How do you animate?

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briannavon
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How do you animate?

#1 Post by briannavon »

I have wondered for the longest how people make animations for their games. So I have two questions :

What free programs are there?

Do you have to draw second by second?
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Re: Hw do you animate?

#2 Post by dramspringfeald »

briannavon wrote:I have wondered for the longest how people make animations for their games. So I have two questions :
What free programs are there?
Gimp is the only one I know that can do animated gifs.

Do you have to draw second by second?
no, you draw 7 to 36 frames a second. Good luck.
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Re: Hw do you animate?

#3 Post by SundownKid »

You can get a way with a LOT less than 36 frames per second, that's just ridiculous. You can look at the Phoenix Wright animations for an example of the minimum amount of frames needed, they only have about 3 frames per animation. Of course, you can also have "idle" animations, but that might get annoying if it's not done well.

Making an actual anime is a different matter altogether, now that would require a lot more work to animate.

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Re: Hw do you animate?

#4 Post by dramspringfeald »

SundownKid wrote:You can get a way with a LOT less than 36 frames per second, that's just ridiculous. You can look at the Phoenix Wright animations for an example of the minimum amount of frames needed, they only have about 3 frames per animation. Of course, you can also have "idle" animations, but that might get annoying if it's not done well.

Making an actual anime is a different matter altogether, now that would require a lot more work to animate.
You can get away with 2 frames if you wanted but for a fluid animation 7 is about the most basic number with today's animation software. However if you are referring to "mouth flaps" check down in Ren'Py Cookbook

If you want to see what i'm talking about "edit" an Animated Gif in Photoshop or Gimp and you'll see what I'm talking about.
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Re: How do you animate?

#5 Post by nyaatrap »

briannavon wrote:I have wondered for the longest how people make animations for their games. So I have two questions :

What free programs are there?

Do you have to draw second by second?
It's not clear what kind of animation you want to make. Most animations in professional VNs are done with Adobe After Effect. It modifies a few drawn images and add particle effects. Artists barely draw more than 2 frames in VN.

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Re: How do you animate?

#6 Post by LVUER »

I use Flash to animate. It's not free though. PlasticAnimationPaper is free (the link: http://plasticanimationpaper.dk/) but personally I think Flash is way better than this software. Currently, I'm curious with AnimeStudio.

When I animate, I draw it frame-by-frame, but when possible, use tweening to save work and time. I want to use vector, but using tablet for vectoring in Flash really sucks so in the end, I use brush tool (which is really too bad since vectoring is resolution independent which is handy).

When making hand-drawn animation, you don't really need to have 36 fps. That's overkill. Even for a video game, 30fps is already super-smooth and sometimes hard to achieve without good specs. If you look at video/film properties, most of them have 24 fps and our eyes can't really tell the differences. IIMN, 24 fps is already called "FULL animated".

When I make animation, usually I only set it at 12 or 16 fps.
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Re: How do you animate?

#7 Post by briannavon »

nyaatrap wrote:
briannavon wrote:I have wondered for the longest how people make animations for their games. So I have two questions :

What free programs are there?

Do you have to draw second by second?
It's not clear what kind of animation you want to make. Most animations in professional VNs are done with Adobe After Effect. It modifies a few drawn images and add particle effects. Artists barely draw more than 2 frames in VN.
The animation I want is stuff like a few seconds anime like clips. Like the image moving to show two characters talking or a 3 second fight scene that is not very detailed (like old TV shows where it would show a dust cloud and some hands moving)
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Re: How do you animate?

#8 Post by dramspringfeald »

briannavon wrote:The animation I want is stuff like a few seconds anime like clips. Like the image moving to show two characters talking or a 3 second fight scene that is not very detailed (like old TV shows where it would show a dust cloud and some hands moving)
Then yeah, either 7/21/36 Per second.

Any less and you will have a choppy animation. More will have a cleaner Animations.

*Edit*
Frames Per Second
7 for digital format
21 for minimal CRT format
24/26 For standard TV
36 for Higher Def and smoother animation.
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Re: How do you animate?

#9 Post by TheGuraGuraMan »

For mouths and eye animation, I think 3 frames is good. Didn't try yet for the whole body, so don't really know...

