The Emperor's day off

Scaling your composition

Hi everyone, a quick point raised by Doris. She asked me why her animation when exported is not sharp. Looking at her .fla I think this is the problem:



This is the overview of her stage in Flash at 100%, that is 640x480 pixels. My first impression is that the girl and the windows (with fish swimming behind) of the main building have jagged lines making it look not good.

Then I zoom in:
And opla'! the girl and the windows are now nice and sharp. This happens when big bitmaps, jpgs, are imported in Flash and then scaled down too much to fit your composition. My solution would be: make a .jpg of of the girl (so you can keep your nice textures) but make the outlines in Illustrator.
You can then import your vector lines, you can just copy-paste from Illustrator directly into Flash, and separately import your jpg. In Flash, put the line on top of the .jpg, and convert them both, F8, into one graphic symbol, that you can reuse in your scenes.
Doris, hope it helps, thanks for your question and veel succes!

Is also a good idea to do a test and see how thin your lines are when scaled down in Flash. Sometimes you have to thicken the line a bit to make the line more fluent.

Hi everyone, hope you are all 'lekker bezig', nice at work, on your animated projects. I received an SOS email from Benine regarding problems with a walkcycle animation she was working on.
I immediately saw the problem: all of her nice graphics imported from Illustrator have been put on the timeline but she did not turn them into a graphic symbol by pressing the shortcut F8. As a result she has an endless list of 'Tweens' in her library, see above. Ouch.

This can be very time consuming to rectify because she had nicely prepared her walk positions and only at the moment of converting to motion tweens, did she realised that her animation was not working.

So, here are a couple of tips to make sure you don't waist your precious time and get the results you are aiming for:
1) once you have all your body parts in separate layers, 1 graphic per layer, convert each one of them into a graphic, and name it.


Once you have converted them all into graphic symbols select with your cursor on the timeline your keyframe and alt + drag your keyframes, or right click and select 'copy keyframes' and 'paste keyframes' to the next position.
Once all of your keyframes are in the right position on the timeline, slect your keyframes with the cursor and right click 'create classic tweens'.

If you need to shorten or lengthen your animation, select with the cursor in between keyframes and press F5, add keyframes, or Shift F5, to remove keyframes. Want to add an extra keyframe? press F6. Want to remove a keyframe, right click the keyframe on the timeline and select 'Clear keyframe. Want to insert an empty keyframe on the timeline, select your keyframe and press F7.

Any questions? you know where to find me! :)

Benine, here you can find your flash file that I adjusted, hope you don't mind sharing your questions with the group!

Color difference between monitors

Hey guys,

After doing everything on my laptop I am surprised to find out that if you look at my movie on a different screen, the colors look really ugly.
-Is there a way to prevent this?
( I used web colors, thinking they would probably be the same anywhere.)
-Can I adjust it in After effects?

help :s

first 5 scenes

These are my first five scenes so far.
I have been editing the music for intensity.
Only problem is: This file is already 40mb

.mov is big

hey,

i wanted to export my file to .mov to post it.
however, it turns up to be 300MB.
Got any suggestions on how to keep it down?

Craig McCracken interview

an interview with a creator of powerpuff girls cartoon in which he describes a bit his workflow in flash....

http://coldhardflash.com/2009/01/powerpuff-girls-10th-anniversary-interview-with-creator-craig-mccracken.html

The BBB Train is about to depart!!!

Hello everyone, The Beeld, Beweging en Beleving ( yes, Image, Motion, Experience you know...;) is starting again, and we are ready to dive into the world of animation and storyboarding!
Here below I post again some tutorials that I found useful to get the basis of what animation is about. They help you in starting on the right foot instead of ending up tearing your hair out in desperation...so download the tuts at the links below and enjoy!
ps: one link is for photoshop brushes that may help you draw more wicked characters ....


walkcycle3-4.zip
walkcycle.zip
stop frame animation.zip
photoshop.brushes.zip
make lip synching easy.zip
character_anima.zip
animating scenery in after effects.zip
animatic in after effects.zip
animate a character in after effects.zip

How to prepare your .swf for import into After Effects

Ah, het wordt spannend!!

