Help Shape the Future of Anime Studio

[eric1223]

Do you know how you can freeze bones and points? Can there be a keyframe that freezes everything on a keyframe? This way if you have alot of layers with alot of details, you won't have freeze each pose/points as much.

[Víctor Paredes]

Do you know how you can freeze bones and points? Can there be a keyframe that freezes everything on a keyframe? This way if you have alot of layers with alot of details, you won't have freeze each pose/points as much.

In the menu Bone>Freeze Pose (and for points Draw>Freeze Pose). The shortcut is Ctrl+F.
Now, by default, it only freezes the bone rotation channel, but if you manually add keyframes for translation and scale at any frame, it now will start to freeze that channels too. The same for points, by default it freezes only point position, but it can freeze curvature and line width too.
I'm used to add rotation, scale and translation keyframes for all bones in frame 1. That way I'm sure my character will be totally frozen when I use the shortcut.

[wip]

Recently I was rigging a character with over a dozen eyes. Trying to give the animator with the most flexible tools I started delving into the curve profile tool. I needed to create separate eyelid animations for all the eyes, but was wondering if the curve profile tool could do the trick to do them all in one go. So in effect have one curve function as the edge of the eyelid enabling it to blink, look angry, sad etc.

To a certain degree it worked. The design of the eye is basic, round eyeballs and masked eyelid on top of that. Unfortunately the curve profile tool works the repeat pattern at random points on a shape, so for instance a square shape with an outline at the bottom as eyelid edge couldn't be manipulated from point to point as the curve profile was evenly distributed across the closed shape. Setting the repeat count to a lower or higher number always results in a random distribution.

It works perfectly on a single line, but I couldn't figure out how to create a filled shape that would follow that curve somehow and overlap the eye where it's needed.

Hope this explains it a little bit.. If there is a solution to this I'd love to hear about it, if not I think it'd be a great feature!

[chucky]

Cool idea ..
What about making all the eyelids with a two point line .Then make them all separate shapes each with the same curve profile. Or maybe two, one for the top lid one for the bottom.
Actually you could use four, if you needed to wink

I'm not sure that it beats smart bones, waiiiit . Can a smart bone control curve profiles? Best of both worlds then.

[dkwroot]

Add more drawing tablet support. Specifically, set the eraser of a pen to something like the magnet tool which is kind of what Flash did.

it would be fantastic if there was an option in a vector layer to make it so that whatever is drawn on it will ONLY alter frame 0. In other words, the animator can be looking at ANY frame on the timeline, but when they draw or alter points on the vector it only effects frame 0. This and the suggestion above would make working with switch layers and doing frame by frame animations a LOT easier.

It would also be great if we could Keyframe layer blur.

[AmigaMan]

Good idea's.
You can keyframe layer blur already though.

[dkwroot]

Good idea's.
You can keyframe layer blur already though.

I see now, I had to check the "Allow Animated Layer Effects" box. Learn something new every day!

[heyvern]

it would be fantastic if there was an option in a vector layer to make it so that whatever is drawn on it will ONLY alter frame 0. In other words, the animator can be looking at ANY frame on the timeline, but when they draw or alter points on the vector it only effects frame 0.

A while back I created a modified point translation tool to edit on frame 0. It isn't too hard. I just changed the "moho.frame" or "layer.frame" or whatever it is to "0" in the translate point tool and saved it with a new name. It can be usefull... but... a bit crazy wonky to work with because the points don't move the way you expect on the frame you are on. There is layer movement, bone movement etc that makes controlling the point movement a bit crazy . The points sort of move in a way that is not logical because you are moving on frame 0, but dragging the point on another frame. It's like trying to write using a mirror. If your points aren't being moved by bones or layer movement it works well. I think a few versions back I even modded the core translate point tool so it had a check box for frame 0 editing so I didn't need multiple tools... but eventually lost it during an update OOPS!

Using onion skin can be almost as effective and I use that now instead. You turn on onionskin, highlight the frame/s you are interested in and edit on frame 0. You can see the results in the onionskin.

[dkwroot]

I'm doing the same thing with onion skinning, but it's a pain in the neck having to manually adjust which frames are seen in the onion skin. It's so much easier to select a few frames behind the current selected layer and then activate "Relative Frames" on onion skins. Doing this, you can scrub through an animation and have the onion skin automatically follow you. The problem is that you have to go back to frame 0 in order to make adjustments to the animation which gets really repetitive.

Your tool adjustment sounds fantastic and I'm curious if it would be too difficult to modify the drawing tools to do the same?


**ANOTHER IDEA
How about this idea, what if we could draw on the active layer in a switch layer from the switch layer. This way we could just create a bunch of blank vector layers, toss them into a switch layer and key them according to our timing chart. Then all we have to do is have the switch layer selected and scrub through its timeline. From the switch layer, we could edit any of its lower layers.

[dkwroot]

I got another idea, how about a reverse patch layer? You know how patch layers hide a stroke between two layers, well what if there was a reverse patch layer that reveals a stroke between two layers instead of hiding it. This would be useful for having a stroke appear on a character only when another body part passes behind it.

