Would this work as 2D traditional pencil test animation software?

[mlle_bienvenu]

I'm a hobbyist animator and I have been looking everywhere for 2D traditional frame-by-frame animation software that isn't either ridiculously expensive (Toon Boom) or free and broken (Pencil 2D). What I want to know is, can I draw raster frames right in the software, go to the next next frame, draw that, etc etc... Is there onionskinning (can I see previous or future frames relative to the frame I'm working on?)? Can you import an audio track to time animations?

I realize it's not really the focus of the software, but it'd be great if this fits the bill.

[xyzt]

Originally posted by mlle_bienvenu:

I'm a hobbyist animator and I have been looking everywhere for 2D traditional frame-by-frame animation software that isn't either ridiculously expensive (Toon Boom) or free and broken (Pencil 2D). What I want to know is, can I draw raster frames right in the software, go to the next next frame, draw that, etc etc... Is there onionskinning (can I see previous or future frames relative to the frame I'm working on?)? Can you import an audio track to time animations?

Yes, there is raster frames. Yes, you can go to the next frame and last frame with a keyboard shortcut.
Yes, there is onion skinning
Yes, you can import an audio track

You can also record audio with a widget and you have exposure sheet options.
You also can create animations in AVI format for video editing in an editor later.

[mlle_bienvenu]

Excellent! I'm going to try the demo right now :D

[xyzt]

There's a demo?? I had no idea. I always thought Project Dogwaffle only had the free version that didn't have any of the neat features.

[mlle_bienvenu]

Well I guess I don't know how updated it is, but this is where I got the demo. http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/demozone/9.5/index.html

Looks like it's slightly behind what's on Steam.

[xyzt]

Ah, that's what I was thinking,

Welcome to the free Demo/Trial edition - not everything is included, but enough for you to determine if you like it and if want to purchase a full license.

It's the developer's style of a demo. Hopefully it has most of the traditional animation features.

Found this though on the website for Howler features:

Animation features:

Traditional animation
Onion skin
Load/Save AVI's, frame sequences
Frame scanning
Line cleanup and non-photo blue removal
Timeline to apply filters
Exposure sheet with lip syncing
Frame sequencer
Rotoscoping matte creation
Motion analysis to create slow motion or add motion blur to stop motion
Animated brush timeline
Animated brush keyframer
Animation retiming
Interlaced video support
Batch processing
Batch conversion and renaming
Particles, 3D hight map, etc.
Image stabilization. Camera motion smoothing, removal and re-addition.
Motion tracking in Brush keyframer
Motion prediction for frame extrapolation and selective motion blurring
Mirror transform (vertical/horizontal) all frames of an animation
frame-level and block-level editing (in/out markers, copy, paste, cut, delete, insert, reverse sequence order, make loopable, time stretching with frame blending...)
animated swap channel and alpha channels from DWA or AVI files
animated renderings in Raytracing with Puppy Ray

[mlle_bienvenu]

Yeah I saw that after I posted this thread, when I went to find the demo. Demo seems to be what i'm looking for, though it doesn't seem to be registering my wacom tablet's sensitivity. Going to fiddle with it some more and see if I can get it to work. Looks like just the thing I need, otherwise.

[thebest3d]

Hi mlle_bievenu - sorry about the delayed response, I've been having terrible back pains, probably muscle spasms due to herniated disk or something like that. Don't think it's due to the car crash from 3 weeks ago, but rather too much sitting at the puter at day job and then owling and waffling at home. So bear with me if you will ;-)

Yes this is definitely a program that will help you draw each frame by hand and play the result as an animation, save as Avi or image sequence.... and it has nion skinning, in fact in v9.5 we improved it so it can also let you change the intensity of the prior and next frames, see more frames and also color code them (redshift). so you know better which frame is before and which is after the current one.

http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/features/enhanced-light-table-onion-skins.html

Unfortunately it is not as sophisticated as the likes of TVPaint. It does have layers but not opaque layers, and not animated layers (meaning it doesn't carry a sequence of frames for each layer. There's just one sequence of frames.

But that sounds like what you need. And there is also a Mouth plugin included (exposure sheet), from where you can also start the Frame Painter, to use just a few frames to build up a long 'dialog' sequence.

Animated and also be carried in the brush (as animbrush) and painted across the image or frames either manually (with ALT key down) or by way of the Brush keyframer.

But yeah definitely, if you like to draw by hand, in pencil styles and others, this should be good for you. Works with tablet and includes a tablet recalibration widget.

-Philip

[thebest3d]

if you look at the old pages from version 5 there were quite a bunch of hand drawn examples there.
http://www.thebest3d.com/pdpro5/

scroll down to look for the horse in cartoon style along the right side, look for Cowboy SHorts. Or go straight here:
http://www.thebest3d.com/pdpro5/tutorials/5.1Cowboy/cowboy_shorts_collection.html