Blargh! Blargh I say!

BLARGH!

That out of the way, I want to start having a go at drawing frame by frame animations. Obviously nothing too long, but I'm hitting something of a brick wall in terms of applications I have available.

ArtRage's tracing option is pretty close, but it's a bit clunky to draw, save, new, load as tracing image, draw, save, new, etc, etc. And I have to export and manually combine to get a look at how the animation is going. Which makes doing the guides then fleshing out really annoying.

Flash MX is my other available option. I'm hoping there's a better way to do it, but so far all I've found to be able to do is have two layers. Say I'm doing four drawings per second (three frames per frameset). Layer 1 has a frameset from frame 1 to frame 3 with the first drawing on it. Layer 2 then has a frameset from frame 1 to frame 6 which I can then draw on with the image from Layer 1 showing up. Once it's drawn, create a keyframe at frame 4 on Layer 2 and delete the image from frames 1 to 3 on layer 2. Then layer 1 gets a frameset from frame 4 to frame 9. It's incredibly annoying and hard to keep track of, but has the benefit of very easily being able to see the animation as it progresses. So doing the rough guides first then fleshing out is much easier.

Ignore the fact my artistic skills aren't up to the point where I can do multiple drawings that look the same but for tiny differences, I like the scribbly effect I end up with doing it this way, and practice should improve things. :3

I did find out how to add music, and set it to STREAM setting, so it forces the animation side of things to keep pace with the music, skipping frames if necessary. So with my current procedures, I can build a basic music video type thing in about... fifty thousand years...

More productive than sitting here all night playing with cheats in GTA San Andreas I guess