Titoonic as flash character animation web games and design

Some tools will create larger file sizes while other tools will result in smaller files. As you become more familiar with these tools, you will learn to choose the ones that best suits the artistic style you desire and any file size requirements you may have to abide by. It's the usual trade-off between file size and download times and playback performance. Let's take a look at each of Flash's drawing tools and discuss their pros and cons. Brush Tool.

The Brush tool is probably the most versatile of all the tools—especially when combined with a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet but still very useful with a mouse as well. Drawing with the Brush tool is much like painting with a real brush, and is the most natural feeling tool when used with a tablet due to the support of pressure sensitivity and tilt features.

Some popular tablets used with Flash are made by Wacom. Wacom features several different sized tablets that include a cordless pen called a stylus. A Wacom tablet has become the industry-standard for digital artists over the years. Since a Wacom tablet can work in conjunction with your existing mouse, or replace your mouse completely, it use goes far beyond what you can do with Flash alone. Many digital designers use a tablet with any number of graphics editors and animation programs including Photoshop, Illustrator, and so on.

But fear not, if you do not currently own a tablet, you can still use the Brush tool with one exception—both the tilt and pressure sensitivity features will not be available. If you do have a tablet installed, selecting the Brush tool will provide you with two sub-selections that will affect your line quality.

At the very bottom of the toolbox you will notice the Use Pressure and Use Tilt options. With one or both of these options selected, varied results will occur when drawing in Flash. Here's what happens when drawing with the Brush tool below, left. The end result is actually a shape , meaning, it has vector points on all sides. The more points an object has, the bigger the file size. This particular shape was drawn with a pressure sensitive tablet. Notice the tapered ends and inconsistent line weight that results with varied amounts of pressure applied to the stroke.

The shape above on the right was also made with the Brush tool but the difference is that the pressure sensitivity setting was turned off. It is not necessary to use a tablet to draw with Flash, although a tablet can, in some cases, make life easier depending on the tools you want to use. I never had to use my Wacom tablet with the Brush tool. I could have easily chosen the Brush tool, but using the shape tools which we'll discuss shortly resulted in the ultra-clean line quality I was trying to achieve.

Oftentimes the Brush tool can create several unnecessary points that bloat file sizes and can create headaches when trying to edit the shapes later on. For the boy, I was simply looking for very simple shapes and as small a file size as possible. The Brush tool offers several sub-selections to help you draw certain effects look for them near the bottom of the toolbox :.

Paint Normal: Paints over lines and fills on the same layer. Paint Fills: Paints inside a fill color and outside of a shape stage. Paint Behind: Paints behind existing fills and strokes. Paint Selection: Allows you to paint inside a selected fill only. Paint Inside: Start painting inside a fill and you'll never have to worry about going outside the lines again! Pencil Tool. The Pencil tool is the perfect tool if you want a consistent line weight throughout your character and if you need to keep file size as small as possible.

Lines made with the Pencil tool consist of fewer vector points than the Brush. A perfectly straight line will only have two points, one on either end. A curved line will have as few as three points or more depending on the number of curves. The Pencil tool also offers several line quality modes:. Straighten: A great option if you want to freehand draw very straight lines.

Even with a shaky hand, your lines will snap straight once you finish drawing your stroke. Smooth : Your lines will automatically be smoothed while retaining the basic shape you intended to create.

Ink : Line quality is unaffected. Shape Tools. The shape tools —Rectangle and Oval as well as some others new to version CS3 —create primitive fills and strokes. Holding down the Shift key while using a shape tool will create a perfect circle or square. Clicking on either swatch will open a color palette and allow you to edit the stroke or fill color choice. You can even specify no color for the stroke or fill by selecting the square with the red diagonal line through it.

Onion Skin. The Onion Skin feature is located at the bottom of the Timeline panel, and it will come in very handy as you begin to animate your character designs in later lessons. In traditional animation, or cel animation , characters "moved" through a series of acetate or celluloid sheets.

To create the next frame of a character animation, the artist had to flip back to the previous frame as a reference. When sketching a character's movements, "onion skin" or semi-transparent paper was often used so artists could see through to the frames below. In Flash, Onion Skin mode works in the same way, allowing you to get a ghosted view of the previous frames to use as reference. With character design, this enables you to create precise motion from frame to frame. Try out the two types of onion skinning as I explain them below.

