If you have read some of the posts I have written here, then you already know that I have delayed the completion of my animation project for a couple of years. But during that time, I have found myself procrastinating in great ways. Yes, in not doing what I was supposed to do, I ended up learning one or two cool things, and I have to admit that I love to waste time animating effects.

Click on the image to see it in motion.
(Be patient; it takes a while to load sometimes)

Water is one of the most entertaining things to animate. It is very difficult to get right too (and I probably haven’t yet). I became interested in water animation after I first came in contact with Adam Phillips’ Brackenwood shorts. I could not believe they were done in Flash. I had to find out how he had done them. Fortunately enough, he wrote a post on his blog about ActionScript camera effects in Flash, and he posted a small waterfall scene of Prowlies At The River to illustrate his point (I tried to find the original post to give you a nice link, but I had no luck). The camera was a nice feature indeed, and I used it a lot, but I was amazed by the waterfall itself. It was in that file; all of its frames. I felt as if I had struck gold.

What drew my attention is that the final result looked wonderful and everything was accomplished with only six drawings and a hold for each of the waterfall’s elements; meaning it was done “on two’s”. He was still animating at twelve frames per second at that time (He animates at 30fps nowadays, I think). I tried to replicate the same principles with the fountain you see above these lines and I ended up with a nice result. I didn’t know I was developing a useful skill, which solely landed me all of the freelance gigs I’ve done.

There are other animated effects, besides water that never stop amazing me, like lighting effects, smoke, fire, and moving sand. The thing is that, even if they are important skills to master, they should come last in your list of things to learn, since there’s no effect that can outshine a good character animation. Character animation is the soul of your piece and it is the only thing that will say whether a story is good or not (or finished in my case). What I’m trying to say is… “stop reading and get back to those characters!! Are you done with your model sheets?” But before you go, share your thoughts about animation procrastination in the comments.

Background Created in Toon Boom Studio 4

With vector drawings you get many advantages. First of all, you don’t have to wrestle a bitmap into TBS. Yes, you can import bitmaps easily, but lots of TBS features don’t work with them. Another important feature is that you can easily animate a vector background created within the application. The image above, for example, is made up of countless “elements” or layers containing a single piece of the drawing each. All you have to do is slide in another drawing element between the rocks and the river bed and with a few frames you can animate a watter ripple effect (I’ll post something about this effect in particular in a later post). Finally, setting up a multiplane shot is much easier if you draw the elements directly into Toon Boom.

Start with a rough sketch, drawing directly into TBS

What I do is I draw a rough sketch of what I want. Then I send that to the static light table and in a new element I create more rigourous perspective lines and visual aids. I send that to the static ligth table and on a third element I do cleanup lines and fill them with color. Sometimes you’ll find that things that were in the original rough don’t quite work the way you wanted them to. This is the time to make corrections. In some cases you don’t need perspective lines, and common sense will dictate what to do. Specially, when drawing nature. Turn on “Draw On Top Layer” in your “Tools” menu and paint like an artist with the brush tool. Construct depth by using at least three colors for every item (I’ll adress color and palettes in another post too; heey, we’re building a list!), and pay attention to details.

How about some color now?

These are from the project I’m currently working on. How do you like them so far? Leave me a comment or two. See ya next time.

]]> http://www.telluastory.com/2008/12/15/creating-stunning-backgrounds-with-tbs/feed/ 0 http://www.telluastory.com/2008/06/17/tap-tap-tap-is-this-thing-on-oh-there-you-go-hello-everyone/ http://www.telluastory.com/2008/06/17/tap-tap-tap-is-this-thing-on-oh-there-you-go-hello-everyone/#comments Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:07:07 +0000 Renato Vargas http://rindolphus.wordpress.com/?p=21 Continue reading →]]> Hello everyone. After much posting on forums and other websites, I decided I wanted to have a better way of sharing insights with fellow animation enthusiasts and professionals, while I try to tell interesting stories, through animated shorts and illustration. To create my animations I’ll be using Toon Boom Software.

I’ll be focusing on the different stages of animation, as I progress. Although the solution to some problems that I encounter during the process might come across as tutorials, this is not a Toon Boom tutorials website. If you are interested in those, more talented friends like Will Reinhardt and Jerry Keslensky are already doing a great job at that. I urge you to check out their sites. This is more of a personal site that I’m starting just so I don’t go crazy from talking to myself, since I’ve been doing a lot of that lately and my inner me, won’t shut up about this “animation” thing.

I’m looking forward to your comments.

Renato