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Flash character animation beta testing!

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Flash character animation beta testing!

If you know and use Flash, then I need your help! I have a character that I've made body parts for and need people to use him to animate with so I can see how well the art I've created works in animation. He comes with a full set of 7 mouth positions in both front and side view so that you can animate him talking as well. There is also enough to do a side walk cycle.
He also has built in eye blink cycle movie clips in both the front and side views, so that when a movie is published, he will have some added life as well.
If you are interested in having some fun with this character, just email me and I'll email you the .fla.
ryan@cartoonsolutions.com

I also have voice files for you to animate the mouths to as well!
Let me know what you guys think!

bluehickey's picture
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Hey Ill try..

Hey Hickey,
If you shoot me an email Ill give er a go?
What the hey.
The tute looks very cool but the Mavs are playing so Im torn!
:eek:

I just finished a new tutorial on timing in flash. Here is the link:

http://clubhouse.cartoonsolutions.com/timing.html

I plan to put up a lot more tutorials in the near future. Hope this helps!

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Wow. I didn't even know some of those things were moveable.

Did you mean body parts or the eyes and eyebrows within the head? I think he might have broken apart the head layer and everything inside it and put them on their own layers on the main timeline in order to animate the expressions.

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Just a thought. Darth Vader has a bit of the Steamboat Willie Syndrome going on in that tutorial. It's difficult to tell what's going on in his illustration, let alone see speed changes, because his dark/black limb is moving around in front of his dark/black chest and cape. Got any other characters to make an example with, or possibly an outline or image adjustment?

Hmmmm, I see what you mean, but it doesn't really bother me that much. You can still see the hand's sillohette well as it stops into it's postion.

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Yes, as it stops. But if the whole point is to show a -gradual deceleration-, what is equivalent to a visual omission of the first three quarters of the movement doesn't leave a lot for the viewer to read.

To me it's like showing them how to pitch a baseball but closing their eyes for the wind-up.

Well, throw that out the window. I adjusted my monitor to full brightness and contrast to see what I'm missing and the whole point is moot because it's a totally different arm, with most of the slowing down at the time of 'silhouette.'

I just finished a new tutorial on timing in flash. Here is the link:

http://clubhouse.cartoonsolutions.com/timing.html

I plan to put up a lot more tutorials in the near future. Hope this helps!

Great tutorial many flashers forget about the easing in and out functions. It can really make a difference. But it's something you really have to play with for a while to get the hang of.

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

Hey Hickey,
If you shoot me an email Ill give er a go?

I don't have your email address, so email me at
ryan@cartoonsolutions.com and I will gladly email it to you!

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Walk cycle

Being that this one needed no sound I could post this one, without fear of "impotent lip synch!":rolleyes:

Attachment 

That's the way I move when I'm halfway around the neighborhood taking the dog for a walk and I get the urge to use the restroom. Suddenly the pace changes...

I understand the x-sheet but I guess I need to start with easy words first.
I have the "Flash 5 Bible" and chapter 37 is about cartooning and lipsyncing.
They lipsync using the words woof woof bark.
I wonder if I need to crawl before I can work or use easy words first?

I have an idea that might make doing the lip sync easier. Change your frame rate of your movie from 12 fps to 24fps. Just go "Modify" then "Document" then in the window change the number from 12 to 24 in the frame rate box.

This will allow more time for you to put in the right mouth poses needed. At 12fps you really have to cram keyframe after keyframe next to each other in order to hit all of the poses needed, where as when the frame rate is higher, it allows you more time in your timeline to space your keyframes out. OF course of lot of it depends on the line of dialogue and how fast they are speaking, but it should make it easier on you.

As far as getting the dialogue right, it's not very hard to do if you say the same word yourself as your animating, and then you can figure out which mouth position to put in. It's good to do this because the word make be spelled with an "o" and you might want to use the O/W mouth, but when you pronounce it yourself you realize that it is the AH mouth shape that you need.

Also remember that animation reads best if the mouth shapes hit their position NOT at the same point as the sound is heard, but actually one frame BEFORE the sound arrives.

Keep going, you can do this!

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Hey Swankaman, that cycle is coming along nicely. The legs are suffering from a strobe effect. I think this might be because the movement is so fast that it makes the legs positions hard to read because it is scrolling through all of them so quickly. The upper body and arms read well though. Try changing your frame rate to 24 or 30 fps and then spacing out your keyframes. It might help to eliminate the strob effect.

Don't worry, that strobe effect gets the best of us, especially during cycles!

Good job!

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Thanks for the encouragement BH.
I started reading chapters 1-3 of "Flash MX Savvy" last night and I purchased "The Flash 5 Bible" a while ago.
I also have "The Art of Cartooning With Flash" and "Flash 5 Cartooning".

