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Japans animation software

Go take a look at Hanoka, animated entirely in flash, and then come back and share with us whether you still think that there is a remote possibility that any sensible Japanese studio would use FLASH to animate remotely anything.

frentymon wrote:

Go take a look at Hanoka, animated entirely in flash, and then come back and share with us whether you still think that there is a remote possibility that any sensible Japanese studio would use FLASH to animate remotely anything.

Geh, while that is quite awful looking, I wouldn't use that as the standard for what Flash is capable of. ^^; That's just horrible animation. Tamala 2010 is a combination of Flash and 3D animation and it's much more successful, stylistically. And then there are all the relatively well-animated American shows and commercials that use Flash (like the work Renegade Animation produces, all in-house). I'd be interested to see a well made all-Flash anime sometime; the potential is there to create something really impressive.

To answer your question, Viga, After Effects seems to be the most common post-production program used right now. In all the "making of" documentaries I've seen, I see that software the most often. Most traditional 2D animation starts out hand-drawn, with the key frame drawings. These are then timed out and set to dope sheets, which indicate where in-betweens are needed. Then the drawings are cleaned up, and then either in-betweened in house or shipped to Korea for in-betweening. After that they are scanned into the computer, colored and composited with the background using production software like After Effects (or something similar). It's there that additional lighting and shadow can be added, as well as tinting and color correction. Recently, a lot of 3D elements are common in many series; these are made using 3D Studio Max (which seems to be the most common, from what I've seen), Softimage (which Studio 4°C used for Tekkon Kinkreet's backgrounds!), LightWave or Maya. These are then exported and composited with the other drawings.

one of the site with software that was mentioned has a demo. i wanna try!

I remember hearing/reading that Gonzo initially tried to use lower-end OTS software, failed, and ended up making/customizing their own effects engines since they couldn't afford the higher-end products at the time. At this point I'm assuming they're using customized versions of the higher-end software Cloe mentioned.

Flash might be cool to use or maybe the Havok engine.

That's weird, because I know the post for Gantz was done in straight-up After Effects.

^^; Havok is more for gaming, isn't it? Programs like Maya already have physics simulations inside them so using Havok would be kind of pointless.

Viga, if it's something you'd like to try, the Learning Edition of Maya is a great tool. It's a vast program with a huge learning curve, though, so don't be discouraged if you don't understand everything right away. People who have used Maya for over a decade still haven't mastered everything the program has to offer.

Havok is indeed the basis for many of the best looking game engines like Half Life 2, Far Cry, FEAR, Oblivion, etc. but that's no reason to pigeonhole it into a specific task. The Source engine is a great example of how even real-time game engines can be used to create nearly photo-realistic displays that can far exceed the native resolution of Blu-ray and HD-DVD content with the right hardware.

The professional Maya Unlimited is now at $7,000USD and the mid-range Maya Complete is around $2,000. That may sound very expensive, but it's a whole lot cheaper than it used to be back in the Alias|Wavefront era.

Does the japanese use flash to animate their anime or do they use a different program to do it.