Have you ever wanted to use more brushes than Photoshop has?  Do you dislike Painter because its interface drives you nuts?  Well have I got the site for you, a co-worker of mine found this the other day.  We got brushes!!

http://www.brusheezy.com/

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

First things first, I am posting from that new wonderful little iPhone app that came out for Wordpress. That said, it’s here to get me to post more often.

Today a few of my coworkers and I shirked out Nickelodeon duties and made our way over to the Children’s Museum of Mannhatten. My new boss was also in our little our group. We went to go see it’s small exhibit of original Golden Book illustrations.

The exhibit was really small (as I said), maybe some 40 pieces. On closer inspection we found some pre-war pieces were actually just computer prints. Only about 4 seemed to be like this, the rest were out in all their original acrylic and yellowed glory. All in all it was really neat to see so many works that I remembered from my childhood. I have included clips of some below.

Link to Southeast Asia Pics

LESSON 01
Efficiency in Flash is important. Whether you are working on your own or on a production team, you need to get your work done as fast as possible. In this lesson I will explore JSFL plugins for Flash.

JSFL (Javascript Flash) is a script language that lets you perform certain tasks with in Flash. The best analogy I can come up with is that its a harder to work with version of Actions in Photoshop. That said its not as easy to use. I personally have no idea how to make any of these, though that doesn’t mean you can’t use them. First you will need to get your self a copy of Adobe Extension Manager. You will Extension Manager to install all the following extensions.

Here is a list of essentials for the Flash animator:

AnimSlider Pro - ($45) [http://www.animonger.com/flashtools.html] I can’t say enough about this tool and how it will help you with animation. Other than the time savers, like vertical and horizontal mirror, it has a button that will reposition the center point of a symbol to its 0,0 origin. It also has a quick motion tween and ease in / ease out quick buttons. This doesn’t even cover the primary function of this tool, the slider itself. AnimSlider lets you scrub through a graphic symbol’s frames without having to open the file. This comes in handy with mouths and lip syncing. In the past you would have to set each key frame with a number in the “Properties” window, now you just scrub though the mouths and you can visually work out the dialog.

Toon Titan - ($44.95) [http://cinestarfilmworks.com/products/toontitan.htm] Toon Titan is an excellent app. I have used it in projects, though sometimes I feel its easier just to do it the Flash way. If you do a lot of toon-shading and want something to manage those shades this is it. Last I checked though it was pretty hard to share color library’s amongst other users, best use of this is making your Flash color pallet then saving that and sending it to your staff.

Symbol Swap - ($Free) [http://www.5etdemi.com/blog/] This one has saved me more than once on a big job. In Flash you can select any symbol and swap it with another under the “Properties” tool bar, you can even duplicate the current symbol and rename it to something else. But what happens if you finished you animation and you have to swap out all the heads with say a different colored head? Well you use this beauty. Select all the symbols that you want to change (you can use the select multiple frame tool, just make sure you lock all the layers you don’t want to change) then select the symbol you want it to swap with in your library. Then under “Commands” select [ced] swap symbol. Thats it! you made the change.

Toggle Guide - ($Free) [http://jessewarden.com/] Other than the obvious, this little script lets you select multiple layers and guide them as a group. Also if you have some guided out and some not, it will swap the guiding. This is also under the “Commands” munu.

Tween 2 Keys - ($Free) [Tween 2 Keys] [Toonmonkey.com] Toonmonkey is an indispensable source for an assortment of animation related plugins for flash. I am including direct links to certain select ones. Tween 2 Keys isn’t exactly name accurate, it should be more like ‘Double Key Tweens” or something. This is great if you animate a walk cycle on 2’s* but then tween the forward movement on 1’s. Tween 2 Key will convert the teened animation to keyed animation on 2’s.
* 2’s means every other frame, 1’s means every frame (ie. 2’s at 24fps means 12 keys per second).

Library Renamer - ($Free) [LibraryRenamer commands 1.0]  This lovely script will append a suffix to an entire library.  It can also batch change the name of linked assets.

Enter Graphic at Current Frame - ($Free) [Enter Graphic at Current Frame] [http://www.dave-logan.com] This little do-hicky is handy. It lets you bypass Flash’s pension for making you enter a graphic symbol at frame one. This tool will instead allow you to enter the graphic symbol at the current frame.

Over all you will find that there are a lot of helpful plugins out there for Flash, a lot I feel are a waste of time. The ones above though are the exception and will really save you time in the animation process. For additional plugins here are some more sites that have them:
• http://www.dave-logan.com/weblog/?p=46
• http://www.toonmonkey.com/extensions.html
• http://www.flashextension.net/product.php?productid=16164&cat=3&page=1

Its been a few hours of work and digging, but now I have it, a totally re-imagined portfolio. Well maybe not totally, I do have about 3 works that I kept from the old one, mostly because I have no new animal drawings that I can find, I will have to check my laptop again to make sure. Hum… I swear. Any who click on the “portfolio” link above and that will take you to all the new works! Enjoy!

Update: So I didn’t have to look far to find more drawings, I guess I just over looked the folder :P

http://www.ironicsans.com/animated_manhattan/

PS - crits are welcome!

Girl in Cafe (aka “longing”)