Wanna Share a Chewbone With Me ?
Pets are great, aren’t they? We have 2 dogs and 2 cats here and they’re lots of inspiration for the cartoons! I’ve been doing the job search thing and our German shepherd helps me work off some steam! Things may change pretty soon, however. We think the little cat, Bullet, is going to be a mommy cat pretty soon and that will change things quite a bit around here!
We’ll just have to see! Shalom!
How are the cartoons created?
A lady in France wrote us asking how the cartoons are created. Thank you for asking! We use Macromedia Flash 8 Professional (Macromedia was bought out by Adobe a few years ago) to do the initial artwork. Flash art is vector-based, not bitmapped as you would find in :Photoshop or PhotoImpact.
Vector drawings are scalable producing nice, clean lines no matter how large or small we make them. With bitmapped drawings, larger images can get “pixelated” or grainy looking. We can use a Wacom tablet with Flash to produce variable thickness lines to make the drawings even fancier!
Using Flash takes some getting used to, but after about 9 years of practice, we actually prefer using its drawing capabilities to most other drawing/animation programs!
Once the drawing is mostly done, we export the image in a .jpg format to be finished in Ulead’s PhotoImpact 8.0 which is pretty close to Photoshop in how it looks and operates.
Then the finished cartoon is inserted into the toon.html webpage using Dreamweaver MX or Dreamweaver 8.
Flash 8 along with Anime Studio and Erain's Swift 3d are used for the animation work. Animation Studio (formerly Moho from LostMarble) can use animation bones to bending objects such as arms and legs far more easily than Flash 8 can do.
Animation Studio can also do some particle type special effects such as smoke which looks better than what Flash 8 alone can do.
Flash CS4 now has bones as well, but Animation Studio takes less computer power to run.
Swift 3d produces 3 dimensional Flash or GIF work for nice special effects and is much easier to learn and use than, say, 3d Max, or Lightwave 3d.
