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I’ve read from this site (and learned the practical way) that AP isn’t really meant to handle a lot of lasso/select all/rescale/move around etc manipulation; or ‘borderline puppetry’ as i’ve heard it referred as.
I’m still starting out and have a hard time keeping believable consistency across different ‘camera scenes’ in my projects, so i often lasso and stick a bit of what i like into a new frame where i need it to be. I ‘trace’ the bits that i need if the frame i’m taking it from is about 2 frames apart from where i want it to be, some other times i take the frame which has the bit i need, copy that to one frame after where i want it to be, and then trace over that, then delete the copy. I’ve also found that lassoing and moving parts of frames pixel by pixel is the roughest, slowest but also reasonably effective way to test short tweens. So there’s no wonder that data piles up and projects take longer to respond.
So i was wondering, if or when AP will implement a way to reduce data clog created by lasso/select all borderline puppetry? Most drawing programs don’t get cloggy with that..
In the meantime, i’m wondering if anyone has any tips that would help with keeping beliavable consistency in animating without abusing the cutting tools? Beside just constantly flipping back and fro between frames, and the experience-knowledge that just comes after doing this stuff for years, i mean. I’ve tried using the grid feature, but the grids are not very easy to see and don’t really help when the scale or angle of the object should change.
One other question that’s not directly related, but still about a feature i’ve been wondering about but haven’t really seen explained recently… What does taking a frame off the peg do?
Funny, while reading through your post I was thinking maybe the off-pegs feature would be of help in your situation. And then you end with asking about it. 😉
Taking the frame off the pegs might help you – at least in some situations. It works like this:
On PC, hold down Alt and Ctrl (on Mac it’s Alt and Cmd) and then drag to move and rotate your frame to the place you want your subject to be in say, the next frame. Let go of the Alt and Ctrl keys – it will stay off pegs. Now go to the next frame and with back light on, you can now do the next drawing by tracing (or partly tracing) the previous (off-pegs) frame.
You can take as many drawings off the pegs as you want. Normally you will use this feature for doing difficult breakdowns in certain situations. Let’s say you have two key drawings that is far apart – I mean with much space between them. You want to do a breakdown in-between the two keys, but the light table isn’t of much help because the drawings before and after is not close to the spot you’re drawing your breakdown. So you take both key drawings off the pegs (one by one) and move them into the middle where your breakdown is going to be. Now you have good visual feedback from both key drawings and are better able to draw your in-between drawing more accurate.
Once you are finished, you need to pop your off pegs drawings back in place. This is done by again holding down Alt and Ctrl on the off pegs frame – and click the green button.
I hope this explanation is helpful.
And by the way – about your first question. We do plan to have an option for getting rid of the vector data, thus relying on the bitmap only. This will of course make you loose cool abilities like scaling up with no degradation or blurring, but on the other hand, make lassoing a gazillion times no problem. 😉
Cheers,
NielsThanks for the reply!
(Now that i tried it out, it works, and is actually simpler than the explanation. I’ve stumbled on moving something off the pegs accidentally before, so that’s what it was… Now i see why it would be helpful!)
Did i miss this on-pegs off-pegs feature in the tools introduction video? Or was it not covered in the initial ones? I got the concept but i’ve still got some lingering executional questions i’d get the answers to by some simple shuffling around; but i also know there are people who get it a thousand times easier when a video shows it to them.
On the other hand, i’d take the bitmap way without questions. I’d much rather cleanly redraw a blown-up or squished-up frame than deal with 10 seconds of some tools wondering if they’re called or not. (I’m no fan of having an expanded image’s line weight visibly differ from all the others; clean inking is also my favourite process of animating.).
I’m also really looking forward to manually tweening without lag, since i’ve not found an editing program that would be easy to use (also i’m not willing to make any expenses unless i know it’d be worth it… I know AP would) and i’m fairly exhausted from downloading and trying almost any free editing software to see if it would work for tweens and camera movements as easily as animating in AP goes.. Do you perhaps have any recommendations for beginner-friendly software that is more or less capable of applying tweens, camera movements and such?
I really fancy that AP isn’t in my face and doesn’t crowd the interface with all sorts of plugs and tidbits.. I’ve seen on videos some other animation programs and i couldn’t really make sense of them even after seeing people work with them. I’ve also never seen support of such speed, kudos for that!
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