Artoonix

Having just watched every movie in the Featured Gallery, one thought kept striking me .... several people who submitted animations produced really excellent and interesting work, yet unless they are hidden in the other gallery, they seem to have moved on or stopped using Artoonix.

I wonder why - or what they're doing now.

The ones who struck me that way were -

Invadertigerstar (Smile)
Lea (Funshine)
Lera (Home alone)
Dan [and his dad] (Flame and speed)
Peteruk56 (Granny gets a tattoo) - although Peter does have his own movie area elsewhere
Andy.P (Ardent heat)

Work by these people should be truly inspirational to anyone exploring the versatility of Artoonix.
It would be great to see what else they have worked on.

That last message was posted just over a year ago and the situation remains unchanged.

If anything, it's less good now than it was then, with masses and masses of really short and undeveloped animations being submitted to the gallery by a really tiny number of users.

Surely, with more time and effort it's easily possibly to move on from crude tests and experiments and to actually take some time to start producing animations which develop an idea and make something of it? Instead, it's as if all that is important is to fill each screen with ultra-short uploads. If anyone can explain this very unproductive and uncreative development, please feel free to do so.

Maybe it's because I was a teacher for 27 years, but it irks me to see such a lack of progress. It wouldn't be so noticeable if there was a large body of users posting into the gallery (as there were in the early days of Artoonix), but that certainly is not the case anymore.

So the original question remains ......
............................................................. ...... why has this happened? Where are all those original and innovative Artoonix users now, and what are they doing? Have they switched to other animation software or have they just gone away and given up?

It's very strange.

Hi there KayNine.
I realize both of those posts are kind of old but if you were interested a year after the first I figured you may still be interested.
I am the one who did the smiling cat animation. To answer your question about where I went, I actually just uploaded that because I was bored XD I didn't think anyone would like my little animation or would see it. I still use artoonix now but I upload what I make on either youtube or on deviant art with the rest of my artwork (I'm a digital artist, although I wasn't when I did that first cat cartoon)
I was just fooling around with google and I saw your post so I thought I'd answer. I have made several much longer animations that I can show you if you'd like.

Hi Invadertigerstar, as I said in my previous posts " ... It would be great to see what else they have worked on ... Have (users) switched to other animation software or have they just gone away and given up?"

I'm sure this applies also for Youri and Andrei, part of the Artoonix development team (or maybe they're the whole team).

Assuming your more recent work is child-friendly, I'm sure we'd all like to see links for your more recent work, irrespective of whether it's made with Artoonix or not. I've sometimes posted links for work made by other animators using other software if I think it would inspire Artoonix users. Artoonix won't ever compete with the likes of ToonBoom, Anime Studio Pro or some of the higher-end animation software, but I still reckon it's a powerful little program that could well serve as an excellent launch platform for anyone wanting to learn the techniques of animation.

Since my original posts, one or two users have emerged with real talent and a real ability to make good use of Artoonix's functions. (Pennaz 91 is the one whom most people refer to and I really like the occasional experiments by Chris). There has also been a VERY slow growth of posts by other people into the forum, but I'm still at a loss to explain why most users seem to keep away. I do what I can, but my skills are very limited and I tend to post tips and walkthroughs to illustrate what can be achieved with Artoonix, plus links to a few of my better efforts in the gallery or on Youtube.

It's good to hear you've gone on to other things, and thanks for responding.

For anyone who wants to check out Invadertigerstar's gallery submissions, look here:

RUNNING CAT
A good example of a VERY difficult type of run-cycle
http://www.artoonix.com/UploadedFiles/Running%20cat.swf

His SMILE animation is in the Featured gallery (page 8 at the moment), and is a good example of how to use Artoonix to animate your pencil sketches. However, because it has exclamation marks in the title, the URL doesn't work as a link.
http://www.artoonix.com/UploadedFiles/smile!!.gif

not everyon posts to the gallery or Youtube. I have my own web place which I only share with friends. But I like the feature gallery here and the links that ones like kaynine and pennaz post. i wish others did better longer anims.

