Monday 29 June 2015

Rebelle Digital Watercolor Demo



Rebelle is something I've never used and didn't know about up until now. This video by a user speaks for itself. You can try the online version or download a demo, or purchase a full version which is very reasonably priced.

Friday 12 June 2015

Face Expressions

A range of face poses for Miss Green. I apologize for melting your eyes with the choice of background color.


Thursday 11 June 2015

First Poses

I copied the bone rig from Yellow and used it on Green. It was easy to do. Got the face working like the other two characters, in that I can move it around the body, move the eyes and pupils independently of each other with everything being masked correctly (the most challenging aspect of these simple looking character designs).



  But no face expressions yet.

The Female Colors

This is 'Green', the third character in a group of four based on complementary colors. I'm only posting it because she took a short time to create so I feel I'm getting quicker with the vectors and masking in Anime Studio Pro. She's not rigged yet but I'll try re-using the bone rig from Yellow.


Tuesday 9 June 2015

Some Poses.



I've gone in and fine tuned all the limbs with smart bone actions to fix any weird bending issues, so knocked out some quick poses, he'll be a strange character to animate because of his low hanging arms.

Mr Yellow

The second character (Yellow) rigged and ready (almost) for animation.


Saturday 6 June 2015

Look Development in After Effects

I animated some of the face expressions and added a lighting effect to the Red character. I exported a PNG sequence out of Anime Studio Pro and brought it into After Effects for some experiments with backgrounds and textures, trying to get a feel for a final look if I where to take this exercise further.

Prepping for acting and talking.

I've created a number of smart bone actions for the face. The smart bone dial button makes this a bit quicker than it was in Version 9.5. I'm not sure if this feature was introduced in version 10 or 11, its certainly handy.


Thursday 4 June 2015

Baby Steps ll

Digging deeper into Anime Studio Pro now, adding smart bone actions for eye blinks and some bone controls that allow me to move the face around for a subtle 3D effect.

 photo RED-Sneaky_zps9e8pxt2s.gif

Wednesday 3 June 2015

Anime Studio Pro 11 Frame by Frame explained.

Animation artist Chuck Kenway did this excellent walk-thru of the new Frame by Frame process in Anime Studio Pro 11. This really helps explain how it can be used as part of a complete work-flow in your productions, with all layers (outline, color, shading) being referenced off the first blue pencil layer. Any changes the animator makes to the first layer is passed on up the chain of referenced layers.


Tuesday 2 June 2015

Baby steps.

I've been hard at it, getting back into the Anime Studio Pro work methodology.  It's been slow going too, I only vaguely remembered anything from the last time I'd used it. It got to a point where I had the character set up but I had no idea what order of layers and bones I should adopt.

Then I suddenly had to get the version 11 upgrade before the 33% discount offer expired and that helped a lot. After watching a bunch of Victor Paredes videos I had some idea of how things should be set up, so here is the first thing I've animated with Anime Studio Pro 11.

 photo RED-Walk_zpskasz6oyw.gif

Still somewhat confused with the key-framing steps, but I feel like I've  jumped a major hurdle and ready to get serious again.