Hello,
Let's
say goodbye to January and welcome the warm February. Jogja is
getting warmer, in fact. I've been waiting for rainy days since Sunday
it poured lightly only on midnight for about 15 minutes. The
rest were warm and humid hours, our fan in the studio set on the
maximum speed and I feel better inside the Transjogja bus, they
provide cool breezed air-conditioner and nice-warm seats as well.
I'd
like to write a bit about this handy software we were using on Rara
and The Ricketies, PAP. Plastic-Animation-Paper version 4.0.
Sincerely, it's handy. Let's talk about it slowly, shall we?
Get
it from and put it on
You
may type 'plastic animation paper' on the search engines you trust
and you'll be directed to this link. We could freely
download the PAP from the site and install it without any annoying demands or reminders to buy something from them. A very huuuge thanks to the Danish company that made it for free :D ...
It
doesn't need expensive requirements for the hardwares. My slow Brazos
1,65Ghz-2GB memory-dedicated HD6470M can do the job. It runs on
Win2000/XP (does on Win7 as well) or Linux, yet I don't know the
installation proccess for the latter. Also, you'd need a drawing
tablet to draw: wacom, genius pen tablet, etc.
The
installation is quite fast: get a coffee, sip it, and put the mug
back where it used to, and your installation is done. It takes only
15mb of your hard drive.
User
interface
It
didn't take a very long time for me to learn tools and how-to. My
colleague told me the basic instruments and I suppose we all can find the
how-to by ourselves. PAP site also provides tutorials, though I've
never visited it since I first used this software *chuckle.
Let's
see, sketches, cleaning-ups, cut-copy-paste, rotate the canvas, set
frame rate, layers, etc. all you can get for a hand-drawn animation.
Output
This
step is the most boring and tiresome of the whole thing. But I think
we would expect the same fate in hand-drawn during the exporting or
scanning outlines, colorings, composing in the compose softwares,
etc.
The
native filetype for PAP is in .lap or .pap and there are 7 types
of images we could save it to: png, bmp, tif, jpeg, tga, gif, and
psd, and 2 types of movies: avi-cinepak and avi-divx.
I've been exporting our works into .png images then put the colorings by GIMP 2.6.11. Sometimes we used PAP's .avi-cinepak outputs to do the line tests and see if they were good enough before switched them to GIMP.
Shortly, PAP worth inside your side-pocket if you were into hand-drawn or traditional animation. And I think these are all I can recall from our works with PAPv4.0 in Rara and The
Ricketies. Would I remember something, I'll make sure it's posted.
enjoy!
