Pisarz' news/status & other stuff.

Pisarz

I managed to make my first animated gif using Photoshop! I drew every frame (because I can't import any) and this was the result:

This could be useful for designing animations for the units in O.M.

One small step for a worm, one giant leap for MACHINES hahaha

Byrgius

@Pisarz Photoshop isn't meant for more complex animations believe me, you'll have a lot of trouble with it doing such concept animations. I recommend using Adobe Flash instead, you can export in .gif too I think, otherwise you could just upload an .avi on Youtube :)

Pisarz

@Byrgius
Thank you!
Do you mean this?
Yet, Photoshop has other features as well, which is quite useful for doing things like this without pen and paper!
animaction gif.gif
(According to the research that I did, these drawings were made either by Jin Kim or Glen Keane. It is a pencil animation test for Disney's Tangled.)

I'll keep on searching then, because apparently flash is becoming obsolete, (this is another article as well).

Storyboards are something that I also want to develop. Maybe I could combine these and other techniques (and software)!

Pisarz

@Byrgius
Umm... yeah, I think I now actually understand what you meant. Each time I work on a frame, the previous frames change according to the frame being created/modified. Yet, it seems that there is a way to use this disadvantage in my favour! To overcome this, I need to be VERY organized. Of course, as you said, I cannot make complex animations with this but it is nice to see that certain ideas can be shown easily (well, I can, but they need to be brief). This could be used for storyboards if done well... I need a system! (Or, again, another software.)

So far, I developed the following procedure:

Simple line drawings need to be done first to ensure that movements flow naturally.
After drawing each frame, start again, drawing each frame with details based on reference points from the first stage.
Finally, verify that frames are in the right order and that the timing is correct.

These 3 steps, if done carefully, should enable me (or anyone else) to do animation tests like the one above.

I'll experiment with it and upload the results!

@Byrgius
@bilal
Also, I wanted to share this video. I think it is quite interesting =)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZJLtujW6FY

Pisarz

First test:

bilal

@Pisarz
The main reason why flash player is becoming obsolete is because HTML 5 can actually run on your browser without crashing or having a horrible framerate (Shots fired).

However, I don't really know any other 2D animation programs than flash, but there is always the option to convert from flash to a video, then run the video in HTML 5 on a website. Plus I think adobe is working on an exporter to HTML 5 from flash. So it's more of flash player that's becoming obsolete rather than the editor.

Pisarz

@bilal
@Byrgius
I kept on researching about the subject and found very interesting things. I'll do some attempts with Photoshop and then see what I can do. Yet, I want to use the software that I already have, and for that I have to learn how to use them, and for that I have to practice, and for that I need time, and...

Challenge accepted!

Byrgius

@Pisarz Yes that's the one. Even though it's becoming obsolete you can export the file to movie format or .gif. It's still a good tool to make animations and one good thing for example is that you see a previous frame with transparency on current frame so you can easily draw over. The flash format is only meant for (obsolete) flash players which is uncompressed and all in vector graphics while other exports result in compression and pixelization - still the compression is not noticable by human eye.

I can tell you first hand because I'm working with Photoshop animations daily and there are A LOT of things that make the job frustrating. The concept animations you have in mind I think are even more complex though.

Pisarz

@Byrgius

"...one good thing for example is that you see a previous frame with transparency on current frame so you can easily draw over..."

So, you mean this?

Problem solved!

=)

Can something like this be done with Photoshop? Although I guess that After Effects would be a better option.

Byrgius

The "draw over previous frame" is way better in flash. In photoshop for example if you have done like 50 frames and you want to change something in between you have to change it in every frame seperately - this is to my view a huge downfall. I assume you'd want to change a lot of things while doing the animation or maybe you'll miss something, that way you'll have this problem constantly.

For the gif you posted: yes but only if you have frames rendered already. The frames were exported from some 3D software like Maya or Blender and then put together as gif. Although I must warn you .gif only supports 256 colors so it's really hard to make it look good. There are ways to make it look better taken out of video format, but it will still be only 256 colors once in gif. I'd recommend exporing as something like .avi or .mp4 if you want to make animations like above.

Example of gif from motion picture format:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaXnYRlAtks

GIF explained:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

There's another way to get around in having more than 256 colors in gif but I haven't tried it out, ever. Theoretically you could divide your (unprocessed) frame sequence into several squares and add 256 colors to each of them. So it would take as many colors in each section as possible (if there's not more than 256 then the algorithm would compress), and if you sum all together you could get around 2000.

I haven't tried this tehniqe though for at least two reasons: I haven't found a decent software to do so; it would't take seconds to download the gif but minutes. GIFs can take a long time to download even in 256 colors (up to 5mb) but we're talking easily of 10Mb+ here, so it's actually like preloading a short video before watching it.

My conclusion is that gif is an outdated format which should better be left alone. You could do much better with simple video format.

Also here's my first Maya animation I did few years back and it was all exported as still images (frames) and rendered with Sony Vegas:
https://youtu.be/ZRaXzUmC-Hk

Pisarz

@Byrgius

Thanks!

"...you have to change it in every frame..."

Yes, my system was meant to overcome this, but it is quite hard when the amount of layers increases.

The following video portrays some of the things that I wanted to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgylViCFHAs

Also, your trailer is awesome!

Byrgius

@Pisarz

Also, your trailer is awesome!

Thanks, unfinished though and the planetary textures didn't render in full quality and I couldn't figure out why.
This is the first frame I rendered while I was working on project and it looked much, much better:

The planet actually consisted 3 spheres. One is the planet itself, one is a transparent sphere for cloud textures and shadows and another is gassy atmosphere which difuses the light around it. All spining in different directions to give it more realistic feel.

If you want to make animations as above I'd recommend learning some 3D program, It would be way more convenient when making sketch animations. Textures and lightning/materials are very complex to learn and master, but simple modeling and animation isn't so you could make results quite quick and you could use the models later for the game as well.

AvionAris

@Byrgius said:

Also here's my first Maya animation I did few years back and it was all exported as still images (frames) and rendered with Sony Vegas:

Wah, man, that's some pretty interesting stuff! I like it!
By the way, why is this forum so... empty? I mean, I know it's quite hard to make a topic about Machines, its developement, ect... but... wow, I think I need to post something. Thing is...
...what?

yay.gorilla < don't forget about my signature lawl