Help Shape the Future of Anime Studio

[dkwroot]

An awesome improvement to the tile script would be to allow the user to set the dimensions of their render window and then have the tile fit those dimensions so that the tiles can be easily exported and used in raster editing programs.

[OlgaI]

1. Colour palette for the stroke colour.
2. The new Paint bucket tool to make it work for hand drawing - my idea is prolonging the spline automatically depending on the stroke width (brush size), so that drawn splines do cross when ends of lines appear to meet visually in the canvas. And the filled area to be one shape with the enclosing spline would be much welcome.
3. Put Copy and Paste buttons back above the mainline.
4. Grouping tool/option for shapes, so that a group of shapes acts as one (may be a part of remedy for the new paint bucket shape-splines problem).

[dkwroot]

Add support for bezier curves and add the ability to import illustrator files as bezier curves thus avoiding all the problems that come from conversion. I understand that it would be a pain in the neck for you guys to make bezier curves work with actions and smart bones, but would it be possible to first just add support for them just so that they can be imported and displayed? Folks would use this for FBF, Backgrounds, Props, etc.


Add sliders to brush size, pen size, magnet size, etc. A lot of animators use tablets and it's a pain to have to go back to the keyboard to change the size of our instrument. At the very least, we should be able to click on a settings box and scrub it.

[dkwroot]

It would be awesome if we could connect two vertices with a hotkey button. Also, it would be great if Split Curve were added to a button format or in the very least, set to a hotkey. I use Split curve a lot and it's annoying to constantly have to go to the menu and hunt it down.

[heyvern]

It would be awesome if we could connect two vertices with a hotkey button. Also, it would be great if Split Curve were added to a button format or in the very least, set to a hotkey. I use Split curve a lot and it's annoying to constantly have to go to the menu and hunt it down.

There is a hot key (space bar) for joining points. Select any point and press space and it will join to a point or path that is nearby.

You can create a button for the split path tool very easily.

Move or copy the split curve script (lm_splitcurve.lua) from the scripts/menu/draw/ folder to the scripts/tools folder.

Open the _tool_list.txt file and add a new line under the "Draw" group as a "button" instead of "tool":
You can add a shortcut key to this as well (replace the "...").

Code: Select all

button	lm_splitcurve		...

[dkwroot]

Awesome! I got the split curve button going, but the spacebar hotkey doesn't work for me. When I press space, it just plays the timeline. I tried selecting one point and both points and tried with several tools active, but it doesn't join points. Also, what I'm thinking is a button that we could press that would bridge two points and connect them that way, not merge them.

[dkwroot]

Also, do any of you know if there is a way to constrain the movement of a layer on an axis while in 3d space? I know that I can manually input x,y,z locations, but since we can't scrub those numbers it's really difficult to position layers when making small incremental changes.

An X,Y, Z constrained movement and rotation tool would be awesome ... just sayin' ... *Hint* *Hint*

[heyvern]

Awesome! I got the split curve button going, but the spacebar hotkey doesn't work for me. When I press space, it just plays the timeline. I tried selecting one point and both points and tried with several tools active, but it doesn't join points. Also, what I'm thinking is a button that we could press that would bridge two points and connect them that way, not merge them.

The spacebar point joining will only work on frame 0.

As for "spanning" two points... hmm...

So... you have 2 points. You select both, click a button or shortcut, and they are spanned and connected.

The same thing can be done just as quickly with the add point tool. However, I think the spacebar/join lua code could be modified to do this, possibly holding a modifier key.

The more I think about it... the better it sounds! . You could connect points with the point transform tool while editing vectors without having to switch tools so much.

Just for grins I am going to look at the code when I get a chance to see if I can modify the joining code.

[dkwroot]

Awesome! I got the split curve button going, but the spacebar hotkey doesn't work for me. When I press space, it just plays the timeline. I tried selecting one point and both points and tried with several tools active, but it doesn't join points. Also, what I'm thinking is a button that we could press that would bridge two points and connect them that way, not merge them.

The spacebar point joining will only work on frame 0.

I tried it at Frame 0 and it still only plays the timeline. I'm using AS10.

As for "spanning" two points... hmm...

