My First Cartoon Test

Hi !

Just arrived here, been playing with animation in the 90’s on the Amiga. I thought I’d give it a go on the PC too but never got around to do it until now. I saw Pencil a few years ago but thought it lacked so much. When I saw that Pencil(2D) is alive again and more advanced I thought I’d give it a go. I’ll keep coming here and see & test your progress. Wonderful work you’ve done one Pencil already. Keep up the good work.

Here’s what I did this evening, took me about 2-3 hours to get the hang of it and to get it right.

4 Likes

Hy!
That a nice test. Good timing and nice design!

This is very good man !

Thank you , I’ll try to do more when I have time. Looking forward to future features and releases of Pencil2D.

@manu
A really nice animation…
He is like a Boss… My Cigarette please!!!

I like it!

Been away from Pencil2D for a while so I thought I’d test a nightly. Ended up with this rough test animation.

So subtle @manu!

Nice. I like the simplicity of the drawing and the movements are nicely applied!

I have already shared your animation in Google+. I am thinking that it was made using Pencil2D, right? If not, I´ll have to change some writtings :slight_smile:

Worked some on the character. Needs atleast one more re-draw, I’m not happy yet. :slight_smile:

Looks cool! But i think his movements are too uniform, i feel something wrong with timing but i can’t say what :slight_smile:

@manu

I see the animation timing as OK.

What I find a lot weird is that the person seems to have only one leg. :slight_smile:
At first glance the man seems to have only one leg, or you just forgot to draw the other…

giving it a slightly different angle from the one which is in front will work better, I think so

Thank you both for your input. You’re right about the timing and missing arms & legs. The animation is very linear and I did that on purpose when I was practicing doing in-between’s, I will remove some where movement should be fastest and add a few where movement slows, when he picks the apple and add a few to get the feelin that he pulls the apple until it snaps off.

If I want to add frames, can Pencil2D “insert” frames so the frames to the right get pushed one step forward ? Can it do that on all layers also simultaneously?

@manu
For inserting frames between an already filled timeline, just double click the frame right after the one you want to add a new one (notice all the following frames to your right will change colour to a dark-colour). Then drag any of those dark-frames to your right. They will move as one.

Clicking on any other frame (not the dark ones) will bring the dark-frames to its previous colour/behaviour

For joining separated long-file-frames just do it vice-versa :slight_smile:

Thanks for the tip, it wasn’t so hard :slight_smile:

I reworked the animation, don’t think it’s finished but it’s a little bit better. Is it possible to merge layers, btw.?

Much much better now! :slight_smile:

Testing walk cycle drawing.

Why does Pencil2D movie export insist on doing a pixelated export ? Bug ?

Run, run… I will catch you sooner or later :slight_smile:
Nice one! Keep improving.

Animation is so fun to do! And the feeling is like when we were little children… the world is made for animation!

@manu

I think the pixelated export is because Pencil2D currently uses a specific ffmpeg command line for export, which may not get the best results. As i understand it, a complete replacement of the video export is being planned. In the meantime, if you want the best possible compression/quality mix you might consider exporting frames to a png image sequence, then encoding with a video editor or a custom ffmpeg command line.

Nice animation =o)

First few seconds of my upcoming cartoon, a teaser :wink:

Coloring this has take a lot more time than it should have, I don’t know if I want to blame it solely on Pencil2D but, coloring seems to be done in a way that if there’s another bitmap layer beneath the e.g character outline then the color goes to the layer down below. That’s ok but it results in that you will not see the true color, before you go to the camera layer (it’s much brighter than actual color) also it’s a few bugs that happens when the outline “leaks” and you want to undo. I get why it’s done like this, because the colors blend with the (black) outline just perfectly I just wonder if it needs to be done like this, couldn’t the color layer be “invisible” because the only time I need to go to the color layer is if I want to use the color picker to pick the exact same color I used. Enough of my ramblings I hope someone understood what I meant. (Note I haven’t used coloring in the vector layer at all, I don’t get my head around how to do that and how to work fast with coloring that way.

Getting there, but still loads of work to do…