How To Get The Best From Your Animation Software!
By Head of Animation Development Tom Lucas
At Cloth Cat, choosing the right software for the job is an important decision. You need to weigh up the needs of the project. Does it need to be done quickly and efficiently? Does it require a small team of animators who can take ownership of their scenes? Is the project more ad-hoc, seat of your pants? CelAction, Toon Boom and Moho arejust three of the programs we come back to time and again and both are great in their own way for getting the job done!
My name is Tom Lucas, I’ve been in the animation industry for just over 13 years. I studied 2D animation at University of South Wales and since then I’ve worked in studios, freelanced and produced a couple of my own short films.
I am now Head of Animation Development here at Cloth Cat, which means I have input into the early stages of any projects that come through our door. I will often be found doing initial sketches and concept art, storyboards and animatics, a rig here and there and sometimes even some animation! (shocked face!)
Flash Dance!
In the early years I worked almost exclusively in Adobe Flash (now Adobe Animate, a heinous crime) I used it to animate my 3rd year student film as well as my later short films Death in Space and Pre-venge
Adobe Flash will always hold a special place in my heart. On a good day the brush tool flows so smoothly, producing the most crisp of lines and your nest of animated symbols within symbols just work! But oftentimes Adobe Flash was just too cumbersome for full series work and I haven’t used it for anything more than a quick hand drawn effect for quite some time now.
Cels in Action!
During my time at Cloth Cat the majority of our 2D animation has been produced using CelAction. We have used it for a wide range of series of different complexities, from the (relatively) simple ones such as Olobob Top, to the all bells and whistles of Luo Bao Bei.
CelAction is designed in a way that lends itself to fast animation and I personally find the vertical timeline / dopesheet to be the best I’ve used in any software. If time and efficiency is of the essence you can very quickly plot your key frames, extreme poses and midpoints on the main timeline to get a feel for a movement, then use the robust pose algorithm to fill in the inbetweens.
Then, time allowing, you can really delve deep into the red dope sheet. Using this you can see all the information for each element of your rig. You can quickly move pose information for specific elements around the timeline (e.g a lower arm or an antennae) to offset its movement from the main animation. Every aspect of the movement, x and y, scale, rotation and more can be separated into its own timeline. This gives you a huge amount of information and control.
It fits well into our pipeline, integrating with Ftrack, our production trackers and render farm. CelAction can be daunting at first, but with the right team around you it can be picked up quickly. On every project I learn new features of the software from a colleague, new ways of approaching problems. The knowledge is out there!
Perfect Harmony
You can’t talk about animation software without including Toon Boom Harmony. It’s a massively powerful piece of software that lends itself well to high end productions. The level of control that you get from the Node view and the ease of access to re-use through the shared library make it a great choice for large teams. We already use Toom Boom Storyboard Pro in our pipeline and are eagerly waiting for the right project to integrate Harmony into it as well.
Moho Motion!
We have also been testing and exploring Moho recently. It’s a very exciting piece of software with a very enthusiastic community of users and a wealth of tutorials and resources online. We have used smaller scale projects such as the recent Sonic x Primark promotion as fantastic learning experiences, building up to using Moho for larger projects and series work in the future.
I particularly love the speed of the rigging process. As everything can be drawn or built directly in software there is less hopping back and forth between programs. You can quickly plot your bones to get your character moving, then assign points and create Actions to correct movements (such as the bend of an arm at the elbow) This is great for keeping characters on model at all times.
Textured vector paths are also excellent and easy to set up in Moho. The base set of textures are very customisable, plus you can relatively easily make your own. When set up correctly, the ability to instantly change colours, line thicknesses, effects, textures and more, across whole characters and scenes is incredibly powerful.