Toon Boom visits Georgia for Game Design Camp

My friends at Toon Boom just told me about an event in my neck of the woods (Georgia). They are co-hosting a game design camp at SCAD for students aged 12-15. Thats probably a bit younger than most of my readers, but hey, some of you might have kids that age. Here’s some more info and link to the details on SCAD’s site…

Combining the expertise and prestige of SCAD with the outstanding products and faculty from Ubisoft Entertainment and Toon Boom Animation, the SCAD Game Design Camp offers an educational adventure in game design for students ages 12-15. To simulate game production as approached in the professional field, teams of students are directed through industry processes, in order to construct a board game from start to finish. Students discover creative methods via brainstorming, interactive practice and teamwork.  After this weeklong camp, students gain a familiarity with game design software, 2-D technology, and specialized equipment used in the game design industry.

Some random CartoonSmart news….

Okay, I’m expecting a big work week coming up, which probably means with my luck, nothing I’m planning to do will get done. But I’m nearly done recording the end of the Wave Attack Game for the iOS course, so again, sorry for the delay but its coming. I did though update all the previous files in the course to the latest version of XCode and Cocos2D. Xcode will automatically update them, you’ll just get a warning that says basically “wanna take a snapshot before updating the project”.  And updating Cocos2D we talked about on the blog last week ,  so I just did that on all the previous projects for you.

Also I’ve had this article open in a browser window for about a week to remind myself to post it, and so I can finally close this dang window, here’s an article about John K (of Ren and Stimpy fame) now using Toon Boom Harmony instead of Flash. What’s wild to me is that he ever used Flash to animate.  And not because of Flash’s shortcomings as an animation program, but just because John K seems like such a classical animator its hard to imagine him working with a computer at all. Here’s what he says though…

“Flash always seemed to me to be a program that was not designed for animation but was the only one that you could bend to do it. When I use Flash I am forcing it to do things that it’s not really capable of. I have to trick it into faking what I want.”

How true is that. Like a Jedi trying to do a Jedi mind trick on another Jedi.  To Flash’s credit though, you COULD fake it.  Just wasn’t easy.  And don’t get me wrong, I use Flash ALL the time still. All the  animations (and illustration work) for my recent apps in the App Store have used Flash. But those are minor animations, small objects on a pinball table appearing and disappearing mostly.

So anyway, we do have a Harmony tutorial coming soon. So for you serious animators . Until then, dont forget we do have a new Toon Boom Studio course and TONS of hours of Toon Boom Animate tutorials.

Also I just heard from our instructor John Nyquist and he is working on the 3rd and final part of the Actionscript 3 Strategy Games series. Parts 1 and 2 are posted there.

Finally, I’ve been posting some free previews of tutorials to our YouTube account, so if you want to see what’s new, go to 
http://www.youtube.com/user/cartoonsmartlessons
 . I also posted the entire Animated Stills tutorial ( the videos on YouTube are called Animating a Landscape / Photo in Flash pt 1 – 4).  YouTube now allows uploads longer than 15 minutes, which means I don’t have to edit an hour long preview into 4 or 5 parts so its much easier to share the training over there. Just puh-lease don’t try to email me via YouTube. Or even more unreliable, pseudo- email me by leaving a YouTube comment worded like an email.  Just email me directly. If I blink, I get 120 unread emails and the ones that don’t look like customer services emails get read really quickly, so a YouTube comment email might not catch my eye as needing actual attention.

Wow, I wrote a lot today. Sheesh. Back to real work.

Toon Boom training comes to my home state.

My friends at Toon Boom just tipped me off to this article  about Toon Boom training here in Georgia. Here’s some cut and paste from the full article…

The Georgia Entertainment Media Work Ready Region, the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Georgia Department of Economic Development (Digital Entertainment Office) are pleased to announce and provide Toon Boom Software Training for 2 weeks during the summer. With this industry expected to grow to more than $555 Billion dollars by 2015 in the United States, the leadership of the Georgia Entertainment Media Region are vested in making sure industry can excel in Georgia and will sponsor the three (3) two week courses priced at $2500 each that will be offered FREE to those referred by their employers. The course will be taught on Animate Pro from a Toon Boon instructor flown in from Toronto, Canada.

