Truthfully, I’ve only had time to play around with TBS for the past couple of weeks - I think trying out the FlipBoom program rekindled my interest. Anyway, I have yet to create a successful animation, and I have what is probably a truly stoop question - that is:
Does TBS create InBeTWEENS on drawing layers that are not manipulated (i.e. scaled, rotated, transformed) with one or more of the Scene Planning Tools?
I thought I’d try the program to see how well it would do to create TWEENS between some drawings I created in Photoshop, then saved as .png, and imported and vectorized in TBS (with texture), but I can’t get it to work at all.
http://www.patriceart.com/flipboom/4panda_out_bears.jpg
I realize that tweening from 2 to 3 and 4 would be asking a lot, but I did expect to have some results between 1 and 2.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong - or maybe the program just doesn’t do tweening between drawing elements!
Any help would be appreciated,
thanks
Howdy,
Not a “stooopid” question at all :).
Shape tweening like that is kind of difficult in TBS to the best of my knowledge. The only way to “tween” from each of those drawings to the next would be the old fashioned way of drawing them. Although I suppose you could mess with the contour editor if you import & vectorize the drawings. But that would be tedious at best.
My recommendation would be to import & vectorize the drawings with texture, then following the steps JK lays out in this series of articles:
http://www.tallgrassradio.com/toonboom/2007/09/introduction-to-photo-cut-out-animation.html
You should be able to cut the panda into pieces & then tween their motions using pegs & the sceneplanning tools. I think if you set your pivot points correctly, you should be able to articulate the bear quite well. You may need to draw the torso again for a couple frames, but the arms & legs you should be able to rotate & transform to get a pretty good result.
Hope that gives you some ideas, I think to generate exactly what you’re looking for would involve investing in digital pro, I’m pretty sure that falls into the “morphing” category which TBS doesn’t have. Good luck & keep asking questions if anything was unclear.
Well, if you like you can download the Template “Panda1.tbt” :
"Template has been removed"
This is just a very simple cut out animation of your Panda image.
(lots of room for improvements…)
Cheers
Nolan
Nolan,
I’ve downloaded your file but I can’t get it to open. Tried everything I could think of, including opening TBS and dragging it into the Local Library folder, the larger one, and the templates folder. I’ve tried with version 3.5 and 4.
Could it be that you’ve saved it as a Mac only file extension?
Oh - and I took a stroll through your gallery! I see that you are the creator of one of my FAVORITES! - “Bruno and Brunette!”
I am very impressed with the water surface effects of your “Need for Speed” animation. It looks cool… Must admit that I had a hard time figuring out which duck won the race though!
KDog,
Thank you for the link to JK’s tutorial. I did see that a long time ago, but back then I didn’t save the link. It’s truly helpful, because when I imported and vectorized my images, I didn’t go any farther in TBS than that - simply importing them.
>>I think to generate exactly what you’re looking for would involve investing in digital pro, I’m pretty sure that falls into the “morphing” category which TBS doesn’t have.
Ummm…
That’s where the proof comes in that my question truly is a stoop. I can see now that ‘morphing’ is what I thought I was getting with TBS - but I thought Tweening was morphing and I thought morphing was when you wanted to change one thing into something completely different - such as turning a politician into a jack— nevermind.
So -
There’s no way I can afford to upgrade to Studio Pro, and I’m going to have a hard time drawing as many frames as I would need in TBS. Due to some health problems, I can no longer draw all day like I used to.
Last night I looked through some old Adobe LiveMotion manuals where Tweening was mentioned, but not gone into in any depth. Does anyone know if LM’s tweening is closer to morphing?
Or of any other (CHEAP!) programs that do morphing?
Is it OK to ask that here? If not, please say and I’ll edit this from my post.
thanks,
Patrice
There are no stupid questions. Any question is worth asking if it helps you to learn more.
There are two forms of tweening as defined by Flash. There is motion tweening and shape tweening. The tweening provided in TBS is what is normally referred to as motion ( or parameter) tweening. (it allows you to animate, using the render engine to generate the inbetweens, scale, location, skew, path etc.)
Shape tweening, which is not a feature of TBS, is also referred to as morphing by some software. It is a feature of Flash (not worth the price differential). It has value if properly applied, but isn’t a substitute for drawing real inbetweens. The problem with most computer assisted inbetweening is that the software doesn’t understand how to represent movement in drawings it just follows your hints, so the artist must still have a knowledge of proper inbetweening techniques to apply the tools effectively and most people don’t understand how to inbetween and therefore computer assisted inbetweening gets a bad rep because it looks wonky and unnatural. One tip is to minimize the tweened frames. You can’t tween more that one or two frames at a time just like in hand drawn animation an assistant can’t draw more than one or two inbetweens between the animator’s keys without getting lost .
As to loading the TBT file Nolan provided, that is a template file and you need to open your library, go to a catalog inside your library, like your Global catalog, and in the template panel on your far right, you right click to open the context menu and select import>import template file. Then select the TBT file you want and import it. Then you can drag that template from the library to your timeline to see it in action. Hope this helps-JK
Ah, but the reason it’s truly stoopid is because it took me so long to figure out that I needed to ask it! 
I still have my right arm, it’s just that using it is rather difficult.
And I do see the logic behind the reasoning that tweening could easily lose character. Oh well…
>>Nolan’s file
YES! Thank you - I have it now - and it made me laugh!
I guess I should have thought to look under the right click button! I do keep finding things there in TBS.
P
Hi Patrice,
Here is another little Panda on the way…
http://homepage.mac.com/nolan.scott/Reference/iMovieTheater393.html
Very simple, just 15 frames on two’s…
Cheers
Nolan
I like that a lot Nolan 
The jiggle in the belly is great! lol
Ha! That’s adorable, Nolan! Very fluid too. Your work is great.
thanks!