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Inkthinker β Pen Spinning - Rough Animation
Published: 2006-09-14 07:16:06 +0000 UTC; Views: 37146; Favourites: 363; Downloads: 5345
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Description
Rough animation which will be adapted to clean animation for the upcoming HTF series "Joe is Japanese". More on that later.
Look up "pen spinning" or "pen tricks" on Youtube and you can see where this comes from. I just watched a bunch of those and combined that with some logic and my limited ability to twiddle a pencil through my fingers and worked straight ahead frame to frame. Not bad for about 4-5 hours of scribbling, I guess, but nothing compared to the real deal.
No way to really key and tween 'cause I was never really sure where it would go next. It was a bitch and a half to make it loop...
-EDIT-
Looks like they've done something that fixed the problem with GIFs not displaying. Hooray!!
Β©2006 HTF Studios Inc.
Sorry, I can't give you permission to use it as an avatar or anything... it's surprising enough that I'm even allowed to share it at all. >_<
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Comments: 156
Toda una cΓ‘tedra!
I want to know how to get such a smooth animation with that low framerate
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Plenty of tweens. 15 is the average actual framerate of many animated TV shows, but since it displays at 30fps it's really better to work with that in mind.
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You magnificent bastard... 
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Oops, bad math. I meant a little bit less than half at 12 fps and 1/5th at 25 fps.
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As you described earlier to someone about 1/5, 3 and 2/4 (the frames). Is it something that's usual among animators to pick those specific ones? When I think about it the frame 1-5-10-15 and so on would be half seconds respectively if you go 12fps or 1/4th of a second if it's 25fps. Is that why you work like that when you don't work 1-2-3-4-5?
I'm still a jackass when it comes to keyframing so I'm trying to learn something about it.
I'm by the way, not that I expect you to remember though.
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Nono... the reason you jump about is because you can control the action, timing and proportions of the characters more effectively. The keys don't have to be at 1 and 5, but that's a common breakdown because 5 is the smallest number of frames you can have where you get two keys, a breakdown, and then a tween between each key and the breakdown. If the action needs to be smoother or take longer, or ease into the keys more effectively, you might have a key at 1 and 7 (breakdown at 4, tween 5 and 3 off 1/7 and 4, then 2/6 off 1/7 and 4/5 respectively). Or, if you want the action to have an uneven rythym (few things in life are mechanically smooth) you might place the breakdown for a 7-frame sequence at 3, thus 2 is the lines laying between 1 and 3, and 4-5-6 become a gradual series of tweens that ease into 7... or ease away from the breakdown and snap into 7.
If you've never read it, check out Richard Williams book The Animator's Survival Kit, which does a really great job of explaining this sort of thing in visual terms.
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I've heard alot about it and I actually have money right now. Perhaps I should take my time and order it.
Thanks for the headsup mate.
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Yeah! That's pretty cool !
I wish I could do that
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Ooh. I guess you'd have to spin your pen around a lot to get to grips with how to animate it. It's very cool, I like the little snap back the hand does.
How'd you animate this? Straight ahead or with keys? I prefer keys but they're hard to use in Easytoon, with the lack of a navigable timeline and everything.
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Oh, I can't spin like this at all. Mostly I used a little logic... if the pen is spinning this way, and needs to rotate around one finger to the next, then the hand must go like so... that sort of thing.
Which is why I had to do it straight ahead, no keys (well... occasionally I jumped ahead by one frame, then did a tween or two, espescially where the pen slows down at the end... but that was about it).
Yeah, keys are a bit of a bitch in Easytoon, but one thing you can do is annotate the frame's placement in a corner and then duplicate it or move it to where you need it to be in the stack. If you Copy while having the copy/paste tool selected but nothing marked on the page (in other words, just click the tool button and then press Ctrl+C) then you copy the entire frame, which can make moving frames around (or pasting backgrounds) MUCH easier.
