you pretty much need interpolation, so that at least narrows down the software you'll be looking for. Other than Flash (which they call Adobe Animate now) and Blender, I don't know what offers that feature at the really really low end. There's plenty of very pricey options. Blender despite being 3d centered does have some 2d tools.

Krita is well suited to the sort of frame for frame "brute force" animation you're already doing, and I don't know that's not the right tool for the job. I've used Krita for animation only briefly but did not find it unpleasant.

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