Animating?

Edit: Oh, we started with Englisch Language! :o

Stimmt schon. Aber jeder deutsche Beitrag wandert auch immer unweigerlich ins Englische ab - warum nicht mal umgekehrt?

Toonz starts, but I don't know how I can work with it. I need a manual. Mäh...

Edit: Oh, we started with Englisch Language! :o

haha, that's a common thing here - sorry. I often hijack German threads & reply in English because I'm not so good at German or other languages besides English. I've lived in Spain for about 12+ years now & I'm still terrible at that too, unlike my brother & sisters who can speak it almost fluently.

I don't mind the mixed language threads & it's not like we don't have access to online translators - they might not be perfect but as long as whatever gets pasted into them isn't full of spelling mistakes or slang words then you usually get a decent understanding of what has been said.

Anyway, would also really like to get Spine as well, but it's way too pricey for the pro version. I hope they do like Brash Monkey someday & jump on one of the humble bundle software bundle wagons as $1 for Spriter Pro was a bloody steal - even if it's on one of the higher tiers for say $5 or $15 it would still be worth it considering the official price.

Hah! thanks Esmeralda! I didn't know DragonBones! I have Spriter Pro and have used Spine; Spine was very polished and a joy to work with but the pricetag? ouch... Spriter is very affordable and feature packed, but not very... pleasant. 

DragonBones looks promising! I'm downloading it as we speak too :-)

Do you have some feedback? What is it like compared to Spine and Spriter pro?

Aber ohne Bitmapfunktion komm ich nicht klar.

Was ist denn eine Bitmapfunktion?

Offtopic:
The reason why I don't like write English is simple: using a language you can't speak and write makes it's usage wrong. Without somebody who corrects me. My English is worse than years before. It's like driving through a language fog sea without compass.

I try to spell something that SOUNDS like English, but it's surely wrong, I think, it's Pidgin English. I know that English speakers are very tolerant, but they must, because NOBODY in a forum writes a correct English in grammar, tenses or spelling (maybe he is a native speaker). F.e.: is "must" the correct word? Means "Must" the same as "müssen"??? I'm never sure if I write THAT WHAT I WANT to write... Maybe "must" means in this context "dürfen"? But I didn't want to say "dürfen"...

I'm thinking German, so I translate word by word in mind and that takes hours sometimes to write a simple text.
I understand only 50% of some questions, so I can't answer if I want to do. I stopped reading all the posts months ago, because it's too difficult to understand what the writer want to say.

This text needs 20 Minutes. It's too long for me. And: Visionaire is German, right...?

OK, for the future: I will write the text in German and use the Google translator without checking if it's right or not.

@ Machtnix: no worries mate. Most native English speakers can't write for shit. Half of them can barely spell words correctly & have no understanding of grammar at all. I don't know if it's down to laziness or if they have just gotten so used to using mobile shorthand, but I often have more difficultly understanding a native English speaker using mobile slang than I do understanding the English of a non-native English speaker. The reason behind that is simple; it's because non-native English speakers learn correct grammar & the formal words / sentences whereas a native English speaker is more likely to use slang words from the area in which grew up.

How you described translating from German to English & vice versa in your mind is how I have to translate Spanish too. It's especially hard having a conversation face to face or over the phone with a Spanish person for me as it takes me ages to translate in my mind & then more often than not I end up saying what I translated in my head incorrectly. Text/email is another matter entirely & for me it's a lot easier because I can take my time to post/reply.

There's nothing wrong with using a translator. I don't recommend using Google Translate though as it's horrible. Bing translator isn't much better, but it seems to work better than Google. Anyway, as long as you write as correctly as possible (spellings & grammar) then the translation from google or bing should be ok enough for English speakers to understand.

Thank you, AFRLme...

For example your second sentence soon are only words for me (Most native English speakers can't write for shit). I KNOW what you want to say in this context (80%) - but I don't understand EXACTLY what the words mean... it's a funny idiom I have to learn... If I hear the sentence without the context I would understand: THEY CAN WRITE... Sometimes it's the opposite of the meaning, that's bad...

I'm only annoyed about must writing in English - that makes it worse. Sometimes I want to have somebody to check and correct. After months wrting my own thinking-it's-right-English I can't change to the correct way...

Back:
Has anyone experiences with making animations on paper (the ONLY old school way...). I want to draw everything, but using a generated and printed 3D-background for poses and scenes (with a light desk). Because a CG-figur stays a CG-figur ever, I want to trace to make it handmade. After all I will scan the handmade frames to stick together (Photoshop or whatever). I am a loser to draw with a mouse (not good enough for me *lol*).

Bitmap-Funktion means that I draw and the computer does not correct me. It means not working with vectors and drawing every frame manually. Well, Toonboom is cool for any 2D-way of animation, but it costs me every month the price I would pay once for the standard-version of Spine.

If you want to draw frame by frame old-school-way (well, not on paper) you could always use pencil 2D. It's open source.

I once tried to draw animations on paper and scan them, but it was too hard to align them correctly. There were always odd jumps in the animation. (but I'm very sloppy when I draw, so maybe you won't have the same problem.) After that I bought a cheap grafik tablet :-)

I have never worked with a toon-program, so I have no idea how this rigging-thing works on a 2D-character. In Cinema I have a mesh, I have bones to animate (NO joints), conditions, dynamics and scripts. In every case I have a body (polygons) with an inside and with textures, a 3d-model to turn and rotate free in the world.

I think, every toon program needs closed-line figures, well? Similar to every graphic tool to fill in the colours and to make it vector-like? You can't use "scribbled", foggy characters?

A funny thing is "MikuMikuDance" which animates a manga girlie to dance, but it's also 3D. I like this 2D-style (no true shadows, it's like a cartoon). But as simple it is it has true collision objects and well designed possibilities, but it's own format you can't transform later.

I tried Flash years ago, but it was "a disaster" (*lol*) to use the timeline with objects, hot spots and invert movies. I bang my head and don't use it now...

The most quick tool for me is the pencil...

I think one of biggest issues when it comes to English is that nearly every other language has feminine, masculine & neutral variations of words & phrases, whereas most English is comprised of neutral words, but the English dictionary for some reason is probably at least double the size or more than most other languages - why I don't know. I guess we just really like words & wordplay.

Must is kind of a variation of need, as in "I need to do something" or "you need/must sort out the washing up".

@Machtnix: yes, I meant that most native English people write bad. Bad spelling. Bad grammar. They often use slang words & mobile shorthand instead of typing out full words, which makes it hard - even for me - to understand what they are trying to say. I'm a bit old fashioned when it comes to the English language - hell I don't even own a mobile phone, so all that texting nonsense is about as alien to me as a non-native language is to you.

Rigging 2D-characters works similar to rigging in 3D. You assign an image to a bone and move the bone to animate. You can scale, rotate, but it works best in sideview because of the missing 3D.
In most programms like spriter or dragonbones you can use bitmap-images or other formats like png. In dragonbones (and spine pro, I think) you can tranform this image to a mesh and deform this mesh.
What art style you use (like scribbled characters) is up to you.