Animation software?

I asked this question here a couple of years ago and got some answers that weren't terribly encouraging, but now it's 2 years later and maybe things are better. I don't see a lot of discussion of animation packages on this forum, but there must be some animators lurking out there somewhere.

I want to animate a cartoon character into live action for a training video. I have looked into Animation Master somewhat, but the lack of an OSX version at the time (2 years ago) made it difficult. I looked at some other packages that came highly regarded but left me in utter confusion as to how to use them. The project went on the shelf for a while so I stopped pursuing it, but it is back in front of me now.

I have little experience at animation but I can understand the principles of creating a 3-D character and assigning splines, joints, etc. I am looking for something that is easy to understand, easy to use and not very expensive. How am I doing so far? I know I can't get all those features in one package but I'd like to know how various ones stack up.

So who can enlighten me? Does anyone have anything good to say about Animation Master's 2005 edition? Any other favorites, or even must-avoids? I appreciate all insights and advice.

Scott

You looked at Toon Boom?

[www.toonboom.com]


No Tiger support yet but coming soon



Michael Horton
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It looks fiine, though there are some crashes sometimes.
I did some integrating of video and 3d with it and it always worked well.

It works nicely with Synth Eyes so you can integrate camera motion quite easy. And it's cheap - so you don't waste too much money it doesn't work for you.

Andreas

Also take a look at Modo by Luxology for 3D object creation. I have Animation Master but could never get my mind wrapped around it.

Thanks for the ideas so far. I've downloaded the ToonBoom Studio demo package but haven't had much chance to work with it. It seems to be drawing oriented, rather than figure (spline, joints, etc.) and I'm not sure I have the drawing talent to be able to complete a short project in my lifetime.

Mike, have you used ToonBoom?

Andreas, are you referring to ToonBoom? Do you have a link for SynthEyes?

Dean, have you used Modo and been able to "get your mind wrapped around" it? I understand completely what you mean, and I think in this area the ability to grasp how the tools work is vital.

I'm open to more ideas and experiences, and would like to hear tales from anyone who has used Animation Master successfully or otherwise.

Scott

Hi,

Toon Boom seems to be quite a good package to do straight 2 animation with vector based drawing, there is also Animation Stand - a more classic way of doing cell animation - I loved to use it for years (when we got the jobs) there is a free personal edition at: [www.animationstand.com]
(BTW Linker was the first company, which bought some TV lines normally used for tele text and delivered updates thru cable TV in California - funny idea - unfortunately I was in Germany and had to wait for Fedex).

The link for SynthEyes is [www.ssontech.com]
There is a OSX demo available too. This stuff is very cool and I'm just working on a way to get parts of my 360 degree videos converted to a special kind of cubes to make them trackable with this software.

Regarding AM: I did some VFX for a german feature film some time ago. It was all the standard stuff wire removal, dust removal, getting people into the scene where there are no people, motion stabilizing roto and so on, but they wanted to have many ants on a dead body somehow just eating it - I told them that my 3d days had been gone some years ago and they called some other companies to do, the cheapest one said 30.000 USD at least (because they already had done some SFX with ants and had the models) and the production get the two 2 second scenes composed in 14 days.
This was way beyond the budget and the director begged me to try at least. With the help of a museum in our city I was able to build a natural behaving ant with AM (that one which the director wanted - black and dangerous - even if this kind of ant does not life at that place where the corpse was found in the movie - but who cares). I used the background video features of AM to roughly model the corpse and then insert paths for the ants and flocks of ants. The support from Hash was great, there were quite some problems, but we/they solved that more or less real time over the continents. I thinks these guys are great guys with a great sense of humor, which helps sometimes on tight deadlines, I finished the scenes within 10 days with 1 guy (me) and 2 Macs rendering and the comment from director, cutter, production and my daughter was: that looks so disgusting!!! - so we got what we wanted.
AM is: either you love it or you hate it - it's somehow like a carpenters hammer, a saw, some screw drivers and a gripper compared to a completely filled toolbox. Some are able to build a complete house with the basic set, others are not.

Hope this helps
Andreas