For example, imagine you have a stylized character with no shading and mostly no outline. Now suppose that this characters arms and chest are the same color. When the arms cross the chest, you can't tell them apart because there is no shading and no outline to separate the arms from the chest. If there were a reverse patch layer, the animator could put this over the chest and only when the arms cross the chest does the outline appear.

EXAMPLE:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwzk-f ... sp=sharing


Oh, I got another one. Make it so that we can Exclude Strokes for a mask using a nested vector layers. In other words, if I create a bunch of vectors and put them in a switch layer, I should be able to use the switch layer as a mask AND have the mask exclude the stroke for the active nested vector layer.

[dkwroot]

I have yet ANOTHER idea. There should be a check box for the line tools that would allow the animator to add points to a curve without disrupting the curve. For example, if the animator uses the shape tool and draws a circle but suddenly decides to add a few points to it, they should be able to add points to the circle without the curve of the circle getting distorted by the additional points.

ALSO, there should be a way to create streaks across an object without the streak lines spilling out from the object fill. For example, suppose that I create a circle with no stroke and then I add a point on the circle and draw a line clear across it. I then select the line bisecting the circle and make it into a stroke. As Anime Studio currently exists, the stroke line spills outside of the circle fill regardless of whether the animator is using rounded end points or not. There should be a clearer way to do stripe lines.

[lwaxana]

I'm doing the same thing with onion skinning, but it's a pain in the neck having to manually adjust which frames are seen in the onion skin. It's so much easier to select a few frames behind the current selected layer and then activate "Relative Frames" on onion skins. Doing this, you can scrub through an animation and have the onion skin automatically follow you. The problem is that you have to go back to frame 0 in order to make adjustments to the animation which gets really repetitive.

Your tool adjustment sounds fantastic and I'm curious if it would be too difficult to modify the drawing tools to do the same?


**ANOTHER IDEA
How about this idea, what if we could draw on the active layer in a switch layer from the switch layer. This way we could just create a bunch of blank vector layers, toss them into a switch layer and key them according to our timing chart. Then all we have to do is have the switch layer selected and scrub through its timeline. From the switch layer, we could edit any of its lower layers.

I really like this idea and your general frame by frame work flow. It's much more efficient than the ways I have tried to do frame by frame in AS. Someone with scripting skills might take interest in this idea if you post it in the Scripting or Feature Request sections.

[dkwroot]

I got another idea. There should be an option that when an animator binds a layer to a bone they can determine if the layers Translation and/or Rotation is bound to the bone. This kind of thing would be extremely useful for smart bones, because the animator could bind a layer's position to a bone, but leave the rotation unbound. They could then use the same bone for a smart bone action and not have to worry about rotating the bound layer, because the rotation is not bound to the layer.

@Iwaxana
I'm not sure if this is a problem the community can solve. We'll probably have to wait for an official update to see this one come to light.

[dkwroot]

Got another idea:
Create a new bone hiding option that hides bones that are bound to points or layers should the layer they are bound to be invisible or inactive. For example, say an animator creates a switch layer and then they create different bones to bind to the different sub layers in that switch. The Animator should then only see the bones bound to the currently active switch layer and NOT all of the bones attached to the different layers in the switch. This would clean up a LOT of clutter and make it so that the animator doesn't have to make a bunch of bone layers inside of a switch (Which would require the animator to dig through the switch layer and THAT is time consuming).

EDIT:
Ooh, a work around to the problem I just mentioned hit me. Create a bunch of bones for the different layers and position them where they are needed. Then bind the position of these bones to a few master control bones. Then choose to hide controlled bones. The positioning of the master control bones won't perfectly reflect the position of the layers they're manipulating, but it'll probably work good enough. =)

EDIT AGAIN:
The ability to drag click the eye/reveal icon for layers (like photoshop) would be an awesome upgrade.


YET ANOTHER SUGGESTION:
Here is a simple, but pretty useful update. Allow the user to copy the layer setting of one layer and then select a bunch of different layers and paste it to them all at once. In photoshop, this is called copying and pasting layer style. Also, make it so that the user can click and drag across the eye icon to hide and reveal layers.

[dkwroot]

I've been pondering some improvements that I think would be 'doable' for a possible last minute addition to the next version of Anime Studio. I came up with these suggestions:



Let me know what you guys think and if you noticed some of the same issues.


EDIT:
I keep getting ideas, so here's yet another one. There needs to be an option or a button you can press that will reveal all of the layers in a switch layer. In other words, if we want to see all of the contents in a switch layer without having to click them individually, there should be a button to reveals them all.


ANOTHER IDEA:
Allow the animator to assign certain Bone colors or Bone Groups to animate a certain way. For example, make it so that all bones in Group A or All Yellow Bones will animate on STEPS while all Blue Bones animate on Linear. This would greatly help sort out dials between dials that switch and dials that animate. ALSO, adding more bone colors would be great. I think White, Black and Grey would be great, but also teal and dark red would be great.