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Cheers for the insight. You should practice pen spinning. I find it relieves stress, (helpful with Easytoon)
I normally do keys in Easytoon, involving lots of copying/pasting/inserting new frames, but often it just seems to not paste what it should do. It's infuriating but must be me not understanding it rather than the program being buggy.
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It's a program with a lot of limitations, no doubt.
Figuring out that you can copy a whole frame by just activating the tool and pressing Ctrl+C was a lot of help to me. Sometimes it's easier to copy the whole frame and remove what you don't need than to try and copy a small segment of a frame and paste it where you need it. It doesn't help that the program hasn't got a real sense of "transparency" so to speak... it copies the blank area as well as the lines when you make a selection, and will overwrite the information on the frame when you paste it in.
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Exactly. When dealing with the stuff Easytoon makes hell I just copy stuff into Imageready and use it's capacity for layers. Maybe it's cheating a bit, but no one knows as long as you don't do any anti-aliasing when moving or zooming stuff about. Gotta keep the Easytoon look, tee hee.
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Meh. I don't know if there's really such a thing as "cheating", aside from outright ripping off another's work. Switching tools is in NO way cheating, in my book.
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very simple, but amazing work. i love the very smooth quality, but most of all i think i like the fact that its such a ... not mediocre, but everyday even portrayed simply and effectively in rahter poignant way. purty shweet.
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awesome in many ways. very realistic when it turns and spins it on the back. it seems that all your animations have a certain beat for how it goes. dont know what it is, but i know its there. a definate fav from me.
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great work here Ink, im motivated to work on mine once more, and put more effort in so they are more detailed.
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OMg thats amazing!! i wish i could animate as clean as that!! great work!
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sigh*
That is really nice, are you thinking of going further with it?
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Yep. All shall be revealed in time.
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oooooooooo.....coooolll. ( i had noticed that you planned on doing more with this after i posted the first comment... good job for not paying attention. x.x)
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i allways love ur animations yo!
and it really looks pritty good
hahaha ive got very limited pen spinning abilities, but then again, many artist i kno have idel hands, usally resulting in pen tricks of some kind
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Whoa!! Suh a trippy animation to watch its very wel done for a "Scribble". Its a very fluid motion and is done quite well! Great job!
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That.... was pretty darn cool.
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i remember twirling pencils like this
it was quite a fad going through our school
but that's really great.. looks really natural @__@
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Man I could never do that in school, but it seemed like all the kids in the honor classes could (Odyessy of the Mind and that junk). This is pretty cool.
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Stopped by, took a look. Awesome stuff. I don't know much of animaition, but I know it must've been a bitch to do it. The movement is very natural, grea job!
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My god the motion in this is awesome.
damn i love yah!
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Nice and smooth.
It may have been a pain to do, but it loops well. Could use maybe a beat or two of relative stillness at the loop point? Or not, I dunno.
I really wish they'd fix this download to view thing, it's a bit annoying.
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sheeeeaT! *drops pen* tries. *drops again* gets a bigger pencil. *fails*
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Part of the trick with the people that do it for real is that they use some really long pens... the best can do it with just a ballpoint office pen, but a lot of tricks are done with double-headed brush pens or unsharpened two-tone pencils. The longer pen makes it easier to balance, I suppose.
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I love watching your animations! Can't get enough of em...
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This is excellent, and will be even more so cleaned up. What's HTF, though?
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Humouring the Fates, Inc.
The animation studio with which I am affiliated.
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Awesome animation. I'm kind of able to do some pen spinning, and this really inspired me to start practicing again
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what would you possibly key and tween anyway to make this work?
well done BTW
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But without keys, you get volume shifts and such.
Once I have it roughed out, it's easier to key and tween properly for the cleanup cause I can jump across frames, but yeah... when actually roughing out the action, it was kinda impossible to do anything but draw a frame, then sit and think about "what next", and then draw another frame... Then look for places to work a loop and edit that in.
I messed up at least three times and had to step back a few frames, take a new path. With more time I could probably add more flourishes and different tricks.
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how do you tween a frame by fram animation?(are they shaping tweens?)
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