Oh yeah.
I would rather learn how to lipsync manually myself instead of getting one of those programs that does it for you.

That's one of the reasons I still use movieclips, I know the "know it all animators" say never to use them, but I was doing flash before they even heard of it, or touched a keyboard, and nested movieclips work, maybe not for cinema conversion, but then all of us aren't ever going to end up on the "little" or "big" screen, so if it works for the net it works for me.

Pat

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

This was supposed to be a walk but it turned into a run instead.
I'll work on it some more.
I initially was doing the arms and legs movement manually but then I decided to try using a tween.
What did you guys use when you created the butler walk?
Manual or tween?
I still have to do the head.

Attachment 
cool beans

:) Hey scat,
yeah the pace seemed to quicken a bit (almost a run really?) The straght legs are pretty long and I was trying to make it all fit.His head jumps a bit too which bothered me a bit but its fun to see the different takes that people would have on the same character.
Thanksfor the advice hickey, Ill seee if I cant tweak it a bit; I was having problems with my positions being "too symetrical" if that makes any sense and tried to stagger them at different angles (so it didnt look like he was skipping)
Ill see if I cant fix the strobing effect as well.
Thanks guys,
swankaman

I usually use a combination, because I almost always work with a sound file I am trying to sync with. He does look like he's pumping for the marathon though. Which is not a bad thing.

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

Swank,

It is funny to see other peoples work of the same character.

I actually went into the pre-built legs and made a miniature comp system for myself of various degrees of knee bending. Then when I needed it bent I just punched in -how bent- and voilà!

Oh yeah.
I would rather learn how to lipsync manually myself instead of getting one of those programs that does it for you.

glad to hear that. :D

That's one of the reasons I still use movieclips, I know the "know it all animators" say never to use them, but I was doing flash before they even heard of it, or touched a keyboard, and nested movieclips work, maybe not for cinema conversion, but then all of us aren't ever going to end up on the "little" or "big" screen, so if it works for the net it works for me.

Pat

If you export a MOV from Flash, then import the MOV into Premiare, the Movieclips are preserved. No actionscript however. you'd have to use a screenreader to capture that. And you'd have to import and export the sound-track seperately.

Mike Futcher - www.yogyog.org

Thanks for the encouragement BH.
I started reading chapters 1-3 of "Flash MX Savvy" last night and I purchased "The Flash 5 Bible" a while ago.
I also have "The Art of Cartooning With Flash" and "Flash 5 Cartooning".

If you want to become a better animator, stop reading those books. Or at least that many. I've only bought one Flash book, and that was one of those "Quickstart" books. Read enough to learn a lot of the ins and out of Flash, but to improve your animation, read books like the Animator's Survival Kit, and The Illusion of Life. All those theories and principles will apply to Flash animation. Just a sugestion, I don't mean to rant.

Aloha,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

Plugins for Flash character animation

Hi guys

There is amazing plugins to work with character animation in flash

www.trickorscript.com

hope you enjoy!

www.animbot.ca

Thanks Ape!

This was supposed to be a walk but it turned into a run instead.
I'll work on it some more.
I initially was doing the arms and legs movement manually but then I decided to try using a tween.
What did you guys use when you created the butler walk?
Manual or tween?
I still have to do the head.

PC, it's looking good, a very nice start. I am dying to write my own tutorial on creating a side walk cycle in flash, but am so short on time with my current schedule. but here are some links to some tutorials I found online that might help:

http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml

http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/02/05/index4a_page3.html?tw=multimedia

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

BlueH,

I've seen both of these tutorials.
I'll go back and look at those two websites.
I think my problem is I need to bounce the body up and down too.
I looked at Tony's "Animator's Workbook" for ideas.
I was doing the arms and legs manually at first then figured I could tween them.
Of course after doing the tween, the shoes dont look right since they can't keep up with the legs.

I had a little fun with it. Know it's not polished, spent about a half hour on it. Tried to come up with a little senario. No preloader, so on dialup it stalls for a little while the first time through. But it's less than 50k so it's still light.

http://www.tco.net/~phacker/AWN/butler.html

Added a couple more hand positions to mine.

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

Graphite,

You make me sick!
Very funny and good!

Cute Phacker!

Please keep these coming!
I want to see more!!!

haha I love the antics. You're brave; I deliberately chose the sound file that lent itself to broad acting. I think being on a faster connection(?) it throws the synch way off though.

PC, it's looking good, a very nice start.

I'm flattered that you gave me this complement considering your animation skills are out of this world.

