We recently completed a new episode in our web animation series “That Meeting”, the most recent one on “Avatar” was made almost entirely using Blender 2.5. Guest starring Dana Snyder of Aqua Teen Hunger Force!
Though Blender 2.5 was a bit shaky on occasion, leading to so many backups and incremented saves, it was a pleasure to work with overall and I can’t wait to do more work using it. Especially the built in nodal Compositor.
The one tricky aspect was, and perhaps always is, lip-syncing. We used an external open-source lip-sync app to export a series of frames which are loaded as animating textures in Blender. Though this does work it’s very clunky, slowing Blender down considerably as it scans all the textures.
I would like you know how you used Blender to do this too. I ended up using Toon Boom because Blender doesn’t have vector drawing support, among a few other things, which makes actually drawing my characters nearly impossible.
I have experimented with various 2D animation apps, including Toon Boom. I’m interested in an economic animation style, not just in the price of the app used but also in the approach to animation. Once I realised I could achieve a 2D look just fine using a 3D app with a ‘pose to pose’ method, Blender was an easy choice. Especially with the improved 2.5.