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Re: How do you animate?

#10 Post by dramspringfeald »

I've experimented with Animation before. Link (It's supposed to be 30 seconds if I ever do it again)

It's a little bit of a pain but you start off with a number of shots like camera angles and the like then you fill in the gaps.

Formats
For Still frame Video it's 1 image shot 3 to 5 times, repeated a minimum of 7 times to maintain a fluid or seamless animation < this is true of ALL Animation and Video. Higher Frame rate (More pictures per second) means cleaner animation.

For Digital Format such as flash 7 frames a second Minimum fluid animation, this goes for CGI, Flash and the like. A higher frame rate means a cleaner production but more work.


So a "3 second fight animation" will require Either 26*7 images for standard animation or about 26 Digital frames. Keep in mind fighting requires more animations then standard animation or it will look "rushed" or very fast.


Also your "Poof" would need to be at least 8 frames.
0 Nothing has happened allowing for the image to remain hidden until activated
1 The "blast" small particles of dust and the like being pushed out by the foot.
2 The forming of the cloud
3 the cloud being pushed
4 The cloud moving further away
5 The cloud fading
6 the last of the cloud fading as particles
7 back to "0" to reset the image.

Again I suggest you take apart a few Gifs to see how they work.
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Re: How do you animate?

#11 Post by suqling »

briannavon wrote: What free programs are there?

Do you have to draw second by second?
For 2D hand-drawn animation (your frame-by-frame drawing), you can try Pencil which is an open-source animation program. However it doesn't render in Ren'Py supported formats so you need to get a free video converter along with it.

Like nyaatrap had mentioned, alot of artists would choose to rely on After Effects to animate because it's both able to 'animate' layers of drawings like paper cut-outs or create illusion of 3D camera motion in 2D planes. Instead of drawing each frame here, you place the keys of each image to their desired position and let the program render the animation for you.
It's versatile and efficient, but not the best fit if you're into traditional frame-by-frame animation.

For that I personally use Photoshop CS3 and later using the its Animation Timeline.. we work on either 24 frames-per-sec or 12 frames-per-sec but dramspringfeald brought up some numbers you could refer to as well. Good luck, friend.

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Re: How do you animate?

#12 Post by thekobester11 »

Well yeah, there's gimp...

As for those what they use in anime, they use the program called Retas. It's kinda pricy T.T
But you can always use photoshop or flash. Convert your animation to .tga (targa, commonly used in anime) format and import it to after effects.

Anime studio is basically flash with a friendlier GUI

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Re: How do you animate?

#13 Post by Greeny »

I'd say that Ren'Py's own ATL (Animation and Transformation Language) can handle some decent enough animations...

It can handle scales, rotation and movement without needing frames as well has sporting the ability to play multiple still frames in succession.

If you're more inclined towards a programming mindset, this can be a great place to start if you don't already have a background in animation.

Special software may offer far more options, but you'll need to take a lot of time to learn them.
ATL... not so much.
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Re: How do you animate?

#14 Post by SelLi »

If you want a free way to animate your characters, you can... just use Ren'Py, can't you?
The same way one can animate a character's eyes moving and such.
I don't remember exactly how to do it, though.
But as long as you have a drawing program, I'm pretty sure you can draw a bunch of frames, have them each individually saved somewhere in your game folder, and have them played in quick succession to make an animation just in Ren'Py.

I've also been wondering if there were any good, free 2D animation programs.
If you're looking for a free, vector based animation program, then there's Synfig. (Vectors are typically less detailed than bitmap images- just think of Flash.)
And, Pencil is also a free animation program. I've heard of pencil a long time ago and tried it out, and I found way too many errors and it was terrible. I've heard that there are ways around these errors, though. They have a forum that you can check out.
There is also Pencil 2D, which, similarly, has a forum and is free. I haven't used Pencil 2D very much, but during the short animation I did to test it I didn't get many errors at all.

I hope I helped and wasn't just rambling to you :)

You can also animate in the Gimp and export them as .gif files.

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Re: How do you animate?

#15 Post by PN04 »

Vectorian Giotto is a free flash style animation program.
http://vectorian.com/giotto/

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