My TG Sequence

[Test-0]

Wow, thats some great work with animating the sequence I did for Ran. How much work did it take to blend all the changes together, or did I somehow forget how closely each frame I drew was to being an animation?

[flango]

Originally Posted by Test-0

Wow, thats some great work with animating the sequence I did for Ran. How much work did it take to blend all the changes together, or did I somehow forget how closely each frame I drew was to being an animation?

I did the main part in about 45 minutes, then I had to make the eyes to blink, so was doing that and the ears for about 1 and a half hours. Good fun

[genderhazard]

Originally Posted by Very_Good_Karma

Genderhazard- The wink is not a two frame animation- It has three transitional frames just for the eyelid, which I think Flango all made himself. The winking animation I posted has eight frames all together, and the one below has nine.

Now that I look at it I do see that the motion is more than two frames.

While I have a better than average traditional animation know how, my understanding of how computer animation is conducted is lacking so I thank you for the tutorial Karma.

[Very_Good_Karma]

Flango, I *really* like your new avatar! Great Crop.

I'm also impressed by your cropping on Test-0's Ran TG Sequence, and all the little extra transitional touches you put in- but I loaded it up into MS GIF Animator, and you *still* aren't varying your frame timing at all. I think that's really holding your work back. You did a nice kludge on your latest raspberry animation, with all the extra frames, but you'll kill your filesize doing that.

If the GIF Movie Gear demo won't adjust timing, I'd be happy to send you an ancient copy of MS GIF Animator- It's really old but it's a full version. PM me with an e-mail address if you're interested.

Do you mind if I take a shot at smoothing out the Ran TG Animation a little? I don't want to appear to be trying to one-up you.

[flango]

Originally Posted by Very_Good_Karma

Flango, I *really* like your new avatar! Great Crop.

I'm also impressed by your cropping on Test-0's Ran TG Sequence, and all the little extra transitional touches you put in- but I loaded it up into MS GIF Animator, and you *still* aren't varying your frame timing at all. I think that's really holding your work back. You did a nice kludge on your latest raspberry animation, with all the extra frames, but you'll kill your filesize doing that.

If the GIF Movie Gear demo won't adjust timing, I'd be happy to send you an ancient copy of MS GIF Animator- It's really old but it's a full version. PM me with an e-mail address if you're interested.

Do you mind if I take a shot at smoothing out the Ran TG Animation a little? I don't want to appear to be trying to one-up you.

Be my guest.

I'm still getting used to the controls of the GIF software, so don't know what to do exactly

[Very_Good_Karma]

Well I got kind of side-tracked poking at all these things...

I tried out Genderhazard's morphing idea; long story short it won't work. Morphing programs are for photographs, not drawings- and I suspect any experienced morpher could have told me this and saved me a headache.

I tried working on the Ran TG animation, but I'm having a lot of trouble with it. Flango, it looks like you recopied and re-resized from Test-0's original for every frame of the ear-growth animation; and the copies all came out slightly different sizes. I don't know how to eliminate the wobble without redrawing the ears from scratch on a new sample. If you have some working images that you didn't resize I could work from those- otherwise I'm just gonna have to reproduce your work.

Anyway, after bouncing around on some animation related articles on Wikipedia, I got some new ideas, yanked Flango's new avatar, and came up with what you see below.

Flango, if you feel like redrawing that wink on [Hmmm!]'s original sequence, without resizing it, I could put the whole thing together with fade effects and I bet it would look fantastic.

What would be really, really awesome, would be if [Hmmm!] could draw a new 'before' image for the sequence with Flango looking normal and not gut punched already. [Hmmm!], you up to it?

Now I'm gonna go look for my old GIF optimizer- this animation is way too big.

(Argh. I never know whether forum posts should be in second or third person.)

EDIT: File optimized! Still too big to be a forum avatar, though. I'll need to prune it a little...

EDIT: Okayyy... somehow the optimizer corrupted the file. Going back to the old behemoth version.

[flango]

I've got all the panels that I used if thats alright Karma

[Very_Good_Karma]

Nah, I already had the low-res frames from ripping them out of your original animation. I decided to go ahead and redraw the wink on the original image, handily reminding myself of my total lack of traditional art skills. The completely 'winked' frame looks a little off to me but I can't say why. But anyway, here's the WIP.

Got any ideas on how far we can take this? I'm mostly just using it as practice, but I'd like to push it to the limit.

[flango]

Sweet man, thats is qualtiy. I was going to do one of my character Holly, but I need to refine her details a bit (and get better at drawing XD)

[Very_Good_Karma]

Thank you! I was really afraid I got the eyelid wrong somehow- I just don't spend enough time drawing to be sure of how it's supposed to look.

I'm finding that the images that adapt most easily to GIF animation don't move anywhere where there's no change going on- in Test-0's Ran Sequence, the last three images, with the ears and tail growing, would have been better off with her body cut-and-pasted rather than drawn over and over. In a still sequence that makes you look like a hack, but ironically it makes an animation appear much more polished.

Right now I'm experimenting with cheap transitional tricks that I can pull off with my limited hardware and software. Here's the version of your avatar I did before, and my latest- which do you think looks better?

[flango]

I'd say the first of the two. The second is a bit too blurred for my liking. Wich do you prefer?

[Very_Good_Karma]

Honestly, looking at it now a day later the original looks better to me to. I was trying to get a 'camera goes out of focus, reality goes out of focus' effect but I'm not there yet.

Now that I've got the whole sequence to work with I'm kinda frustrated because there already *are* before and after pics, but they don't fit in well with the sort of simple animation I was trying to make. So now if I want to use them I have to get *really* creative.