Thursday, April 01, 2010

'Inking' in Flash demo

Here's a demo video I recorded of myself inking a drawing in Flash CS3. I accidently exported the video in grayscale...oh well.

Enjoy!



Also, I'm on twitter now: CLICK HERE

19 comments:

Isaac said...

Watching this is a kind of zen experience.

Troy Little said...

WoW! Animation sure takes a long time!

ncross said...

You'd think, but really that's the computer doing all the work...I just hit the "cleanup" button in Flash then went to bed.

Bob Flynn said...

Thanks for the notes in the previous post. This video pretty much puts it all out there. I appreciate that (A) you use a low smoothing number, and (B) that you don't fuss over optimizing your line. It keeps the drawing honest—and looking like a drawing.

Willem Wynand said...

thanx for sharing yeah =)

Oscar said...

Great tutorial Nick I guess, I need to buy a Cintiq so I can get better results with my strokes.Thanks for this tutorial.

Pedro Vargas said...

Wow, very cool demo, Nick! Thank you! And the process of storyboard to finished animation is great! I'm really learning a lot from this! You're doing something great for the animation community and especially for 2D animation. Thanks again!!

Mitch K said...

Thanks for posting this! It's cool to see how you go about doing it. But maaannn, it must take you forever!

ncross said...

Thanks

Mitch: I don't really think that it takes too long...8-10 minutes per cleanup is not that slow. I was going a bit slower to get it exact since I knew that I was recording it...I didn't want to document any screwups :)

Hobo Divine said...

Thank you for posting Nick!

(Sincerely)

~ HOBO

Sean said...

im excited for the new film nick. thanks for showing us how you work-always insightful to see other artist's processes. Can you tell me where to find this cleanup button? I am very mad that I haven't used it up to now, feel like I've been missing out....

Juan Carlos Cruz said...

Muy bien. Me gusta la gente que comparte su experiencia.

Te invito a que veas los episodios de Polillas Acrobáticas.


Very good. I like people who share their experience.

I invite you to see the episodes of acrobatic Moths.

Geneva said...

Wow, super cool! I love watching you work. It was also great seeing your previous post with different stages. Thank you for posting it all! :)

Sketchees said...

Kudos if you've got the patience to clean up in FLash. That's some labourious, non-rotatable work.

You gotta be doing this full time, without breaks or a job. Full credit to be doing what you love to do.

Good luck!

ncross said...

Thanks again!

@Sketchees: The cintiq tablet rotates like an animation disk, it would be really difficult if it didn't.

I do have a full-time job -drawing storyboards- I do my own short films in my free time.

A.Massenburg said...

Hi Nick, I just started learning about 2d animation and I was wondering if you drew your backgrounds first and then you character animate?

P.S. Your tutorials are very helpful. If you could, I have a special request on your process of drawing and painting backgrounds.

bluzich said...

Hey Nick, thank you for sharing this video with us. I'm still a noob at 2d animations, but i hope i'll learn some things from you. Wish you all the best.

ncross said...

@A.Massenburg - Thanks! Normally I draw them both at the same time. I rough everything out first as a single drawing at the storyboard stage. This gives me my main composition. Then I figure out my main character poses. After those are established I draw the background. I do it last so that I can make sure that it frames and compliments the animation and doesn't have weird tangents etc (ie having a tree look like it's growing out of the characters head)

I will hopefully get a chance to do a post soon. I hope to have the animation on my film done in the next couple months, then I'll move on to backgrounds and then I'll be able to record some process videos and write up a post.

Thanks again!!

Eric "Spillz" Angelillo said...

Thanks for sharing! I always assumed you did it this way, but it's nice and fascinating to see it done.

I have a large intuos 4, I wonder if I can achieve similar control. It's annoying to not be able to rotate the canvas though, which is why in my latest film I did my cleanup in photoshop... it had its share of problems though.