Animating with Cherry Brush

Have you ever wanted to slap yourself because you bought software that had a free equivalent or near-equivalent? I bought Digicel Flipbook for $40 a month ago, then found out about Cherry brush. It's only 178K. Be sure to read the readme.txt 1st. DrPetter has also written some Flash games, a sculpting program and a music program, he must be very smart.

Prerequisites: read the 'readme.txt' that comes with Cherry Brush. You'll also need a Wacom or other pen tablet to get anything done efficiently, Bamboos are $70 or so.

Cherry Brush

Not only that, you have unlimited layers, so you can clean up your animation on another layer of the same frame, this costs an extra $60 in Digicel Flipbook. Open up Cherry Brush and click file/new

File New

Ask for a 64x64,(default is 1024x754)now go settings animation and check animation (it shows an asterisk).

Settings Animation

Click on 'add frames' and add about 10 frames. Your keyboard arrow keys navigate you through the frames. images/add_frames.jpg

Add Frames

Add 10 Frames

Now down in the lower left is your background frame, hit 'plus +' to add layers to it, each frame can have many layers, click the 'A', (to animate that layer) more layers will appear. The lowest (all white) square is your background.Anything you draw on the background (it's selected when it's pink-orange) will appear in every frame. Make sure you have the 2nd box turned pink-orange or you won't get any animating done. With many layers, you can clean up your animation after getting it animating right. The black vertical bar adjusts the layer transparency. The "H" stands for Hide Layer, the 'T" for lock layer transparency. "Onion skin on" means you can see the last frame you drew in gray.

Hold down 'ALT' to get a box where you can change brush size and pick a color from the picture you're working on.

Click plus click a

Layer 1 Layer 2

When you're finished, 'export' to .jpg or .png, you'll get a bunch of numbered frames which you can assemble into a .gif or .swf. Haven't found a foolproof free assembler yet, for now I use Paint shop pro 6 Animation studio, it only makes .avi's and gifs. If you have Windows Movie Maker,(comes with XP and Vista) I believe this will also assemble .bmp's into .avi's and you can also add sound.

Update: I made an .avi and also a .mov in Blender- Blender Video Sequencer Doc
There's also a video on youtube about it Blender Video Sequencer Video
Blender Video Sequencer Video 2

I just watched the 1st one I think, or these may not be it, the one I watched had a dog running in the yard.

Note: Save your work often, to different filenames. I started drawing on the background layer when I wanted to be on an animation layer, hosed it completely.

Also, you can convert your .avi files to flv with Any Video Converter, but flv only accepts these sizes: 220x176 , 176x144, 320x240, 640x480, so make your movie this size if you want it on youtube.

Digicel Flipbook

You can try out Digicel Flipbook here, but more useful are the tutorial movies which also apply to Cherry Brush.

http://terrymorgan.net

hike1213@gmail.com