Gimp Animation Package
Community Forums/Developer Stations/Gimp Animation Package
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| Anyone tried the Gimp Animation Package? Is it any good? If not, can anyone suggest a decent alternative (free or cheap). I`m after an animation package that can deal with higher quality images other than simple lowres sprites. Thanks for any advice, Jason. |
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| If 50$ is considered cheap you could have a look at Anime Studio: http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/anime/index.html |
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| Are you looking to do frame by frame animation or cut-out animation? I use GIMP a lot and like it, and have messed a little with GAP. Frankly, it's not the best option for animation. It's kind of a hack to get GIMP to work with multiple frames, and stores one xcf file for each frame. Though it does work. :) If you want cutout software these ones might be worth a look. - Anime Studio as mentioned by TommyH, does cut out mostly using vectors, but can use bitmaps as well. - CreaToon - bitmap based cut out software that is now FREE. You can get it at creatoon.com Not as advanced as AnimeStudio, but quite usable. - ToonBoom - Mainly a frame by frame program, but latest version does cut out too. Comes at different prices. - Synfig Studio - a vector based open-source morphing program, that shows a lot of promise...but is still in relatively early stages of development. http://synfig.org/Main_Page - Blender - Yeah, it's a 3D program, but there is nothing stopping you from using 3D software to do 2D cutout. I know of at least two TV series that have used Maya to do 2D cut-out animation. blender.org If you want to do frame by frame drawn animation, there aren't many free options: - Pencil http://www.pencil-animation.org/ Was somewhat limited last time I tried it, but might be better now. It's free, so go try it out. - FrameToon - in Japanese, see this post http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=83390 by me from a while back. - ToonBoom - vector based, works okay. Can do cut-out too. - TVPaint - quite expensive, but also really nice. You might want to check out Cinepaint as well. It was a fork of GIMP from quite a few years ago, made for film effects work. It started of well, but then kind of died...then turned into Glasgow....which...well...I don't know... :) |
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| Thanks for the links guys, I`ll check them out. Blender could be a good option though, thanks for mentioning that. Jason. |
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| I use blender for iso characters, you have to make sure you turn off anti-aliasing when you render or you wont get a nice seperation between character and background. |
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| Thanks for the tip. Jason. |
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| I just came across http://www.pencil-animation.org/ that might be worth a look. |
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| Thanks, funnily enough I came across it yesterday too ;) Jason. |
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| what series used maya for the cut-out? |
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| South Park and a Norwegian series called Kutoppen, that I know about. |
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| nvm |
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| I wanna know what the big studios use. That way you have the best reference ever. |
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| What about Corel Xara. It deals with bitmaps, but can't do pixel editing. Excellent, if not the best vector art app out there. Animation is pretty easy too. |
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| I wanna know what the big studios use. That way you have the best reference ever. Uh, there's Amazon Paint and ifxAnt, both probably way out of If you can't afford that (ah ha ha haa!! OF COURSE YOU CAN'T!), there's PD Pro, a Corel Painter-like program with facilities for animation. Try the free version to see if it has what you want insofar as tools. Something I found mildly interesting was that plugins written for it must be written in Lua, which BlitzMax offers facilities to use as a scripting language. |
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| Thanks for the continued suggestions everyone. Jason. |
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| Please let us know what you went with (and why), I am curious. |
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| Hmmm... I wrote a little 2d animation tool with BlitzMax, which is very promissing, but I havn't continued with it for a while. It has layers, undos and redos, dublicate, insert, delete, a pretty and unique color pallet, playback with parametric fps and internal 16bit colors, dithering for 8bit. Reacts to pen pressure for brush size and/or opacity, adjustable brush feather. Loads and saves PNGs, whereby I also added a desaturation feature and incidently a sharpening/blur filter as well (was just curious if I could...and I could). Now you've read all that and can't get the tool...pffff...sorry. I still have to write a proper interface for it and all the fileformat import/export features along with a proprietary fileformat for scenes, brushes and such. It has some long ways to go, but well... promissing. |
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