Monthly Update: March 2021

 The current process, animation, for fun.

Afterward, back to making a comic book.

I've been trying out new animation software, Callipeg and Adobe Animate (used to be Flash), along with Source Filmmaker that I'm already used to for comparison. Here are the results so far for working about a day or two with each of them and also my thoughts about them.

With Callipeg, I managed to make it look like this:

The most organic, flexible, and fun workflows to work with. 

The downsides are that it's harder to make an object not to look jitter, and copy and pasting animation is a lot of manual labor working with individual keyframes and layers at a time.

It's easy to paint with and human character animation handling was decent with a few copy and pasting layers. But it's a bit of a headache if I aim to have a few dozen flesh/tentacle parts moving together.

Next up, Adobe Animate:

Well, I couldn't even get it to animate without it trying to melt my computer.

I never liked Adobe Flash, It seemed to always work against me. Adobe Animate is a bit improved version of that. And I had more practice with visual arts too. So I thought I could do it. But, nah, it is still quite demoralizing.

The software has a lot of ways to make a lot of things work. But the ways it is set up by default are not quite what I thought would be intuitive. So I have to keep looking up tutorials for every process and unforeseen settings I have to tweak, all of which seemingly need to be done in exact order or the whole thing falls apart later and I have to do it all over, which gets a bit harder when I don't know what their definitions are to ask the internet. That and preview of the animation is really slow. I had to wait half a minute every time I want to adjust a leg's position to make sure everything looks smooth.

Rant aside, I might go back to Adobe After Effect. My previous Flash-like animations were all done on that and I thought that wasn't too bad.

And Source Filmmaker:

A fraction of the time I spent in this already makes it look quite a bit better than the other two. It is almost the best option by far until the realization that all of these models are at least somewhat copyrighted (and I don't like using other people's characters, especially if I am attached to them in non-sexual ways) and I have little to no control over how things are shaped, set up, and rigged, and human models I found so far cannot perform yoga poses without their body parts (mostly shoulder, elbow, and groin) collapsing.

It makes me want to learn Blender. Or maybe Unreal Engine is good for this too depending on how much and how well it lets me make my own models and rigs.

But until then, I'm going to focus on animating that image for now. I've been missing animating and there are a few decent models that I could use to make works faster and interesting.

Oh, and, the comic book trial release I posted a week ago had good receptions. Thank you all for the support, ideas, and compliments. A lot of motivation boosts with that one.

It'll be fun making the next one.