[Kristofer]

Well basically I got addicted to those darn Caramelldansen videos roaming all over Youtube and NicoNico so I wanted to try making a Caramelldansen animation thing too. It still isn't complete but I would love to show my progress so far. Oh a little note, it was supposed to be Sawatari Makoto from Kanon but it ended up looking like Ayu. xP

This is what it started out as:


The Caramelldansen videos are usually three frames so that's what I did, draw three frames.

Then I decided to try and color it in paint which wasn't such a brilliant idea:
http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/242...gn8copyhg0.png

That is basically how I wanted the drawing to be colored.

My friend recommended I made an outline of it in Photoshop:


I think it turned out nicely in my opinion.

I decided to color her in as a third year studentL
http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/4...8seniorwn6.png

Yeah I know she never went to school but I thought it would be cool to see her in with yellow hair and change the school uniform to pink. I was inspired to change it pink when I saw this Kawasumi Mai figure in a pink uniform, I thought it looked really cool.

I wanted to imagine what she would look like in her first year:
http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/2...reshmanci2.png

I thought the green ribbon and the brown hair was a nice combination, and it matches since I ended up making Makoto looking like Ayu. Haha, I like to picture Ayu much younger than she really is.

And now her second year was colored in last:
http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/9...8juniornk8.png

I didn't know what would look good with her red ribbon so I decided to make her hair dark blue, like Mai and Nayuki's hair.

Now this was just made for fun:
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/3595/kanonbv2.png

Now time for the animations:


That one was more of a spasm one, my apologies.



There you go, I apologize if you had a seizure.

Now I tried to add more dimension to the drawings:
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/6813/freshmanlh1.png
http://img388.imageshack.us/img388/2756/juniortt8.png
http://img388.imageshack.us/img388/5287/seniordl1.png



Yeah, the GIF kind of took the quality away but I still thought it looked okay. Oh well, I had a lot of fun doing this and hopefully I can actually make a Caramelldansen video.

[akprince]

Cute

I'd suggest getting a program that produces frames between the three to make it smoother~

[Kristofer]

Originally Posted by akprince

Cute

I'd suggest getting a program that produces frames between the three to make it smoother~

Haha thanks! I've been trying to find a program but I never found exactly what I was looking for. Do you know of any programs?

[akprince]

Originally Posted by Kristofer

Haha thanks! I've been trying to find a program but I never found exactly what I was looking for. Do you know of any programs?

Flash animators i guess.

Use something like Adobe Flash ~

[Ruuka]

Originally Posted by Kristofer

Haha thanks! I've been trying to find a program but I never found exactly what I was looking for. Do you know of any programs?

Lol Caramell Dansen virus all over again.
Nice work, but I recommend trying to improve it with straighter lines?
The last one with the light shade doesn't look very good, to be honest.
It seems to made her look 3D but awkwardly. Try cell-shading when you get to it.

I use Adobe Imageready.
It's great for animation and flash, I normally export it in .SWF so quality won't be lost. But to make it to an image you'll have to sacrifice a little bit of quality by saving it to .GIF, but with Imageready you can set it very high quality so it'll only lose very minimal quality.

Example of what I did before:



It was my siggy in another forum. Ahaha

[Saffielia]

Omg~ That has to be the most chibi Pikapal I ever saws <333

[Kristofer]

Originally Posted by Ruuka

Lol Caramell Dansen virus all over again.
Nice work, but I recommend trying to improve it with straighter lines?
The last one with the light shade doesn't look very good, to be honest.
It seems to made her look 3D but awkwardly. Try cell-shading when you get to it.

I use Adobe Imageready.
It's great for animation and flash, I normally export it in .SWF so quality won't be lost. But to make it to an image you'll have to sacrifice a little bit of quality by saving it to .GIF, but with Imageready you can set it very high quality so it'll only lose very minimal quality.

Example of what I did before:


It was my siggy in another forum. Ahaha

Wow! That is hella adorable haha. Thank you very much for the great advice. And it seems you play the Japanese version of Mabinogi in the Mari server? I used to play it too, I forgot what server I joined though.

[Unit 00]

Another option for a program simply to add frames between the images would be the GIMP. It isn't the greatest program to use, but it is free and if you get lucky you can make some interesting anmations.

You can try to save the image as a png file as well, that will boost the quality to around that of a decent jpeg file and still be able to be animated. The biggest issue with this is that anyone that is still using internet explorer 6 will have some issues with the picture and it. that, and it is larger than a gif since it is saving more information to keep it at a higher quality. I don't know how well any of the fire fox browsers work with animated png files, but they work farly decently in ie7 and I haven't seen any issues in ie8.

As for the GIMP, to animate it you need to put the in order from bottom to top with the bottom most layer as the background you want used and then put the background in behind you picture. If you don't have the same image as a background the colors can get a bit odd. Once you have your images lined up accordingly in layers, go to the filter drop-down menu and then to the animation window. I believe the option is called fade, but you should be able to recognize what it will do by name. A window will pop up that will ask for how you want to set up the intermediate frames. The higher, the more slowly and smoothe the animation will appear though for that I would start by try 18 or 24 frames. That may be a little fast though.

It will make a new file, so if it isn't right you can close it and go back to the origional file and try again. To preview it you go back to the animation menu and there is a playback choice. A window will pop up and it should be self-explanatory. When you like it just save it and it should ask if you want to make it into an animation if you choose the rght format.

I couldn't find and of the fade/blend animation files I made, but here is a simple ripple I did in under two minutes when I was testing the ripple animation:

[kitaek27]

Not a bad job, though 6 frames would've been much more sufficient for a carmelldansen.