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Virtual On: OT, Tech Romancer, Cannon Spike, Power Stone, Last Blade 2....basically any and every fighting game...

flapping anime mouths

Actually, another thing I've started doing recently is playing "Sakuga MAD" playlists on my computer while animating. I don't know if you're into anime like that, but it's keeps my inspiration meter charged to look up and see an amazing anime sequence done by one of my favorite artists, and there's no pesky story or dialog to distract me from drawing.

I can't have an actual movie playing because I spend more time turning around to watch the cool parts than I do drawing. Podcasts are good though; I recommend the Indoor Kids if you're into nerdy videogame stuff.

Also, DVD commentaries are great too.

When you're inking with the brush tool zoom in 200-400% and ink with a fatter brush to get better looking line consistency. Other than that, looks good.

There's no fast way to get thousands of subscribers. Fan bases have to be built from scratch one person at a time. In addition to posting content regularly, It helps if you are actively participating on youtube in the form of subscribing, liking and commenting on things posted by potential subscribers. You can't just have a one sided relationship with a platform like youtube and expect people to just come to you, being active on YT is a form of advertising in and of itself. You're basically selling yourself (well, your online self) as a brand, not necessarily your content.

You may also want to work on branding you channel better. Things like posting custom thumbnails for your videos, or having something eye-catching in your icon that represents your channel but also acts like a little preview of what to expect on your channel. You could probably also make better use of the 'channel art' space.

Overall though, CONTENT is king. You have to be pumping out stuff people want to see. All those channel links you posted are filled with pop culture-y parodies, and just like this place, the parodies are always going to be most popular.

P.S.
I just subscribed to you :P

It's been my experience that just adding something in the background is enough, just so it doesn't look like they're floating in limbo (unless that's what you're going for)

If you can't figure out what the numbers mean, then what's the point of adding them? You don't need to put random numbers on your model sheets just because they do.

I'm not so sure about the red dots, can you take a screen shot?

As far as coloring, AS requires that all your shapes be closed before you can fill them, then if you need an opening, you have to make that line invisible(they don't call in 'invisible', I forget what it's called within AS. It's like 'hide segment' or something). That's why most people tend to build their drawings using the shape tools and layers, like to make a head they'll take a circle and add points and mush it around until it's the right shape.

I like AS for rigging and being able to quickly bust out animation; and the camera controls and rendering are really good. It's just the drawing tools suck so much. But for puppet animation I find it a little bit more flexible to work with than trying to edit a million layers in flash.

At 11/17/14 09:31 AM, Fim wrote:

At 11/16/14 02:14 AM, Celshaded wrote:

Sorry for bugging but I have a few more questions if you can help a brother out.

Sometimes when I'm drawing in frame 1 there are random red dots on the screen, what the fuck are they doing?

Also, generally I like to draw with the freehand tool, but when it comes to colouring in a shape often AS doesn't understand where the boundries are meant to be and it won't colour anything in. Is there no 'close small gaps' tool like there is in flash?

After this project I don't see myself working with AS again, it's such a ball ache!

Yeah, so far I've only really been able to make minor adjustments to premade keyframes, like sliding them around to adjust the timing. Each layer has it's own timeline, which is really weird, but I try and just select the individual parts in the puppet as opposed to selecting each layer.

As far as I know it's really not good for doing detailed pose to pose animation where you go back and add more keys between your pre-existing ones.

There's a thing where you can save premade animation (like walk cycles for example) and just insert them into preexisting animation (i forget what they call it, but there are tutorials for it on youtube). So in theory you can animate lip sync and walking separately and then add them together to have a character talking while walking.

I would recommend to keep doing all your scenes as separate flash files, render them all as individual swf's and then just combine them together into a single movie file using Swivel.

http://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/flash-resources/swivel

At 11/13/14 05:09 PM, SokkoTM wrote: Yeah same here. So what program is good for creating anime?

Flash ain't half bad.

Tips:
Make all your assets and pieces in a different program and then import and assemble them in Anime Studio instead of trying to use the terrible drawing tools. You can sort of "model" characters in AS using the shape tools, but it takes so long, I wouldn't recommend doing that unless you absolutely need your characters to be vector.

I have post it note above my computer about what order to do stuff when rigging--
1. Make bone layers
2. Add character parts to bone layers
3. Make bones and bind parts last
There are tutorials on youtube where people go into further detail about rigging, but it took me a while to learn that if you don't follow that set of rules in that order, your rig won't come out right.

The auto lipsync works better with the poppagyo (i think that's what it's called) plug in. There are detailed tutorials online for that as well.

Um...the only other thing I can think of is that you can really only animate straight ahead in AS and that you can't really get to complex with the movements (unless you're using vector)

Here's a test thing I did in AS not too long ago:
http://youtu.be/poGj-7RY0QU

Was there anything else you wanted to know specifically?

People have been doing that since the beginning of time. If you do strong enough keys, people won't even notice unless you tell them.

This thread! XD

Well whatever you decide to do, let me know and I'll do UI and ingame art for it, maybe even some sprite animation if it's simple enough. I really need UI and ingame stuff for my portfolio...

Would you be into making a simple shmup? I would do all the art for it.

It's just a matter of getting moderately proficient in the games in your rotation. It's like riding a bike, even if you're rusty you should still remember enough to have a good match.

Beat Rush

Bayonetta 2 for sure

Grandia 2 on Dreamcast

I'm glad this thread got revived, I love stuff like this! Here's mine:

Jesus, what the hell did you even make this in!? If you say After Effects my head will explode. Fucking phenomenal!

At 9/28/14 10:56 PM, Hero101 wrote:

At 9/28/14 02:39 PM, Celshaded wrote: I ink my stuff on paper and use illustrator's live trace to convert it to vector and then import it into flash. Live trace is way better than the 'convert to bitmap' thing in flash.

Oh very cool dude. I was very curious if there was a way to draw something on paper and then plop it into a program. So if I draw something on paper, scan it into my computer, and use Illustrator's live trace to convert to bitmap - will I be able to do things with it such as using the paint bucket to fill inside the lines?

yeah, absolutely. That's actually the main reason for me vectorizing my lines. If there was a way to get clean paint bucket fills in raster, I would just do it in photoshop; But the paint bucket is such a huge time saver.

I specifically use illustrator because you can set it to automatically delete the white of the paper and preserve your vector line work as opposed to "trace bitmap" in Flash, where you have to go through and delete all the whites individually.

Persona 3 if you're into rpg's

Sonic Heroes.

I ink my stuff on paper and use illustrator's live trace to convert it to vector and then import it into flash. Live trace is way better than the 'convert to bitmap' thing in flash.

At 9/18/14 12:10 PM, ThePivotsXXD wrote: "Freddy Got Fingered"

YES!!!
I can't wait to sell my cartoon so I can buy my girl a bag of jewls!

Well if the only thing you're EVER going to use your computer for is running Flash, then yeah all the stuff Mr Smarty Pants said up there will work. But if you ever want/need to use flash in combination with other programs like after effects or premiere, then you will need that ram and processing power for EDITING AND RENDERING. Flash is terrible at rendering video and Swivel has its limitations when it comes to rendering uncompressed video. If you're only going to be making swf files then that's something you won't really have to worry about.

Also, as a rule of thumb you never want to use scenes in flash because they are glitchy as hell (unless they've fixed it in cs6, I'm still using cs5).

Working in individual files will require you to combine everything together later on in an editing program, or sit there and copy and paste hundreds of frames of animation into one file. Both of those things will require a sufficient amount of ram.

There's a free program called Gamesalad. Google it and download it.