Friday, July 10, 2009

Camera set-up & Motion Keyframes: What the manual doesn't tell you.

A little something we learned yesterday after one frustrating hour of trying to create a multiplane camera effect with this "Bostie Boys" scene.

Bostie Boys scene (ToonBoom Animate) on Vimeo.

As you can see, there are 'motion tweens' happening with the waves, the clouds, characters' ears flappin' etc.

The idea was to add a camera with multiplane set-up by putting BG layers in different z-axis positions, giving depth to the sky, clouds, sea etc. while everything is panning.

What we found was that in setting keyframes on the Camera Peg layer, the multiplane set-up did NOT carry through on the timeline beyond the first keyframe. (!!!!) We couldn't figure out why this was happening.

The problem was due to the motion tweened layers.

In Flash we are used to animating the looping symbols first - which are then nested inside a larger movie clip symbol for "camera". In TB Animate, the order in which things are done can sometimes be almost the opposite.

The solution to our problem was to set up the multiplane BG and camera first, BEFORE tweening anything.

16 comments:

  1. Great share as usual, may I recommend next time you guys use a screen capture software like camstudio, which is a great open source app. Cause sometimes its hard to see what you are doing. Nonetheless nice share, keep 'em coming. :D

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  2. Sometimes WE don't know what we are doing ;)

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  3. It matters not, but sometimes your hand and body gets in the way. Furthermore I see you are using a wacom cintiq, I too have one. And find it hard when drawing, tends to hurt my wrist. If I may ask how do you go about placing it>? and how tall is your desk>? (<:[)

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  4. You find the Cintiq hard to draw with?!? Ah, you spoilt kids of today, why I remember when we created our first Internet Flash series with a MOUSE...

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  5. Ehhh, I spend my whole summers saving on it last year. Can't say I was spoiled, so any tips on the matter.

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  6. Nope, mine works for me just fine with a standard desk

    Maybe you need to lift more weights and develop those wrists :)

    (I will be leaving smileys after all my facetious comments from now on so you can see I am only joking)

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  7. Eddie... great point to make in the video. It's actually times like these I'm happy that I haven't had time to play with the program yet. I have it... it's sitting right here with a nice "pro" sticker on it haha. Love it when people make mistakes for me so I can just swoop into a program with minimal effort! Thanks for taking on that burden for me! (=

    Mortal Arts... make sure the tablet is at an angle (elevated in the back). When bending the wrist to make a line or dragging etc (small movements) having it at an angle that isn't perpendicular to you (sitting up) cuts the range of motion necessary to make that line. It's the same reason foreshortening makes someones arm look short when it's pointing at the camera... depth. The range of motion now incorporates depth instead of just linear motion on length/width axis. Drafting tables are made to have that angle for this reason (and others but... this reason too). Hope it helps

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  8. Well there is no huge learning curve to it - just a change of mindset here and there. Diving in and making mistakes helps you understand things a hell of a lot better.

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  9. True, thanks Rubber Onion.. .:D

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  10. Man, that looks so cool when your just moving the camera around.

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  11. I've found that to be a running issue with Animate - things are often the opposite of Flash. It's a wonderful program, with lots of little caveats. It's a shame because you may have a client request a camera move after you've done all the work. What then?

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  12. Thanks for the great tip Eddie. I tried dabbling with the camera for the first time this past weekend and it did not go so good. However, I like it when that happens cause that is how you learn. That and Blog's like this. Thanks dude!

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  13. I know this was posted a a long time ago ago but i was having trouble with my camera setups recently. I've only just started using Animate and so was looking for some help. But I figured out your problem, the problem isnt that you set up your tweens first. You added a camera and on the first frame you seperated all the layers to their Z depths. I think you actually only changed your first key frame ie the layers tweened back to 0 Z depth at the end and so no multiplane. All you would have to do is turn off the animate button so the whole layer is modified and not just the key you had at the start.

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  14. Clients can include photographs, recordings or shading solids to their smash impact. Basically drag the media into the timetable and afterward apply it to the generator. Once the media is inside the generator, clients can uncheck the perceivability box of the first media layer. Motion 5 Effects

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  16. Sometime, we have no idea about the camera function. Now, we can get to know about any camera model functionality.
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