Start a new Flash document, draw a shape, and make several keyframes five to ten. Vary the shape's placement on each keyframe slightly so you can see the effects of onion skinning as we try them out. Select Onion Skin in the timeline to turn on this feature and add Onion Skin Markers to the timeline's playhead indicator. These markers can be clicked and dragged to expand the number of frames before and after the current frame.

Normal Onion Skin Mode. In normal Onion Skin mode, the selected frame is shown in full color while the previous and future frames are dimmed progressively.

This gives an impression of a series of drawings created on semi-transparent paper and then stacked on top of each other. Onion Skin Outlines Mode. If you click the button to the right of the normal Onion Skin button, you'll be in Onion Skin Outlines mode.

The current frame is shown in full color while previous and future frames are shown as outlines. This is visually easier when working with complex animations. You'll almost always want to use the Graphic behavior for all of your character's feature symbols. Symbols are the very essence of what makes Flash You can make anything you draw or import into a symbol. And in almost all cases you should. Here's why Once an object is converted to a symbol, it automatically becomes an item in the Flash document's Library.

Once you do, the object on the stage is referred to as an instance. No matter how many instances of a symbol reside on stage, Flash only needs to load it once. This is how Flash delivers streaming animations while maintaining small file sizes. You can also apply effects to instances such as scale, tint, alpha, and brightness, and apply motion tweens in combination with one or more effects.

As you'll see throughout the course, we'll build our characters from lots of symbols, then move or modify the instances to give them motion—saving us lots of bandwidth! But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's refresh our memory on symbols and their behaviors. Symbol Behaviors. Create an object on the stage — anything at all. The Convert to Symbol dialog will appear. In this window you can enter a name for your symbol, select one of three behaviors, and determine the registration point of your object.

For now we are going to discuss what each behavior is and what it means. They can have any number of layers and frames, but their timelines are independent of all other timelines. Think of a solar system: Each planet is a movie clip, looping endlessly and independently around a sun which is our main timeline.

These are represented as keyframes in a button symbol. You can place graphics in any of these states and then apply ActionScript to the instance of a button to add interactivity to your Flash movie. Graphic: Graphic symbols are very similar to Movie Clips except that they are not dynamic and cannot be targeted with ActionScript.

You can, however, place a graphic symbol inside a movie clip symbol. Graphic symbols can have any number of frames and layers, and the most important feature is they will always be in sync with the main timeline and each other. This is very important when trying to create time-based animations like the ones in this course. In this animation course, it is recommended to use Graphic behavior.

Doing so will allow you to "scrub" the timeline to see your animation play while inside the Flash authoring environment. Now that we've reviewed the basic drawing tools in Flash, let's take a look at how to sketch a character and prepare it for animation. Watch some cartoons tonight. Notice the separations between features and how they might aid animators. Our skill includes, Flash Designers, flash programmers Intermediate and advanced action script , animators, UI designers and Javascript programmers.

Preproduction Our team has the necessary expertise to produce preproduction contents for TV and web animated contents. Our 2D team comprises of: Traditional and Digital flash, toon boom animators.

BG Production Artists. Ink and Paint and Compositing Artists. SFX animators. Tokyo, Japan Television series. Japanese and some English. Teletoon Canada Inc. Toronto, Ontario, Canada Animation cable network. English and French. Televirtual Ltd. Norwich, England UK Motion capture animation for television.

A division of Ten Alps Communications plc. Also provides postproduction and special effects services. Tezuka Productions Co. TFX Animation, Inc. Site is for its film, Adventures in Animation 3D.

Formerly Taarna Studios. Paul Thiltges Distributions s. Thomson SA Paris, France Electronic manufacturer which also provides services to the entertainment industry, including through its Technicolor Entertainment Services division. Thousand Words Beverly Hills.

California USA Live action and animated movies. A division of Powerhouse Productions. Its Threshold Digital Research Labs unit is involved in animation and visual effects production, including feature films. Site is not available to public. Part of The Jhaver Group. Site under construction. Part of Discovery Communications.