So... you have 2 points. You select both, click a button or shortcut, and they are spanned and connected.

The same thing can be done just as quickly with the add point tool. However, I think the spacebar/join lua code could be modified to do this, possibly holding a modifier key.

The more I think about it... the better it sounds! . You could connect points with the point transform tool while editing vectors without having to switch tools so much.

Just for grins I am going to look at the code when I get a chance to see if I can modify the joining code.

I got the idea from Blender. In blender, you can select two verts and press F to bridge them. It's incredibly useful and I use it all the time, so I really miss it when I switch to AS. This is extremely useful if you pair it with the select tool, because you could create two lines and then use split curve to slice them up. You could them very quickly select the point you want to bridge and hit a button to connect them up.

Another question, is it possible to joint two lines at a point where they intersect? In other words, if I draw an X with the draw point tool, is there a way that I can make the two lines join at the place where they cross?

[heyvern]

You need to have the point transform tool selected, select a point and hit space. It shouldn't play the animation.

If it is playing the animation you must have the layer transform tool selected. No way to bind points with that trick using any other tools. Point tool modification can only be done with the transform point tools.

[dkwroot]

Anime Studio should consider GTK+ for building it's next GUI. GTK+ is an open-source royalty/license free toolkit for building graphic user interfaces and is backed by some big companies as well as a community. I'm saying this because every time I show people Anime Studio they ALWAYS tell me that it looks cheap and not professional which is getting annoying (but I can't blame them).

Anyway, GTK+ is perfect for a small development team like AS and already has more features built into it than I've ever seen in Anime Studio's GUI. When the devs decide to overhaul the GUI, I'd suggesting giving GTK+ a gander.

[eric1223]

Timeline markers would be useful. The way it would work work would be by clicking them, and add a note on the timeline, and it would appear in the upper left of the canvas. This would be useful to if you have specific parts on the timeline that u need to remember, or as a reminder what is going to happen. I know you could use the note layer, text layer, and onion skinning for this, but alot of the time, you (or me) would like to change the pace of the animation, but then you would also have to change the note or text layer. Also a save feature would be nice if used this =)

[dkwroot]

NEW IDEA:
How about making it so that we can set the stroke for an object to only appear on one side of the stroke line? This would make using strokes to make sharp appearances a LOT easier and overall make the program look more crisp.

Here is an image done normally with strokes as they are:


Here is an image with the stroke ONLY on the inside.


ALSO, if they could make those inside corners sharp, that would be fantastic.

[gdewizard]

First, I am a fairly long time user wit 6 debut, pro 8,9,9.5,now 10. While the new drawing tools are good, they really could be better. First eraser is appreciated BUT if we could erase just a little rather than all it could be really great for shading and such. Blob tool good but could be improved. I admit that I did not realize we could add user brushes until recently. The way is still a little awkward. Character wizard needs a real overhaul including a simple way to introduce user art into the process. Library is hard to work with, I had a bunch of stuff on 9.5 I could not get rid of. It is gone now however. heh heh heh. Also I looked for new scripts for 10 and was not able to be sure WHAT would work with it. I know it is new but we still need to know what will work with it. LAST, the support people seem to be dropping in quality. I kept trying to get on early to buy and get the deal with magna studio. Had login problems till sale was passed and they would not honor agreement. Ironically if the had I would have upgraded to 5 EX. I have 4 beginner. They lost that money. Still I absolutely love this new version of AS although have not had as much time to explore the new features as I would have liked. Hopefully will be able to do so soon. Tell the boys we need more how to's. Haven't seen anything since 2 point perspective and that really great April fools day program. Still laughing over that one. All for now, Cobalt Wizard out

[Nicohk92]

On occasion I like to mess around with Inkpad on my tablet. It has a tool which shouldn't be too hard to set up (I only imagine) and which ASP could benefit from.

It's called "unite" and basically it takes a complex shape or set of shapes and changes it into one solid shape by keeping only the borders of the whole structure as outline.

Here's an example with these coins:




And after uniting it all (here the red color is selected).




It allows to create more realistic silouhettes, but more importantly to use a bunch of elements as mask without overloading the project with a bunch of useless points (and many more little quick fixes it helps with). It sounds trivial but actually I use it all the time.