Line drawing in Illustrator

This took me a while to figure out the "best way" to do... but I eventually stumbled on to this blog:

http://danidraws.com/2007/01/08/creating-line-drawings-in-adobe-illustrator/

Good stuff.

Basically...

1) Take your hand drawn sketch, scan it in
2) Place it on a new Illustrator document
3) Turn it to a template
4) Make a new layer (this will be the inking layer)
5) Use brushes and a drawing tablet to "ink" the lines, don't worry about over-shooting lines
6) Use pen tool to add anchor points where lines intersect and overshoot each other
7) Use direct select tool to delete the overhanging parts

This is very useful because importing vector art in to Toon Boom Studio is how we're doing things on our end.  Drawing in TBS is nice, but really awkward correcting my line art.

Oh, and if you don't know how to import AI files in to TBS, you have to save your Illustrator art as CS2 format otherwise TBS can't read the data.  This information is current as of TBS version 7.1

Storyboarding, scripts, oh my!

Part of my studies in to animation requires the use of storyboards.  It makes sense, how do I know what to make and how to present it... and in what order?

Needless to say, my original "rough draft" outline for a quick story was totally redone after I ended up writing the script for it.  The basic ideas stayed the same, but actually focusing on how cameras move around, zoom, which characters are animated, things fading in and out... yea stuff changed.

I was asked today how my animation is coming along... my answer was "animation is the last thing I'll be doing".

Intro to Animation Endeavors

So, this blog has been mostly about programming, game development, design, smart phone stuff, technical rants, and stuff like this... and has been idle for a little while again.  Well, a small and somewhat crazy offshoot to all of this has been all about visual things that look pretty.  Worse yet, pretty things that move.

I've been learning more about how cartoon animation works and some of the software that powers these pretty cool things.  The adventure led me acquire Toon Boom Studio and take a related class or two at the local community college.  Ideally with the lofty goal of implementing pretty, moving things in our games and heck, maybe even do some of our own animation work!

I found a couple random blogs that really helped me out in addition to the classes.

Of particular note:
http://animationcraft.blogspot.com/2007/04/toon-boom-studio-learning-track.html

This guy is clearly an industry veteran with very helpful articles.

I also came across John K's blog (yea, one of the guys that did Ren And Stimpy back in the day).

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/

To get this party started, we had done various assignments for our classes, but with all things, it usually takes a wiping of all your old stuff before you feel somewhat confident enough to actually feel like it is going anywhere.  At any rate...

Here is my *second* ball bouncing animation that turned out pretty decent.