Thursday, March 5, 2009

On My Mind

Do you guys think NuShift.net needs a redesign? Cuz I do. I don't really have any idea what I want to do for it and as much as website design gives me indigestion, I still feel good when it's all said and done.

I rented Killzone 2 and it's amazing. I'm not really into console FPS but this one has changed my tune. Definitely check it out if you get a chance.

I worked on CC last night, just coloring up some frames really quick. Spring break is coming up this week, but I still have to go to work, so it's not much of a break for me. I'm sure I'll be loaded up with plenty of HW to carry me through.

Act 2 is still chugging along. Ideally, the best route is to do the drawing and animation at home, and then in my freetime at work, cleanup and color. The past few weeks at work there hasn't been anything going on, so I just worked on HW and CC for 8 hours a day. Nice, right? This week, not so much. Got some updates and new projects to do so my freetime has come to a temporary end. Hopefully it'll come back soon.

There's some stuff I want to get done in a relatively short amount of time but I usually only have the motivation at work during the day. When I arrive at home, I don't feel like doing anything other than chilling out. This blog post? Yeah, I'd never do this at home, that's for sure. Anyway, CC is looking really good. Everytime I work on it, it seems the new animation looks better and better. I wish Newgrounds enabled either other file formats or even more than 15mb swf files. It would be so awesome if I had the power of After Effects in the CC workflow. Flash is so limiting and I realize this everytime I work on the project. With AE, I could truly achieve the finesse and quality that I strive for. For example, to make glowing explosions look white hot, it takes a few mouseclicks and a couple glow setting adjustments to achieve that look in AE. In Flash, it requires converting every white ember to a movieclip and messing with the individual glow settings to get it right because even if there are multiple embers in one movieclip, the glow effect does not do a good job at maintaining the effect between each individual ember.

I've been reluctant to actually learn ToonBoom. As Adam Phillips has mentioned, it's supposedly really intuitive and a good piece of software. Maybe for a future project I'll take the time to learn it. It's got some nice features like a moveable camera, color palette customization (with names, OMG!), and rotable viewport. I think Flash for animation is becoming outdated. They keep adding features to the development side of things and while CS4 did add some stuff for the animator and designer, it's still nowhere as robust as it needs to be. IK bones? Seriously? I don't see myself ever doing puppet animation again. I could have used that feature like what, 8 years ago?

As far as I'm concerned, Flash can be used in a workflow but shouldn't be the ONLY program. It should be used in conjunction with some sort of post-production application to get the film-like quality if you so choose.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

No offense, but I don't think enough people look at this site to warrant a redesign. But if you really wanna do it...

Unknown said...

I don't think the site needs a redesign. Once more people start arriving, then maybe. It looks fine as it is.

Nicholas said...

The size limit is to make sure people don't upload garbage that sucks up the bandwidth. People often submit quality pieces to Tom Fulp, who allows them to be uploaded despite their huge size.

As for Flash and After Effects, keep in mind that it's quite possible to animate in After Effects, then import what you've made in AE into Flash. Look at the Charlie the Unicorn sequels, for example.