Toons/Animation in After Effects 6 - Production bundle.

Hey guys,
This will be short and sweet... I wanna learn how to do traditional animation in After Effects, are there any good tut's or sites available online?
I hope someone here can help me out, thanks in advance!

 

Long time no see Callum, when you say traditional animation, are you reffering too cell animation??

You should try 3d animation!!!

 

Yeah I'm referring to cell animation... Any tut's out there?

BTW, who is that? J?

 

I don't think After Effects is what you're looking for if you want to do cel animation. You cannot effectively draw anything in After Effects...

You can use it to bring in the individual images and put them in order, but still, After Effects is WAY overkill for that.


I suggest you investigate something like Flash. You can draw your cartoon and handle all of the animation using that program.

 

The Williams Street (Adult Swim) people use a combination of Photoshop and AfterEffects for all their work...

 

Yeah I know you don't draw in After Effects... I meant just the basic animation etc. in it. I'm pretty sure alot of production houses (small ones) use AE and PS for this purpose. I guess I'm just gonna have to draw the frames by hand, scan them, colour them in PS and animate in AE, I'd just be interested to know if anyone has done this much on these boards. I'll take a look around and PM some peeps maybe?

 

Right... That's pretty much what I was suggesting. Draw, scan, and put them in AE to order them. But, frankly, AE is still overkill for that. Although, the one advantage to AE is that you can name your images with numbers and AE will import the whole set as one logical object. It's a lot better than importing 35,000 seperate images...

You're still going to find that lip synching and timing is not going to be easy at all. AE just isn't good with real-time previews. You may be better off using something like Premiere for that part.

 

I'm willing to bet there's a way to seriously streamline lip-synching using Sound Keys.

 

what you need is toonboom studio
http://www.toonboom.com/main/

 

i actually made a SWEET greivous anamation with battledroids getting shot in the background that looked similar the the clone wars series just by using Adobe illustrator to draw, and AE to put em in order and do a lil of keying/compositing.

 

Hey Ken, I'm a traditional animator and I use Premiere. I like Premiere because it's easy to set the single image import to 1 frame (or 3, or whatever) and then adjust the timing from there. I haven't tried dialogue on it, but I'm going to have to for my next project. I should probably do some tests...

If you don't want to do Flash, you are going to need to animate on paper and then scan it... or you can animate in Photoshop with layers on top of each other and import those.

That's my 2 creds.

 

I suppose you could do stop motion animation the same way. It would be interesting to see some Harryhausen style films with puppets composited digitally instead of opticaly. It would be pretty time consuming though.

 

another good one i herd is Toonz
http://www.toonz.com/products/prodtoonz.htm