Wow, the process of making characters directly in CTA2 is a pain... I haven't yet made one single finished G2 actor, even with the latest work containing only a head, arms, legs, hands, feet and 1 facial expression... I made all the sprites, but rigging them is really tedious and only to some undecent avail.

I really hope that CTA3 will fix this at a price and compatibility, that will be worth it

Nice software, though, for animating finished actors!

i sincerely doubt the process is going to get any easier. The artwork has to be done in an external program, there is absolutely no way around it. and so far the only programs that can create full templates are draw plus and flash.

******(this is purely an assumption) ******
While there might be a easier way to greate characters through some automated task thing, the quality of such is provably going to be limited to ugly generic character you provably wont want to use any way.

The only way CTA can truly improve the workflow directly is by creating actual art tools for the program (pencils, brushes, fill tools etc) and i know from experience that most likely they haven't put in the research an development for it, almost every commercial product that comes out always threads lightly so as not to accidentally create tools that behave similar to other tools so that they don't get sued by companies like corel and adobe. So they end up with extremely shitty and frustrating tools like the crap fest in Anime Studio or Toon Boom where even drawing the simplest of tasks is a pain in the ass you wouldn't wish on your worse enemies.

Maybe i'm just not using my imagination hard enough but i just don't see them getting away from the current template system. It really is the most efficient way. YES it can be a pain in the ass for a novice, hobbyist, dabbler or regular joe to try to do it, but that's just the point. You're not supposed to. The marketing is targeted toward those who want to use the pre-built stuff and just want to get work done without getting their hands dirty. Anything that requires pro level skills, well it requires pro level skills. You have to know how to draw, no machine is gonna replace that. You have to know how to use the other software. so any novice looking to take on the challenge just has to understand that it comes with multiple learning curves if that's what they really want.



Ibis Fernandez   |   (available for hire)
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Professional Animator, Filmmaker | Creator of the highest quality (modular) G2 rigs for cartoon animator and developer of Toon Titan and Puppet Producer 
Author of Flash Animation and Cartooning: A Creative Guide
>>> be sure to check out http://toontitan.com for professional grade assets, templates, and custom tools for Cartoon Animator and more.

I use CorelDraw for graphics development and am very satisfied. It is not a problem making the sprites for a simple G2 charactor in less than half an hour. But rigging them, on the other hand...!!!

I would wish for the following workflow, unless someone can come up with anything better:

1. Design sprites in whatever program and export to swf or even better: eps or svg
2. Create new character, which will make a build box for sprites
2½. configure the totally custom bone system to fit your needs. 1 angle changes all angles!
3. Drag'n'drop all your sprites to the build box or drag them individually to the right "compartment" and angle as described in #4 (In which case you can skip #4)
4. Sort your sprites by dragging them to body part / angle "compartment" of the build box
5. Press the magic button: "Build" - all sprites are placed on the bones
6. Adjust sprites position, size and rotation. Changing 1 angle will affect all angles. The angles dimensional and perspective information is of course retained. The "change 1 affect all" should be possible to turn on or off for fine adjustment purposes.
7. Add multiple facial sprites or hand sprites using drag'n'drop to compartments. It's too tedious to do this 1 by 1. The program should try best guess as to placement of alternative sprites. Sizes are of course proportional, as they were designed in another program, where all sprites were correct.

How about this process?

i think one thing that would certainly help improve the efficiency is the ability to export flash source files directly from CTA. It's perfectly possible since flash can make use of a format called XFL which is an xml based version of their FLA soruce format.

CTA already has features that let you manually adjust bones and bone structure. So theoretically all hey need to add is some basic filler sprites and let you export your modified character in XFL format.

You could then just open up this custom (fully rigged) but generic templates and customize them in flash. Then edit them same way people edit the current dummy template. The process would allow for more diverse characters to be done faster. It still would be a pain in the ass for a lot of people especially those who don't know how to use flash, but the benefit outweigh the bad. More people would be creating characters for the market so it would all just trickle down to everyone else.



Ibis Fernandez   |   (available for hire)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professional Animator, Filmmaker | Creator of the highest quality (modular) G2 rigs for cartoon animator and developer of Toon Titan and Puppet Producer 
Author of Flash Animation and Cartooning: A Creative Guide
>>> be sure to check out http://toontitan.com for professional grade assets, templates, and custom tools for Cartoon Animator and more.