Okay. Here's mine.

http://www3.telus.net/drard/butler.html

Truly awesome animation! I get so excited when I see what people are able to do with this character. Nicely drawn additional hand as well. The only thing I see, which can be quickly fixed is the order that the layers are set up. Seems like both legs are in front of the torso. The back leg needs to go behind the torso layer. Don't know if this was intentional or not, but if might help.
Also, the mouth sync is dead on!!!! Very impressive! How long did it take you to animate all of this?

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

I'm flattered that you gave me this complement considering your animation skills are out of this world.

Honestly, my stuff was not so great when I first started, that's for sure! We all have to start somewhere. I can see by your test that your getting the grasp of motion tweening, and the poses are working well too. The more you work at something, the better you will get. Keep at it and you'll be able to look back on your early work and see how much you've improved!

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Accurate sync is never going to happen with a swf file. We can only hope for close. Everything is relative to what sort of processor you have, and what you have going on in the background drawing from your processor power. It's one of those things that those of us that design for the web deal with. We know our stuff is never going to be perfect, but we go for mood and light weight. So our stuff doesn't perfectly mimic real life, I don't think that Bugs Bunny ever aspired to that anyway.

I used 12 fpm, and I know it's not the industry standard, but for low cost files it's the choice of web animators. I was just having fun with the character, and Blue did a terrific job with him, he's great.

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

Mimicking real life would be an artistic pursuit; audio synch is a technical issue. It wasn't a criticism regardless, just an observation and maybe at most a heads-up. If you export it to AVI will it stay together?

I actually keep it at 12fps for testing out different motions sometimes before putting it to paper. Most of the motions I do are to be on twos, and doing 12fps on ones is a similar convention.

Actually I played it over an over again on an old PIII/500, looked pretty good, but without access to a newer faster machine it's hard to tell.

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

My stuff is probably always going to look like old Italian films that have been dubbed. I try not to get too anal about it. I specialize in ecards for middle aged ladies and they aren't that particular.

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

I try to emphasize emotional posing and secondary action...after all it's all smoke and mirrors. I don't try to deal with reality...unless I have to.

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

Hell, I'm just a student, and by concentrating harder on my life drawing I've seen an improvement inside a month. And that's without any formal animation education.

I don't want to be a "tweener" how boring could that be...I'd rather do my own thing and tell my own stories. I am sure some of you aspire to getting a job at a studio and filling in all those spaces...that's not where I come from.

Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.

Who aspires to be a tweener? It's simply a means to an end, of being able to eventually move up and fully act out a character or characters in a shot. Of the professionals on the board, I'm willing to bet few of them do just inbetween work, but I'm also willing to bet for most of them they've done it in the past somewhere along the way. The only people I can imagine aspiring to be tweeners is the CalArts graduates because of the whole old "Disney factory" thing, but even then they just wanted to do it to climb the rungs to be a lead.

.....The only thing I see, which can be quickly fixed is the order that the layers are set up. Seems like both legs are in front of the torso. The back leg needs to go behind the torso layer. Don't know if this was intentional or not, but if might help.
.........How long did it take you to animate all of this?

Shucks, thanks.
You know, BH, my monitor is dimming with age...I can't get it any brighter and the butler's suit looks totally black (Of course I saw the outlines in onion skinning mode) it was easy to forget to change the levels. An easy fix indeed.
The good news is maybe it isn't my eyes afterall.

...It feels longer to do than it did becasue I always worked on it late...I'd say about 7 hours tops?

Phacker, you packed a lot in there for only having worked on it for half an hour! Good job moving the character around the screen as well!

I have a superb walk cycle test of the butler that someone tested for me that I will post shortly. It's amazing to see what he has done having just barely learned flash by going through the tutorials!

p.s. I started out as a tweener when I first entered the industry!

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

BH,

I'm going to post this thread on another forum.
I want to see more people doing the butler.
Do you think you can post a female character this time?
Maybe a dumb blonde?
This is addicting!

OK, as I mentioned, these tests are by someone I know who went through the tutorials in Flash and then the very first thing he has animated has been with the butler character. He did get hung up on some technical aspects of flash, as most of us do when we first start. He lives near me, so I was able to meet with him in person and I helped him through the snags he had hit.
He then went and animated the butler in a kind of sneak/stalk cycle and he even added a knife in his hand. I particularly like the use of ease in and out with this cycle:

http://clubhouse.cartoonsolutions.com/images/bk_butler_sneak.swf

And here is his first attempt at dialogue. Again, I liked his inventiveness adding some props in the scene as well:

http://clubhouse.cartoonsolutions.com/images/bk_butler_talk.swf

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

Love them both but the first one is too scary for me!
The butler has gone mad in the first flash movie!

Haha so refined, so subdued. That makes my stuff look awful. You said he's new to Flash -- is he new to animation? He seems to have a sensibility about his work. The little tick of the leg. The settling of the dialogue.

Are you going to use what he does as a sort of "sample" for what these packs can do?

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