I agree Maggie. Every week I look for other users' animations to see what's happening, but apart from Pennaz91, I have yet to find anyone who goes beyond little movies with blobs that slide around and which don't try to tell a story or develop a theme beyond (maybe) the usual guns-and-blood stick-figure type which soon become excrutiatingly boring, derivative and unimaginative.

As my original post proves, there ARE people out there who produce really good work with Artoonix so it may well be that other users are like you and keep their work to themselves for their own websites which can only be accessed by friends or people who work with them in their own group or school.

Occasionally, interesting work by new users appears in the gallery. koushik is one good example. I also noted that Stoneyo recently re-appeared, although I couldn't get the animations to play. They just seemed to be still images.

As Artoonix is being developed, it is becoming a really powerful little program so maybe the best thing for the moment is to carry on doing your own thing and wait for others to catch up? Good luck.

KayNine,
After reading your post, I was thinking that maybe you expect perfection from these people who are new to creating animations with Artoonix. Maybe they feel they can't compete with your favorites in the Featured Gallery (who are really good, by the way). Well, I am not perfect and certainly don't hold a candle to your favorites, but I enjoy animation and have, off and on since 98, been creating animations with various software. I plan on keeping my creativness as a form of fun, as compitition takes the fun right out of it for me.
As Artoonix is updated, I think there will be more good animators uploading to the gallery, so chin up, hope is not lost.

Far from it. My original post considered the point that quite a few early users of Artoonix produced really interesting and varied styles of work, but they then never seemed to continue posting. I just wondered where they went to or what they did next.

What I sontinue to see is a lot of is users who consistently post really short (2-3 second) tests and experiments but don't seem to go beyond that stage. I do find that odd because Artoonix is so easy to learn and explore. One long-time user (natartonnixtweener) has recently found their own style and is now starting to upload longer and well developed animations into Youtube - but by and large, even two and half years after posting my original comment, I don't see a lot of change amongst other users. In fact, new users don't often seem to make an appearance in the gallery.

This does strike me as odd because the inherent flexibility of Artoonix means that it can be used for so many different styles of animation. However, if you cruise the forums and posts for animation programs that do seem to be successful amongst people outside the sphere of being professional, you tend to find a few fairly consistent factors. For example ...

(1) Programs such as Pivot, Stickman and Elemento and those with Flash-style characteristics offer very simple ways to pin elements together, although only a few such programs also offer tweening.
(2) Programs such as Pencil, Synfig (ghastly to install!!!), Easytoon etc. all offer onion-skinning.
(3) Programs such as Alice, Moviestorm, Truespace 7.6, K-3D, DAZ etc. offer free or affordable access to 3D animation but these are never easy to learn or use and there are always catches. eg: Alice has no inbuilt system for rendering to avi, swf etc. Others work with meshes and you need to use other programs to 'flesh' your creations.
(4) Many programs offer quick routes to stop-mo animation but, by definition, these mean that you need to either prepare whole sequences of images or still photographs and the programs themselves simply 'stitch' these together to create movies.

One or two programs offer combinations of some of those features, but on balance I continue to believe that many people who are new to animation will most readily gravitate towards programs that offer pinning and onion-skinning. In that way, their objects and characters can be moved by using what is effectively pointing-and-clicking. If tweening is thrown into that mix, the three-way combination is incredibly powerful and attractive.

The trick for developers would be to make any such system simple to use as regards users being able to create and animate their own characters. That really is a challenge and I've yet to find a program that achieves anything like it.

One other factor is that as some programs evolve and new features are implemented, this can mean that continuity with previous versions has to be surrendered. This happened with Mark Overmars' program 'Game Maker'. How far that is important, I'm not sure but in terms of the process of software development, I reckon it's a fairly basic principle that after awhile, new versions have to cease to work with creations made with earlier versions. Sometimes, inbuilt conversion systems can work, but not always.

In the meantime, Artoonix offers a huge amount and thus it continues to strike me just how few and/or new users or examples seem to be emerging.