Pencil for Smooth Animating?

[Blounty]

If I wanted to make an animation as smooth as, say ; Aqua teen hunger force or Family Guy would it be better to use the pencil tool?

[Boss]

It depends on what you prefer to do. I'm not an expert at all but on Flash you can smooth out your lines you make with the brush so if you zoom in and draw with reasonable smoothing you could imitate such a style after smoothing it out and bending the lines, or whatever is needed etc.

[bl00db47h]

I don't know if you could match the skills of professional TV shows, but yeah. What I usually do is set the line thickness to about 2 or 3, and set the smoothing to 67. Try drawing with that. One thing though; you can't see the actual lines in onion skinning. So color them or else you can't see anything with the onion skin feature on.

[Ani-x]

At 2/22/10 08:25 PM, bl00db47h wrote: I don't know if you could match the skills of professional TV shows, but yeah. What I usually do is set the line thickness to about 2 or 3, and set the smoothing to 67. Try drawing with that. One thing though; you can't see the actual lines in onion skinning. So color them or else you can't see anything with the onion skin feature on.

I see the lines with onion skinning.
Line tool is your best option if you want the smoothest line. I usually set the smoothness to no more then 30, that is because flash tends to do weird things with it.

You can also zoom in a lot, Then use the smooth option after it is colored.

Your best bet is just a really steady hand.
IF you do want that professional drawling lines and such, Try Toon Boom, It has a better drawling system. (but it is not alot like flash, So be warned on that)

[M-Shack]

The pencil tool does help you get steadier lines, but the animation is because they basically use tweens and puppets. They don't do it frame by frame. They have different images of all of the characters in all their poses then replace them when needed.

[PeterSatera]

Not all the time...When it comes to Family Guy they do redraw the body movements frame by frame when the twist and turn. It's not always a bunch of tweened elements, you can see this when studying the animation frame by frame.

You should be able to recreate the style if your artistic skills are high enough in Flash. Both Aqua Teen Hunger force and Family guy though would have to be approached by using different techniques. Family guy can be achieved by using the line tool (then manipulating the lines) and the pencil tool.

You can see that here.

As for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the lines are of varied with and edge. You would have to use the brush tool OR use the line tool/pencil tool convert it to fills and manually adjust the widths where appropriate. You can see that here too.

Colours for both animations are vibrant, so the approach is easy there.

[Zyphonee]

I personally never use the pencil, I find it completely annoying, however, when doing lots of FBF, I suppose it could be used for making the clean linework, and use the brush for the rough sketch.

[PeterSatera]

If it helps...The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad all use Toon Boom Digital Pro, which is basically Toon Boom Studio with more features. For Frame by Frame animation, the traditional way (which always beats tweens :P) it's a much better package for animation, namely because Flash is a web development program. It was never designed to be strictly an animation package for cartoons.