Wednesday, May 13, 2009

DoInk: Sweet Online Animation Tool


The Empress of Denmark's Sister Escapes by mrpony, made at DoInk.com

I've only started to mess around with DoInk, but it's pretty amazing. A co-worker of a friend showed me this robust online animation tool, with all sorts of sharing and community built in. The drawing tool is one of the best I've seen online (it kind of mimics Flash's drawing tool, which I use almost exclusively), and the animation compositer is fairly simple, but it incorporates layering and basic loopable clips. The animation I made is admittedly boring, but I didn't have a lot of time to mess around with it, and just wanted to play with the basics.

I ran into a little trouble getting tweened clips to revert to their pre- or post-tweened state, but this could just as easily be my problem, having learned on an entirely different system. Clips made there can be exported to youTube or exported as swfs (!)

The most wonderful thing about Doink is that once you share an object you draw, it's available to everyone on the site. If you need a picture of a duck, say, you can search for one and incorporate it into your animation (This system might sound a little familiar to Ruby). This sharing concept meshes with a lot of ideas we've been kicking around at work about the educational value of remixing content, and lowering the skill bar for formerly difficult types of content creation, including animation.

Near as I can tell, the community is fairly small, but the tool is nice enough that I hope to see them attracting a critical mass soon.

5 comments:

Galspanic said...

Hrm, their drawing interface needs some work. It's not very tablet friendly. The ideas are great though.

Mr. Pony said...

I think pressure sensitive tablets might be their own cross to bear.

Aaron White said...

hey all, Aaron from DoInk here. Thanks for the post, really glad you enjoyed it. We definitely consider ourselves "forever beta" so we've definitely got some UI issues to iron out.

As for tablet support... there are no pressure sensitive tablet applications on the web... yet. We've got code that works, it's a matter of making sure we can roll it out in a way that doesn't burden the user w/ a bunch of software to install, so we're trying to crack that problem.

BTW, great animation :)

Galspanic said...

Hey aaron that's some sweet customer service you got going on!
I understand the tablet issues issue. My tablet has problems with its own software half the time as it is.

Mr. Pony said...

Hey, Aaron, thanks for following up! I've just recommended DoInk to a tech teacher who wants to get her kids involved in animation (she's been using KidPix up until now, with some success) Have you done any preliminary testing on age appropriateness? The tool is very sophisticated, but there's always a trade-off between sophistication and ease of use... I'm interested to hear if you've seen anything in the field.