First try at vector animation
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Hey all, starting on animation for the first time and need help nailing down my process. I'm aiming for an animation style similar to Another World (somewhat rotoscoped vectors).
I made a first pass and have thoughts on what the next iteration would change (mostly reducing the number of verts and fixing the jitter/gaps), but wanted some feedback on my process.
I'm currently rotoscoping by taking video, cutting it down into the frames I want in Premiere, then pulling those into Illustrator and tracing them on layers. This makes it tough to see how the animation is coming along, since I need to export the layers out to an swf if I want to see it in motion. The eventual output that I want is a bunch of pngs that I'll either pack or import straight into UE4.
I'm also having a hard time keeping the overall motions in my head while I'm working. I'm focusing on lining up to the reference, and end up losing my sense of how things are moving in a given frame. This is certainly because of my lack of experience, but I think that the lack of playback and the roto process in general might be contributing to it.
So, my questions.
1. Is there a better tool for what I'm doing? I looked around and found better tools for animation, but couldn't find any that supported point-based vectors.
2. Should I drop the roto and just use the videos as reference instead? The Another World dev said that he didn't actually use roto much, since hand-animating got better results. I can't tell if it feels bad because I'm bad, or because it's not the best process for what I want.
I made a first pass and have thoughts on what the next iteration would change (mostly reducing the number of verts and fixing the jitter/gaps), but wanted some feedback on my process.
I'm currently rotoscoping by taking video, cutting it down into the frames I want in Premiere, then pulling those into Illustrator and tracing them on layers. This makes it tough to see how the animation is coming along, since I need to export the layers out to an swf if I want to see it in motion. The eventual output that I want is a bunch of pngs that I'll either pack or import straight into UE4.
I'm also having a hard time keeping the overall motions in my head while I'm working. I'm focusing on lining up to the reference, and end up losing my sense of how things are moving in a given frame. This is certainly because of my lack of experience, but I think that the lack of playback and the roto process in general might be contributing to it.
So, my questions.
1. Is there a better tool for what I'm doing? I looked around and found better tools for animation, but couldn't find any that supported point-based vectors.
2. Should I drop the roto and just use the videos as reference instead? The Another World dev said that he didn't actually use roto much, since hand-animating got better results. I can't tell if it feels bad because I'm bad, or because it's not the best process for what I want.
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