getting that (cel) look

:p

i know what you mean. ive heard good things about the US Animation compositing suite. but then at $15000 i prefer After Effects&Flash to do my bidding.

well adobe now own flash,so maybe u'll need 15000 to buy flash in a couple of years :rolleyes: heh.

well adobe now own flash,so maybe u'll need 15000 to buy flash in a couple of years :rolleyes: heh.

yeah sure, if it can do what US Animation can.

Actually it can be done in Flash by creating a shadow layer and copying your character frame to that layer, break it apart, make sure all lines are converted to fill and color it an alphaed gray expand the fill slightly and you have it. It will add to the size of the file but it can be done.

Yeah, I'm not sure how you'd do that in Monkey Jam. It's a pretty simplified program. Flash 8 is supposed to be able to do that kind of look with it's new drop shadow thing.

I know when the Simpsons switched over to digital ink and paint they had to go in and re-create the cel-shadow and add grain to it because they felt it looked too sharp and clean. I'm not sure if they are still doing that now or not.

Aloha,
the Ape

I have never even noticed cel shadows before, although I have noticed the difference between the earliest versions of South Park which used paper (shadows) and later episodes which use Maya (no shadows).

Actually, South Park has used Maya since the series started. They used to "float" the characters above the backgrounds to create that paper/cutout/shadow look. Guess it got to be too time-consuming, and they dropped it. It's a shame, really; I kinda miss it.

The only South Park shorts that actually used paper cutouts were the ones that were circulated as "christmas cards" that got the boys the series. I think there were two of them...

Thunderbot,

Is that a real clip from the "Fairly Odd Parents" episode that you saw?

cel shadow is considered a flaw.
sometimes with more particular clients, a reshoot.

it means that the cel was warped, the flanking lights
on the stand are uneven, or the cameraman,
in his pay-per-foot-of-film world sneakingly shot the
scene without pressing down the platen-- a swifter
but sloppier way of performing his craft.

contrary to what it seems to other people
putting a cel shadow-- or a shadow layer--
actually makes it flatter by negating the volume
suggested by the drawing.

I just downloaded the Flash 8 demo. If you animate within a movie clip or graphic, and set the 'filter effect' for that clip or graphic to be a drop shadow, it -will- do that.

A couple people are already doing it in little test sprite games. It has no reason to be there (and in fact they're just showing it can be done; no one would keep it that had taste) but it looks just as it should...

The first episode of south park was made with cut out's.Every episode after the first were made with a computer(and they didnt start with maya).

Correct, the pilot episode and the two "Spirit of Christmas" shorts that preceded it ("the earliest versions") were done with construction paper cut-outs and a stop-motion technique. They were quite beautiful, especially the season 1 pilot.

Q: I presume computers are a lot of the reason you can turn these around so fast. Did you go to computer animation right away when you started the show?
TREY PARKER: [i]Yeah. We knew right after the pilot that it was going to be impossible [otherwise]: It took us three months to do the pilot using construction-paper cutouts. We’d be making a show a year, basically.

[/i]No, they didn't use Maya right away. They used Alias's Power Animator, which was the precursor to Maya; just as FutureSplash was the precursor to Flash.

The first episode of south park was made with cut out's.Every episode after the first were made with a computer(and they didnt start with maya).

I think we're saying the same thing about the cut-outs. The "Santa vs. Jesus" short was cut-outs. The series has been computer since the get-go. And yes, they did start with Maya (or it's precursor). A college buddy was their tech guy during the first couple of seasons, and he tells me it's always been Maya.

Jesus vs. Frosty (1991)[i]
2D stop-motion[/i]
[b]
The Spirit of Christmas (1995)[/b][i]
2D stop-motion[/i][b]

South Park
season 1, episode 1 (1997)[/b][i]
2D stop-motion

[/i][b]South Park
season 1, episode 2 through season 9 (1997-2005)[/b][i]
Alias 3D animation software[/i]

cel shadow is considered a flaw.
sometimes with more particular clients, a reshoot.

it means that the cel was warped, the flanking lights
on the stand are uneven, or the cameraman,
in his pay-per-foot-of-film world sneakingly shot the
scene without pressing down the platen-- a swifter
but sloppier way of performing his craft.

contrary to what it seems to other people
putting a cel shadow-- or a shadow layer--
actually makes it flatter by negating the volume
suggested by the drawing.

Another way this flaw became apparent was when too many cel layers were used. If more than 5 layers were used for any scene there would be a definite shadow layer or "pop" as well. Looking at Hanna Barbera's first examples of TV animation you can tell they had to be extra careful of this because many many scenes had arms, heads, and mouths etc. on seperate levels. I couldn't imagine being the guy(s) who had to keep all the layers straight for every single episode. :eek:

I was half-wrong:

[I]Ever wonder why you can't apply filters to graphic symbols in Flash 8? This is certainly a limitation animators will run into again and again. While there could have been a technical solution, this feature was essentially cut due to time constraints and the involved complexity.

They key part is to understand what graphic symbols are. Although they seem to handle the same way as movie clips, they really only exist in the authoring environment. When you publish to SWF they are flattened out to plain shapes. That means the player would not know how to apply the filters as the sense of object hierarchy is gone due to the flattening.[/I]

what software etc are you working or compositing in?

i'm sure after effects cud do that easily *if u have it*

same question as skinny...

ive never even heard of Monkey Jam and i dont use Gimp.

i do know that just bout anything that needs to be done can be done in After Effects and its a chosen compositing tool.

you could add a secondary shadow, quite light in a gradient, that would give you that cel-shadow i think.

Supposedly the next version of Flash will have shadows.

If this effect is important to you, you might want to just - at least temporarily - switch to an animation package that directly supports it.

As mentioned previously, you can always animate your characters seperately against an alpha channel, and then composite them onto your background in a program like After Effects which supports shadows, glows, etc.

Anyway, ... interesting topic. I have never even noticed cel shadows before, although I have noticed the difference between the earliest versions of South Park which used paper (shadows) and later episodes which use Maya (no shadows).

As mentioned previously, you can always animate your characters seperately against an alpha channel, and then composite they onto your background in a program like After Effects which supports shadows, glows, etc.

of course it depends on what level or kind of project he is working on. But isnt that the ideal scenario? i.e. animating and then doing your layout/bgs and compositing in something else all together?

But isnt that the ideal scenario? i.e. animating and then doing your layout/bgs and compositing in something else all together?

Ideally I'd like an all-in-one package. Softimage, for example, has a built-in compositor. Maya has a built-in 2D painting program (for texturing). Both need work. :o