Denise, thank you so much for your reply, I add here below my reply to Hylke's emai about how to prepare your flash files for after effects:

After importing all your flash files
1-make a new composition for each of your swf files and name them with numbers so that you can keep the order of how the movie should play.
2- make a new composition, ctrl-n, and make it 525 x 288 pixels. This is 50% smaller than our movie, and it can be uploaded on the youtube channel.
3- In this MAIN composition put on the timeline all of your compositions which have the sfw in it so that your movie is one string of small compositions. You have to shrink the compositions to fit this smaller size, press shift to keep proportions.
4- on the top layer add any music sound effect you need
5- export, cntrl-m, and in the render queue panel put render settings= best settings, click on output modules and choose quick time, check the audio option, and then in output to choose the folder where you want your movie.
6- press render! it should be ok, will be big but not as big in size as you have now
7-upload on the bbbdelft youtube channel, username bbbdelft, password (to be mailed to you individually)

and don't worry if your movie is big, more than 1 gig, you can still upload it on Youtube!

hope this help....

Re: urgent: making the movie??!!

>
> hi cesare,
>
> today I finished my last scene, and I tried to combine all the scenes.. but it doesn't work in flash (at least not the way I'm trying it..)
> I've heard you talking about After Effects: is that program more suitable for editing the entire movie?
> what can you recommend me to use?
>
> greetings
> gwen

-------------------------------------------------------
Hi Gwen,
Good to hear you're better :)
If you try to do it in Flash you will get confilcts if the names of your movieclips are the same, amongst other issues, so it is not recommended to compile it in Flash.

Yes, After Effects is the program to compile all your Flash .swf files on one timeline.

You can download a free trial from adobe, then go to file import and import all your sfw files. Then make a new composition size 1050x 576, and put all your swf on the timeline one after the other. After Effects is also good to add any music/ sound effects to your movie. Import them just like the flash files.

Then select your composition name on the timeline, then on the above menu go to Composition, >make movie, in the Render Queue choose Best Settings, and settings and as per Output module Quicktime, Animation compression. Choose in which folder where you want to save your movie and click 'render'.

Next wednesday I am available for assistance, hope to see you there...

Veel groeten
Cesare

Denise take 1 Da Vinci code

Gwen's Bladerunner (in progress)

Walk cycle 3/4

Another simple walk cycle, this time seen 3/4 view, the character is just drawn in Flash, may have been influneced by this neighbor kid next door, a bit of a bully, anyway, if you think is something you can use in your animation, please download the .fla

enjoy! :)

Walkcycle

Here's a basic walkcycle, I thought some of you have a character walking and this is a good start to tweak it for your own animation, please download my .fla

The left arm has a texture, a piece of clothing grabbed from a texture library, that is then masked inside the symbol, in this way you can also create your body parts, just an idea..;)

If you want to move your character across, say from left to right, you can select all the frames and then right click on the highlighted frames and 'copy frames', then make a new symbbol, f8, and then 'paste frames', after that you can drag your symbol on the stage and animate it...

Also for the people working in after effects is possible to animate your character in Flash and then import the .swf into your AE project for the rest of the animation...

Flash animation sample

Some of you have asked me to upload a character animation I showed last week in class, here is the .fla which you can download and study. This is just to give some ideas on how to organise your assets in Flash and prepare the animation.

Please keep in mind that this is only one way, ( and probably not the easiest), to approach your character animation, but it can give you a jump start in getting started. All the elements, face, eyes, etc, were drawn in Illustrator and then imported in Flash, Ctrl-Cmnd r.

If you prepare your visuals in Photoshop you have to save each element as .png format with transparent background, then import it in Flash.

Any questions, post them here!