3 months ago, we took notice that the old Plastic Animation Paper, (an application that was intently built with the goal to bridge the gap between computer animation workflow and traditional 2D animation) may see a resurrection as a brand new application with a new an innovative paradigm for creating 2D animation on the Mac and Windows as well as devices.
Let’s revive hand drawn animation! Let’s get the fun and ease back into 2D
This was exciting news, as Plastic Animation Paper was a pretty good tool, and from the glance we had at Animation Paper, looks very promising. The key of the application will be to make the interface and workflows dead simple, leaving animation and drawing as the focus.
Recently Niels Krogh Mortensen the creator of Animation Paper, has launched a new IndieGogo Campaign to fund the development of Animation Paper and bring it to life. The campaign has a goal of $175,000. Lets make this happen!
Let’s revive hand drawn animation! Let’s get the fun and ease back into 2D! You, and the animation community, can now make this awesome dream tool happen!
Animation Paper Funds, Budget & Timeline
To develop Animation Paper on Mac OS X to the point of final fully tested product, we need to raise $175.000 to pay for programmers and other expenses. If we raise $125.000 more ($300.000 in total), we will be able to do the native Windows version as well. Everybody on the team are highly qualified and highly motivated to deliver their best, – and at the same time work for a greatly reduced salary in order to get Animation Paper out to everybody.
Features
The No.1 feature of Animation Paper is the limited number of features. 🙂 Keeping it clean and simple.
Other than that, here’s the list of main features:
- Super fast responsiveness – while drawing, while flipping, while everything
- Quality lines – built on high speed, high resolution input from your tablet (like a Wacom)
- Small to large format frames
- Realtime smooth rotation and zooming of the view (and mirror) – controlled with gestures (pinch/rotate) or quick zoom function
- Light table (onion skinning – advanced and customizable)
- X-Sheet – easy, yet powerful timing and reuse (also scribbled notes and sound wave display)
- Layers (each layer colored black, blue, red, green or custom)
- Cutouts (easily reposition/rotate/scale drawings or parts of drawings)
- Clean up (smoothed lines)
- Paint (simple coloring with eyedropper and fill. May not be included in first release, but in free upgrade)
- Many alternative ways of flipping (keys, wheel, springy return flip, etc)
- Customizable Tool Bar and Quick Select (marking menu) for reaching favorite functions with a flick
- Realtime full frame reference on 2nd monitor
- Play scenes in sequence to check continuity
- Import and export of video and frame-stacks (including alpha and X-Sheet timing data)
- Native Mac OS X app (but also done natively for Windows, iPad and Android if stretch goals are reached)
If you want to check the details of what exact content is going into Animation Paper, you can explore the planned menus and study the interface below. Click to see full size 1:1 interface
