Sick Days & Experiments: Retirement Diary #4

Sorry I’ve been away, but I got COVID. My youngest appears to have brought it home from school. The whole house was down for about a week. I tested “not positive” (I can’t 100% say negative, but the test did not show me to be positive) two days running, so I’m now free to go about my normal schedule.

So what did I get done?

I tried an experiment to do a bouncing ball in a few pieces of free software and it pretty much showed me that a few weren’t in line with the path I’m on. Krita seems to still be more attuned to frame-by-frame and Synfig not only can’t import SVG (found a workaround by having Inkscape export to Synfig format, but it’s not ideal), but it kept crashing unexpectedly.

OpenToonz was the only one where it felt pretty intuitive and easy. Because of all the complexities in Blender, I’m not sure I want to keep on with it, mostly because I don’t think it’s going to create the speed advantage I thought animating in 3D would. I think I need to focus right now on getting better at drawing and getting my drawing tool skills better.

Still not sure which tools to learn/use.

In the long run, I think that finding my most organic workflow requires a more staged approach… learning to draw and animate better at the same time may not be the best idea. Or maybe it is. I don’t want to develop a bunch of bad habits I’ll need to correct when I make the step from drawing to animating. OTOH, I don’t feel like I know enough to make the best choice.

In the end, I think I’ll need to pay for a professional program to get mocap, lip sync, and features the freebies don’t have. Right now, it’s sort of down to OpenToonz (free) and Moho ($399) in my mind if I choose to go 2D, Blender (Free) if it’s 3D.

I’m a few lessons from finishing my Inkscape master class and heading into some vector drawing lessons (or traditional drawing lessons I will translate to vector). This week I’m also going to get started on the Music Theory for Electronic Music.

I don’t know if I’m making things harder for myself by wanting to use a vector program instead of a sketching program for learning to draw better or if trying to learn music theory in a DAW is better or worse than using a piano(ish). I honestly believe that these will feed into an optimized workflow for creating with both quality and speed, but it’s more a gut feeling than one with scientific proof.

We shall see. I’m basically starting my 5th week… of 127. At the end of that 127 weeks, on my 58th birthday, I have to be good enough to do what I set out to do, but I’m also less than 4% in to the training period I gave myself. Who knows that the other 96.6% will bring?