Greetings from #rdcHQ! This week in the Cobwebs meetup, we completed an important exercise to help the Cobwebs Crew understand the best way to build their illustrations for animation in ToonBoom Studio 7 or Anime Studio 9. We are comparing the features of these two programs, and have learned of another interesting open-source animation program called Giotto. The latter seems better suited to textual effects and not necessarily character animation – we will share our findings in a later post.

To begin, we used art from a previous project that was already properly prepared in an exploded fashion (with all of the parts separated in space as explained on Page 11 in the ToonBoom Studio tutorial which we covered last week). This is a technique common in animation software when dealing with figures, and also helps the Crew to begin thinking about drawing in “layers”, which is how skilled digital artists work in image-editing and illustration software programs.

Below is the exploded view of Poseidon which was used in our first example -

Poseidon by Gabby McCutcheon

We learned several useful things working through this tutorial – one is that importing Portable Network Graphics (.PNG) from the original vector illustration file (which in this case is an Adobe Illustrator file) into ToonBoom will export and render as an animation much more quickly than importing the .AI file as source art*. Our Claire Libre example by Evelyn Jennings is wonderful, but it took almost 20 hours to export due to all of the points and Bezier curves that had to be processed (even on a quad-core Mac Mini!**).

During this exercise, the Cobwebs Crew worked in layers, built character skeletons, and created simple animations quickly in ToonBoom which enabled them to understand the mechanics of preparing their own art for animation (we even had a new member of the Cobwebs Crew this week, and she created her own animated robot on her very first day!). Next week, we begin creating production art of all of the Cobwebs Characters so we can use the techniques we are learning in the episode!

Great work, Cobwebs Crew!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! The Cobwebs Crew has been learning techniques in ToonBoom Studio 7.1! In the last Cobwebs Lab, they learned about working with Bones & Skeletons. For this example, we chose to to bring one of Evelyn Jenning’s 2D creations, Claire Libre, to life as an animation. You can view the original illustration used in this exercise here …

The first step is to define the skeleton by using the Bones tool to create a jointed wireframe which can be animated as if it were a body using the Skeleton effect. The process is fascinating, and can amazingly be used on vector art as well as bitmap illustrations. You can read the step-by-step Bones Tutorial at the ToonBoom website.

The crew learned a lot during this process through trial and error, primarily 1) how to plan your drawing in advance to make it easier to animate when you reach this step, and 2) the need to simplify the artwork when working in vector mode so there are less points to process when it is time to export the final animation. Below is the final animation which creates a seamless animated loop!

Next Cobwebs Meetup: we streamline the illustration for easier rendering and add audio! Excellent work, Nathan and Evelyn!

Happy New Year from #rdcHQ! 2012 was a great year for the Rural Design Collective, and it promises to be an even better 2013! We started the year off right with a substantial addition to to Codes of the World project –

Codes of the World: Eurocode

Nearly 1000 MathML equations and SVG diagrams have been completed by the Rural Design Collective for EuroCode! 600+ of these have been incorporated into documents which are now available on the Internet.

“Sustainable World” Premiere!

In other #rdcHQ news, we helped organize our first ever movie premiere — The Beginning of the Sustainable World — at the Savoy Theatre in Port Orford, OR on 12-21-12. The Rural Design Collective designed the posters as well as produced the main movie presentation. Kudos to Nathan Malamud for expertly editing nearly two hours of video footage in iMovie as well as designing the slide show that accompanied the musical entertainment for the evening. We will host a web release of the video in the near future that will contain footage from the event itself. Stay tuned!

Scenes from “The Beginning of the Sustainable World”

Our second poster in a series brainstorming the Port Orford Community Stewardship Area is now a reality – and it is centered on an upcoming event at the Savoy Theatre in Port Orford, OR regarding sustainability. “122112 — The Beginning of the Sustainable World” features photography from The Memory Palace Project and collaborative poster art by The Rural Design Collective.

Download a PDF of our 122112 poster — 12 MB / Photo by Rebecca Hargrave Malamud

( View our first poster … )