This Toon Boom Animate tutorial is a simple pose-to-pose animation exercise of a blob splitting off a baby blob. Traditional animation terms are covered like keyframes, breakdowns, and tweens. This tutorial, like the stick tutorial plays with idea of a basic way counting when animating – instead of 1-2-3-4-5, for this pose to pose exercise you count 1-5-3-2-4… watch the video, you’ll catch on. Enjoy.

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This tutorial uses Toon Boom Animate to create a multiplane landscape, in addition shows how to creating a wiggly line effect (Ed, Edd, and Eddy or Dr. Katz) on each part of the scene. The clouds and sun in the shot are parented to the camera to to push the illusion that objects furthest away in the horizon barely move.
28 minutes/103.2MB… be patient while loading

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Here is part 2 of how to animate a character walking up stairs in Toon Boom Animate. This tutorial covers basic rigging, motion tweens, z-depth, and patches.
13 minutes/31.4MB… be patient while loading

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Okay, for those of you who haven’t heard, I’ve stopped using Flash for animation. Before I explain why, allow me to be clear—I haven’t stopped using Flash for other projects (web design, motion comics, etc.), I just no longer animate with it.

For animation, I switched over to a product from Toon Boom called Animate – right out of the box, Animate does things for my animation work flow that Flash only can do with plug-ins, and, in some cases not well, or not at all.

Though I’m sure there are other advantages for animators to switch from Flash to Toon Boom, for me and my workflow, there are three reasons worth mentioning – character rigging, a true 3D camera, and automated lip sync.

Character Rigging
Flash CS4 did add the Bone tool, however, Animate’s IK system, IMHO. is a much better solution. Cartoon Smart did an awesome comparison of the two here.

Camera
Flash, to date, has no camera of its own unless you know how to “fake” one or program one using Actionscript. Though I can’t talk about Flash’s lack of camera without mentioning V-Cam. V-Cam is a free movie clip that creates a pseudo-camera for Flash. However, when compared to Animate’s True Space camera, V-Cam lacks Z-depth and the ability to create multiplane scenes.

All of this can be faked in Flash (trust me, I’ve done a few), but having the ability to create camera moves in minutes by simply moving the camera instead of moving your object, scene or symbol is much less tedious, and far more efficient.

Lip Sync
Last but not least, automated lip sync. Almost all of my animations involve some sort of lip sync, from simple dialogue to song lyrics. Typically, in Flash, this process for me can take anywhere from two hours to a full day, or two, depending on the level of complexity or number of characters. However, Animate can automate this for you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a stickler for lip sync, so my preference is to go in after the automation and tweak a few things. The bottom line: I can now get my lip syncs done in a fraction of the time.

In closing, I realize the Flash vs. Toon Boom discussion is one of those conversations that can be lumped in with sex, religion, politics, Mac vs. PC and, more recently, Apple vs. Adobe, but IMHO, there is no reason for discord.

Both Adobe Flash and Toon Boom Animate are amazing tools, and I use both. A hammer and a wrench are also great tools, and again I use both; however, I do not hammer in nails with a wrench, nor will I animate with Flash, for that I use Toon Boom Animate.

Don’t take my word for it; try out the free PLE (Personal Learning Edition) of Animate.

OK Campers, there is a lot involved in this tutorial. It’s a Rainy Cityscape in Toon Boom Animate 2.0. It is 26 minutes and covers: custom settings, Importing Adobe Illustrator files, camera set-up, importing image files, making a rain effect, importing sound, drawing swap, swf test, exporting mov

If you don’t have a copy of Toon Boom Animate 2, download the FREE PLE
version here and follow along.

…and click here to download the support files

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omG! So I was up at about 1am randomly searching Google for stuff, as I do that from time to time, and found a piece of Open Source and or FREE 2D animation software, Pencil. It ROCKS! Enough talk, let me show you.

Straight on animation tutorial using Pencil.

BTW, using another FREE resource to record this, Jing by Techsmith, more on this later.

Here is a lesson on seamless rotations in Flash, from the animation section of the book. This is an example of using Motion Tweens, and rotation options in the Property Inspector.

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