Re: Main character animations.

[Al Riddoch <ajr@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 12:51:46PM +0100, Katie Lauren Lucas wrote:
> Quoting Al Riddoch <alriddoch@zepler.org>:
> > I would be very interested to know what tools you are planning to use
> > to
> > create your content. Have you found an available set of animation tools
> > for
> > Linux, or are you fortunate enough to have access to the high-end
> > proprietary
> > tools?
> 
> At the rate things are going, I will be creating a paint package as part of the 
> project to paint the damn images with. Nothing I've yet come across counts as 
> what I'd consider a suitable tool for drawing animation frames with.
> 
> I can't find anything that will let me have: a window with a x8 view of an 
> image in it, with another image "ghosted" below it to use for onion-skinning 
> the animation, plus having two other windows running animations in them, one at 
> (say) x4 and one normal size. And allow me to paint in any of them..
> 
> So the answer here is "I'm assuming I'm going to need to write a proprietry 
> high-end tool." :-)
> 
> Or use Gimp and suffer the slings and arrows that come along with not having 
> the right tool for the job.
> 

You are planning to create the animations in a paint package?

The approach we have always taken with this, which I understand is
the approach used by professionals, is to create the animations in 3d,
and use a high quality renderer to generate the 2d frames. Packages like
Poser are available to the this in one package, but are quite costly.
In WorldForge we have created tools which generate pre-rendered 2d animations
from 3d animated cal3d character animations, but so far we have no
affordable or open way of creating cal3d animations. The only viable way
appears to be to use 3d studio max.

Al