And I was just talking to an art director here in Atlanta working on an animated show for FX (I’ll let ya guess which show), and we joked around about his crew using Flash because it crashed on them constantly. Of course its a tough sell to get anyone to switch software midway through production but I did tell him they need to look into Animate for his next show. Maybe an animated episode of Dexter with guest Casey Anthony. Sigh…. our legal system.

 

New Toon Boom Animate Tutorials!

Holla! Its 2011!!  Finally, right. One more year till 2012 and we can all say “so long suckers” forever and evaporate into space dust when some totally sweet solar junk wipes its butt with Earth JUST like the Mayans said would happen…Oh what’s that? The Mayans just said 2012 was the start of a new solar cycle? Crap. I guess I gotta work this year. I guess Mastercard wants their money back. This guy likes money too. Oh heck, if I’m posting random Idiocracy links, lemme just post the intro below this important stuff….

So to get ya started on your next project, Justin Cook returns with 2 excellent Toon Boom animation courses. For sale as a combo pack for only $10!  And you’ll get that fully rigged character for free as a source file, which for legal purposes looks nothing like the great Bruce Campbell. Just sayin’.

Also don’t forget you can hire Justin to do just about anything. His site is SeenCreative.co.uk

Got any predictions for 2011? I’m listening to ALL your crazy or non-crazy comments. Go for it.

Okay here’s some fun to start the year (careful of the F-bomb at work)…

Zombie Bods are Finally Here!

Take a look at these beauties! And uglies. Once again, the great Justin Cook has delivered an awesome collection of Toon Boom Animate character templates. These come fully rigged for animation and have plenty of body parts to swap through, including “normal” and “zombie” modes. Plus there’s tons of mouths for lip syncing, and each character has their own weapon. So for you animators that just want to animate, these are ready to go for ya!  Each character comes with 2 project files, one with the character in zombie form and looking normal, a demo video of each character’s swappabled parts, and exported versions of the vector art in an .fla and a PNG file.  Check ‘em out further by clicking below!

Zombie Bods Preview! “Chinnery”

I had to share Justin Cook’s latest Toon Boom Animate character template as soon as I could. I’m not saying he looks identical to a certain actor from Evil Dead, but I’m not saying he looks too un-identical either.

Chinnery will be for sale in a mere days!  In time for your Halloween themed animations!

 

 

 

 

Just updated! We’ve got a preview video now too.

 

Big Toon Boom Discounts Tomorrow Only

Animate Pro is $999 and Animate Reg is $299. Just sayin’ is all.

Also because I want to share this but not create another post, here’s a good freelance comic for ya’ll. Some of you won’t find it funny at all though. Too real….

Copying / importing from one Toon Boom Animate Project to another

Below is a relatively short lesson for our Toon Boom Animate crowd. Justin Cook made this for you guys because copying artwork with your bone structure intact directly from one Animate project file to another isn’t possible with a simple cut and paste, but  this video will explain why that is and what to do instead. Basically you’ll be creating Templates for your Animate Library out of the artwork you want to reuse in other projects…

Zombie Bods Preview

Here’s a preview of our upcoming Zombie Bods Character Pack for Toon Boom Animate and Animate Pro…

Check out the body substitutions in particular. Yummm…. And for those of you just stumbling onto this blog, we’ve already got an Office Bods template pack available here.

Toon Boom Animate Zombie Templates Coming Soon

Ok its been decided, our next set of Toon Boom Animate character templates will be Zombies! Justin Cook is drawing these up now, complete with drawing substitutions for zombified and non-zombified versions of each character. And if you’re not sure what that means exactly, Animate has a simple slider tool for swapping one piece of artwork for another, which independent of any transform keyframes you’ve added. So you don’t have to keyframe a position (like your X or Y) just to swap out artwork.

If you’ve got any suggestions for how these should turn out, lets hear ‘em!