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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

For Those Into Inkscape


The Latest in Online Book & Mag's

This morning I discovered purely by accident the online magazine site called issuu.com .It has stacks of magazines that I can use for reference in my art. But best of all it had Illustration Magazines. I think my weekends and lunch hours are now predictably going to be filled with searching this site and all it has to offer.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Production Management with Celtx

I love production management tools. Mind-mapping, Gantt-charts they really help when you need to know where you are at any one stage and how far it is till the finished project. So here is another tool that will help anyone trying to get an animation studio organized. Its free and its cross platform ..yay!. Celtx at http://www.celtx.com/ creates storyboards, schedules and is a great all round tool for film and animation studios. Its really well thought out and is pretty easy to use.

Getting to Know Pencil

In an earlier blog I encouraged you to download Pencil. For animators this app is an obvious benefit to freeware illustrators, it offers so much for nothing. I can remember when software like this such as "Animation Stand" would cost around 8K and was always stuffing up. Frames would drop colours change and everyone got frustrated. The world of software seems to have a much brighter and enjoyable future now that we have free software of this caliber. Here is a Youtube demo of Pencil being used by someone who knows animation. Note the timings and the ruff tween estimations the animator makes.

The Global Animation Studio

It has always been a dream of mine to set up a global telecommuting studio one that allows artists from around the world to work together in different time zones on animation projects. This has been successfully done by the Blender 3D open projects like Big Buck Bunny but I am not sure about a 2d animation. What I really want to achieve is a studio that produces TV commercials, short animations and features that have real world credibility. These projects will employ a team of contributers that are in different parts of the world. The idea is to get a bunch of artists together using the same sorts of freeware tools I am championing in this blog . These artists then act as a real studio logging in hours on scenes and returning the finished files to be composite into a movie that then sells either online or via public release.

The next set of tools I will blog about will be helping me realize this dream.

Pencil is Great for Animation and Illustration

You really should add Pencil as a tool to create great animations in swf format. The user aproach is really the same as old school animation. That is you draw roughs, flip the pages for timings and line corrections, clean up with a sharp line, then colour and overlay onto the background. I was taught in the traditional animation manner and reckon that this app is a real comfort to work with. You can also import any work you do in Xara or Inkscape . I do wish there was a bones system similar to Anime Studio though. But there is one very cool aspect to Pencil. The cleanup layer snaps to the bitmap layer. This makes for really easy cleaning up of scanned roughs. But as its freeware I'm not complaining. Its available for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu here http://www.pencil-animation.org/



Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Using Free Software Fluidly.

I am off and running now with my free computer and free software. I had an old scanner that had seen better days. I kept it under the bed in case it would come in handy for parts. I plugged it into the USB port, ran Ubuntu's Xane scanning software and hey presto I was scanning in my sketches ready to be traced back in Xara in seconds.
That's real plugnplay in my book. No faffing around looking for drivers or waiting for Windows to find the right driver. Ubuntu just made it work right away. So I am now using this box ( The Freeware Illustrator Box ) to do some client illustrations. I have posted the screen shots of my Xara brush clean up of scanned images. The beauty here is that Xara is a vector program, I can keep these files small eg 800 x 800 and output a high res 300 dpi image without any loss of crispness to the line.