Anyone cares to post their tips on building templates for cut-out characters?

Retired Products Animate Tips and Tricks
1

Hi y’all!

I’m wondering if there are any good souls out there who are willing to take the time to share with the rest of us what they prefer when building cut-out puppets.

I’m talking about, how many poses do you draw, whether you use the legs or draw them as you go, how many substitute drawings for mouth, eyes, etc. I reckon it always depends on the needs of the final animation, but I’m a total noob here so i would like to learn from you guys all I can if possible :slight_smile:

Carlos

2

I would like to second this request.

3

HiJust a couple of thoughts1) It may be worth looking at Marty’s tutorial at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7H22Mtv2nY&feature=related I found it interesting listening to his thought process and he’s a great animator. 2) If you have access to ToonBoom Studio the cut-out tutorials and sample material are very detailed and you can infer a great deal about how the cut-out experts work by looking at them. Bear in mind that ToonBoom and Animate 2 are technically very different so the material is useful for “process” not technical operation.Bob

4

Thanks for the tips Bob. I just started with Marty’s Ninja tuts. I can’t find the studio tutorials though. Are there free or do you mean the training videos wich are for sale on the ToonBoom website?

5

Hi The tutorials I was thinking of are part of the ToonBoom Studio Work Out Bundle. The particular tutorial was the one on rigging. It comes with a sample project that can only be opened in Studio. I think they may have come as “free” when I bought Studio. However, I find it difficult to keep track of the ToonBoom deals. If you have come from the Studio upgrade route this may be a Red Herring.For me, one of the difficult parts in rigging is hiding the fact it’s a cut-out character by getting the joins/pivots right. The other difficult part is making sure that I have a storyboard that is detailed enough to develop the majority of limbs and pivots before I begin animating. It avoids the two pitfalls of a) Building stuff I never use b) having to develop a lot of stuff on the fly. Bob