duocartoonist - Tumblr blog

[duocartoonist]

PATREON CLOSED

Hello! I’d like to pass an official note about out Patreon, since today, it is officially closed and we won’t be accepting any further donations. THank you very much for your support so far, you are the best guys.

[duocartoonist]

Please I NEED help and you guys are amazing at animation sooo I got a problem: I'm on my last year of animation school and I'm still terrible at it. I don't improve. Just don't. But I don't wanna give up, even with everybody telling me that. THE PROBLEM IS we don't have many jobs in my country and not being good enough means no money and I'm so afraid BC my time is running and I don't wanna give up but I don't improve. What do I do??

Hi! I thought I would post a public reply  about this, since this is a very valid, serious question.

It happens that sometimes, animation and art schools don’t fit well with some students, you may have a few lacks in your basic training, and if left unattended, those can come and haunt you while looking for a job.

The good news is that with a bit of clarity on what you need to have in your  portfolio, you can solve that problem  in 6 to 12 months of intensive practice and training.

It’s all about focusing on ONE position, and training solely for it, producing portfolio piece after portfolio piece along the way. Schools scatter your training, this is the opposite approach.

   You will need around 6 hours per day, minimum, to make sure you get a fair chance, and in the meanwhile, you can get a part time job and settle your finances so you can sustain yourself.  I also recommend networking with some industry workers and actively seeking mentorship, I am too mentoring and being mentored, it’s the best thing ever.

Bobby Chiu often recommends jobs like being a night guard, because that kind of task leaves you with countless empty hours that you can fill with sounded practice, most guards just binge on Netflix, but you can be wiser about how you use your time.

[duocartoonist]

ToonBoom Rules, Flash Drools

One feather to rule them all!

We figured out this new rigging system for TB this weekend. It is a neat little trick that allows you to control multiple elements at once.  Or do a deformer within a deformer (something impossible till today) woo hoo! 

The only way to do this in Flash is to hand draw it, so this is a huge time saver.

[duocartoonist]

Recently, we had a rather unique commission stream in youtube. We never open C-work, but we did for that one. And the commissioner requested we would draw his vision of the “Choices” ending. With the two sisters confronting Discord at his peak.  I had a different ending in mind,  but that was the funny fact about the project, I wasn’t in full control of the story. :) This could have been a prelude of a final battle.

[duocartoonist]

Big news!

We are happy to announce the opening of our very own GUMROAD store!

To access the store, click here:

https://gumroad.com/duocartoonist#

The first tool we have released is the speed color action, we tested it with fellow professional character designers from both the video game and animation industries, comic artists (IDW) and commission artists.

No matter what method was used, the speed color action cut it by 1/3. If you are working in Photoshop. 

This is one of our most coveted Patreon tools, and as we stated, the price of the products has increased since last year, as they have been carefully tested to ensure they would be an asset for the artist using them. 

SPEED COLOR INCLUDES

* A full video tutorial

* 2 PSD example files

* ATN file for Photoshop cc2015 and beyond

* Installation instructions

[duocartoonist]

Helios Full Rig!

Hello everyone, here’s an animation update and how there’s a full rig of Helios done now!

It works real well and with a few more tweaks I’ll have all the templates I need :D

Made an HD video with full sound available to our patrons, of course.

But isn’t this awesome!  Can’t wait to use it on more projects!

[duocartoonist]

MerMay! (The Challenge)

Month of May... Heard at work that there was a ‘MerMay’ challenge around.  So I went out and had fun with it.  Here’s a little preview of how she looked like in the end :)   Kept the higher resolutions and other goodies for our awesome patrons :)

https://www.patreon.com/duocartoonist

[duocartoonist]

You've shown us how the helios rig works for relatively flat 2d characters such as My Little Pony, but what about characters with more dimension? Disney's 'Tarzan', for example, had a very muscular leopard 2d character, and in Dreamwork's 'Spirit', all of the horses had animated muscles. Could artists use the helios system to create characters with more physique?

Short answer, Yes.  But it would be quite complicated to get all of that working with solely Helios.  With my current pipeline and test that I have done with my module, I would do some parts with Helios and others with more proven rig techniques.

[duocartoonist]

hello is koolfrood again, I want to ask if there is any classes that YOU took to get into toon boom animation because I'm trying to make an animation but its kinda complicated to be self taught about it. I did make an animatic with sketches but camera movements were from toon boom if you can help me the video is on youtube under unleash the magic animatic... i hope to hear from you again...

Hi!  Sorry for the long reply.  I did not learn toonboom through classed, but rather by myself through youtube videos.  Look up  Kyu Bum Lee, he has good Toonboom Rigging tutorials that are easy to follow and understand :)

[duocartoonist]

Run away is finally out!

THe team did an awesome job in this one. Some people prefer Midnight Frenzy, but this one is my personal fav. Voiced by EileMonty!

[duocartoonist]

Diamonds song instrumental. Official release with lyrics on screen. It took, a while to complete this one, and we are going to start working on the vocals on March.

[duocartoonist]

Choices preview number 2!

We just uploaded it yesterday right after a rather fun Stream!

[duocartoonist]

A Note about criticism and Thank you, TUMBLR

Hello!

I wanted to drop a quick note today.  As artists, we have to accept the critiques of the audience, no matter what. This is a reality we accept.

When people send us a critique, we are usually delighted, a chance to improve! to learn! The critiques issued here have been the best I’ve ever seen. You TUMBLRS are gold.

Not only you give the GOOD kind of critique, you even come and HELP! and they say TUMBLR is rough!, I’d say you’ve been very good to us!.  It is for this that I want to thank you, TUMBLR audience.

In the last months, on the other hand, we have noticed somehow of an  expectation for our productions to be TV quality from the YT comments, and because we work in the industry, and we strive for Disneyesque, then,the logic goes:

Duo Cartoonist= Disney  thus their work = a multi million production with 300+staff.  They have no deadline so it’s totally fair

We are being required to be expert storytellers, writers, animators, designers, sound editors, SFX artists, video editors, composers, lyric artists, sound engineers, managers, producers and post producers...

...that’s a bit too much, and we do what we can with what we have, always pushing for more.

Thanks goodness the TUMBLR audience helps.

The last thing I want to is set an excuse to allow us to curl into mediocrity (we are small, don’t expect much!) this is not the case, I just want to remind everyone and myself that at the end of the day, we are only human.

[duocartoonist]

Our musician, SPIRAL HARMONIES, has now a youtube channel as well, you can check the DIamonds instrumental in here!

[duocartoonist]

Diamonds Song, Instrumental

We are happy to announce our first Steven Universe Song!

DIAMONDS!

A song about how these beings think and act, and the society they rule.

To give it a listen, please click on the link below.

https://spiralstroke.bandcamp.com/track/diamonds

[duocartoonist]

Midnight Frenzy is out at last!

All $1 Patrons will have direct access to the song download while $5 will get the HQ WAV

https://www.patreon.com/duocartoonist

That is just an appetizer, we are crafting a new set of high end rewards, bigger than Roger.

[duocartoonist]

This is Helios in action, over the Mrs. Brisby rig that you saw before. We decided to reproduce an scene from NIMH to visually explain the difference between our way of doing stuff and a 3D toon shaded head.   If you do animation or art in general, you will feel the gap right away.

We know it is not a 100% match with the classical, but the goal of this test was to show how Helios preserves the character on model 100% of the time. The next step will be altering such integrity as the hand drawn guys do with their cheats to bring out more appeal to the drawing.

It was really surprising to see, frame by frame, how the original model was cheated in volume, constantly!.  I bow before Don Bluth and his crew’s mastery.

This was animated in 4 hours.