RE: Thinking of South Park-Style Animations

G'day,

 

I don't want you to stop using blender but wouldn't flash be good enough
for animations on its own.

 

If you want to have a look at what is possible with flash try to find
"dr Amoeba" by Fwak! Animation (a quick google search will get you
there).

 

Note this cartoon has been around for several years now, so the
possibilities in flash will be even better still.

 

Kind regards

 

Rutger

 

  _____  

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of damaeus-/[email protected]
Sent: Friday, 16 September 2005 8:27 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Blender] Thinking of South Park-Style Animations

 

I want to do some South Park-style animations -- not of the South Park
characters themselves, but just using the same style (to make fun of my
co-workers lol).

Is Blender a good choice for that?  At first I was thinking I'd use
Paint
Shop Pro to draw some static backgrounds and then animate the characters
in
front of them, but thankfully, before I even started on that, I realized
that I would want the characters to walk behind, between and around
various
objects.  So just a background plastered in there won't work.

So the characters are 2-dimensional.  I certainly can't have them
walking
around something and becoming as flat as a pancake during the turn.
With a
program like Blender, it seems like it'd be easier just to create a path
for the character to follow and you would see him turn in three
dimensions.
But limiting him to two dimensions is going to be tricky, it seems like.

So I'm curious if there's some way to link a characters front face to
his
right face to his left face and backside, so at just the right time
going
into a turn, you see the back of his head instead of the side, all at
once.

I've spent all night just trying to familiarize myself with the Blender
environment.  I've messed around with Alias' Maya, and while I love that
program, even though my knowledge of how to use it is extremely limited,
I
don't want to spoil myself by playing with something I can't afford.
And I
don't want my rendered videos to have the Alias watermark on them, so I
turned to Blender.

I tried to find information online, even by searching for Blender Park,
but
that site is now offline and what sites seem to remain which have info
on
it are all in some language I can't read, or they're 404 or 403 errors.
I
hate Google!  lol

So basically what I'm trying to find out is if doing this is pretty
straightforward and is there anything unusual I should be aware of
before I
get too involved?

One thing I'd like to know is if Blender has a vanishing point to which
I
can link all the objects in a scene to make sure they all stay in scale
with each other as they move around.  Or perhaps while the characters
are
flat and will look flat, I might be able to turn the view sideways for
myself so I can move things around in three dimensions, even though the
end
viewer won't be able to see the three dimensions.  Is that how it'd
work?

Somehow I think I'd be better off using Flash MX, but I don't know --
that
doesn't seem to have the same touch.



Thanks