https://www.toonboom.com/products/animate
Animate is one of the ToonBoom products best suited for 2D animation. This is what I'm learning now. Apart from animation it also has excellent tools for creating and manipulating vector graphics. The tutorials are a really good place to start at and basically you don't need any prior knowledge of anything else - it helps but it's not necessary.
The biggest feature that seemed amazing to me was the rotation of canvas. Just at any moment hold down Ctrl - Alt and quickly rotate the canvas in any direction. Seems like a small thing but it changes everything especially if you work with a stylus.
When you draw on a piece of paper you can rotate it as much as you want. Because some lines are difficult to draw simply because of how your hands and arms move - when you rotate paper you make sure that at any point your hand goes in the direction that's comfortable for you. This is a problem in Illustrator when you draw with a stylus - you can't rotate your screen every time and you can't rotate your canvas. In Animate you can and quite easily - it fits into the creative workflow very naturally to the point that you don't even have to think about it. In my opinion this should be added to any software dealing with drawing.
The other interesting point of making your graphics in Animate is how they deal with vectors. You can create a closed path with the pen tool and yet continue that path. The coloring seems similar to that of good old Paint - as long as you have an enclosed area (it can be defined by a couple paths) you can give it a fill. In general this approach to things feels a lot closer to how you draw on paper - you just draw and color without worrying about anything - the software does the rest for you. Also, there is an option for automatically merging paths that intersect together, and another option to make sure they get extended enough to "touch" the other path they were close to. This lets you not worry about unclosed paths and just keep on doing your thing.
Another really amazing and helpful feature is Onion skin. Say you have the front view and profile view of the same character. You put them onto 2 separate frames and go to the frame between them and enable Onion Skin. It will show the previous frame in one color and the next one in another color. Then without thinking just draw your 3/4 view by simply drawing between respective red and green lines.
Another big plus is you can use the Adobe Flash keyboard shortcuts rather than learning the Animate ones - this is convenient for any Adobe fan / user.
Also, an interesting approach on coloring. You can keep your line art and fill separate. The way it works is you create shapes from your line art that have no outline which you can color. If you do so you can always go and look and your clean line art without colors getting in the way and you can always see them together if you have the "Preview Color and Line Art" option enabled.
I haven't made anything exciting yet and am still learning - there will be more on this later on. Right now I'm trying to improve my actual drawing skills and the drawing speed. And the only way I know to make it happen is by just drawing as much as possible.
Animate is one of the ToonBoom products best suited for 2D animation. This is what I'm learning now. Apart from animation it also has excellent tools for creating and manipulating vector graphics. The tutorials are a really good place to start at and basically you don't need any prior knowledge of anything else - it helps but it's not necessary.
The biggest feature that seemed amazing to me was the rotation of canvas. Just at any moment hold down Ctrl - Alt and quickly rotate the canvas in any direction. Seems like a small thing but it changes everything especially if you work with a stylus.
When you draw on a piece of paper you can rotate it as much as you want. Because some lines are difficult to draw simply because of how your hands and arms move - when you rotate paper you make sure that at any point your hand goes in the direction that's comfortable for you. This is a problem in Illustrator when you draw with a stylus - you can't rotate your screen every time and you can't rotate your canvas. In Animate you can and quite easily - it fits into the creative workflow very naturally to the point that you don't even have to think about it. In my opinion this should be added to any software dealing with drawing.
The other interesting point of making your graphics in Animate is how they deal with vectors. You can create a closed path with the pen tool and yet continue that path. The coloring seems similar to that of good old Paint - as long as you have an enclosed area (it can be defined by a couple paths) you can give it a fill. In general this approach to things feels a lot closer to how you draw on paper - you just draw and color without worrying about anything - the software does the rest for you. Also, there is an option for automatically merging paths that intersect together, and another option to make sure they get extended enough to "touch" the other path they were close to. This lets you not worry about unclosed paths and just keep on doing your thing.
Another really amazing and helpful feature is Onion skin. Say you have the front view and profile view of the same character. You put them onto 2 separate frames and go to the frame between them and enable Onion Skin. It will show the previous frame in one color and the next one in another color. Then without thinking just draw your 3/4 view by simply drawing between respective red and green lines.
Another big plus is you can use the Adobe Flash keyboard shortcuts rather than learning the Animate ones - this is convenient for any Adobe fan / user.
Also, an interesting approach on coloring. You can keep your line art and fill separate. The way it works is you create shapes from your line art that have no outline which you can color. If you do so you can always go and look and your clean line art without colors getting in the way and you can always see them together if you have the "Preview Color and Line Art" option enabled.
I haven't made anything exciting yet and am still learning - there will be more on this later on. Right now I'm trying to improve my actual drawing skills and the drawing speed. And the only way I know to make it happen is by just drawing as much as possible.
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