Anyone own any---

[KC]

Anyone own any, off the wall imaging programs that are something we should all look into ? like wasson said toonboom is a good one think i got the right name ,, I use a few I listed in this thread that are odd, like SYN, cookTOP, etc.. post em

[wasson]

Toon Boom is a great one... the more I think about it, the more features I remember it having.

It has an automated lip sync funtion, which is awesome. It analyzes a .wav file and picks out certain sounds, and tells you what type of mouth to put there. For each sound, you assign a certain mouth (for example, an "A" sound vs. an "O" sound), and it does the lip sync for you. Anyone who has ever tried to do a lip sync manually (yours truly included) knows that this is a life saver.

Others are plugins like Vecta3D and Illustrate! for 3D Studio Max which output from 3D to vectored format, which makes it really easy to import and use in Flash without making the file size stupidly big.

LiveMotion outputs directly to Flash with an AfterFX type interface. Better for animation, worse for interactivity than Flash.

Streamline, which takes raster images and converts them into vectors for better use in Flash... It works much better than the "trace bitmap" function in Flash.

I'm always on the look out for new and strange animation utilities. Nowadays Flash is where it's at.

[D-Loc]

I am partial to using Fireworks 4.0 and Photoshop 6.0 - of course those programs do not come cheap as I was to the one to pay for mine out of my own pocket. Aside from that fact they are great programs, I would have to say among the best on the net/market.

All images I make are made with one or the other - I don't think I have touched another image editor since I bought those 2 programs.

[KC]

I think you sold me on toonboom, I think I will have to try it out, hehe as least try it first anyway, the stuff they had on the site looked good to, I like the scrolling scenery that was nice! "even a simple scencery scroll on a site intro would look really nice...