Sketch Blog

OpenToonz Animation Timelapse from Draconian Rain on Vimeo . I made this in hopes of showing others that you don't need to be in a studio or use fancy software to make animation with cool looking effects. It's a shame that so many people strongly believe that you need After Effects to create anything halfway decent. It's simply not true. All you need is passion, determination, motivation and a willingness to not only learn but be prepared to do problem solving. After you learn OpenToonz, your only real roadblock is yourself. Keep trying guys. Just keep at it and please always use freeware to learn animation first because so many people after they realise there is not "do it for me" option and find out that you have to do everything yourself, these people give up while others come to find that despite the results they absolutely hate the process and also give up. Don't waste your precious money on paid software until you are certain that animation i...

The purpose of this animation was to use the gradient tool with a colour set to fading out into transparent. I chose to animate steam from a coffee cup on a still painting. It was very interesting, simple and fun.

After years of trying and saving and failing to save enough for TVPaint, I finally was able to buy a copy with some help. Which I plan to pay back in the near future. After spending years using Toon Boom (A great program, don't get me wrong) I am finally comfortable animating. I realised very faster that I am about 95% raster based in everything I do, about 3% 3D, 1% traditional and 1% vector. In TVPaint, not only can I express myself better, but I have found the tools far more intuitive. I do wish there was a clipping layer, but after getting used to using masking and it's quirks, it has a lot of advantages with the way it's setup in TVPaint. One thing that has constantly annoyed and disappointed me in Toon Boom was the lack of ease for cel shading shadows and highlights. You either had to use a lot of nodes and the "Cutter Tool" and the frequently wouldn't overlay together or if you tried to animate it on a separate layer, you couldn't see the on...

I have been working on this for 4 months. I couldn't make up my mind. At first I wanted to fully commit to raster based animation, but there were certain features of vector that I wanted to use or couldn't resist. This is all frame by frame animation at 24fps about 60 frames in total, give or take a few frames. Originally I wanted to add a texture to the hair instead of colour but it just didn't look right. I was also hoping to try a water colour look but it just didn't suit the lineart. Hopefully when I learn a little more I can do some compositing and add a few effects such as lighting, shadow, and a background I like.

So I had quite a hectic time with this. I had a 1yr subscription that I imported for retas studio. I tried making this animation in it since I learned it and I found that no matter the program or pencil and paper I still had the one issue that keeps coming up. Export, loss of quality and video editing. After spending days to make just this which I changed over to toonboom studio to complete, I realised that I am going to have to learn to use adobe after effects. And it's been so hard. It's been very overwhelming. Unfortunately I don't have the PC power to use it effectively which means both my PC and Laptop will need an upgrade =___=  Still I am pretty determined to get 2D animation to work for me. I just WISH I had the money to buy toon boom animate or animate pro. But I don't so I'll just have to stick to using multiple programs. At the moment I am using Clip Studio Paint, Adobe After Effects, Toon Boom Studio and Flash. Just makes me glad that I can afford ad...

Lately I've been working on an animation and it will be my first time animating special effects with the aid of Adobe After Effects. So far it's been quite hard because I don't know how to use the program very well. But fortunately I can do quite a lot of things in Toon Boom Studio before I need to take it to AE. I am hoping in about a week to a month that I may be able to post a preview. I will update more about what I am up to tomorrow.