Help Shape the Future of Anime Studio

[dkwroot]

Now that we have layer referencing, I think object arrays would be an awesome next step. I imagine that this would be a new kind of particle layer called an "Array Layer". The settings would let you determine the array axis and the offset. You could probably even do a follow path, sort of like how origin layers work in particle layers now.

[braj]

Speaking of layer referencing, I think it would be a great help to have an option to 'lock child keyframes to parent' for using for frame to frame. Then you could animate on the child layers while working on art from that level without getting everything messed up by mistake. It seems like a small thing to implement that would be really helpful.

[dkwroot]

Linked reference layers would be a nice improvement. A linked reference means that all referenced layers have their channels linked so that if a change occurs in any of the references it propagates to all of the other references. Linked Reference layers are essentially clones and don't have the ability to break reference, which in many cases is exactly what the animator wants!

[strider2000]

A little over a month ago there was some discussion on how Anime Studio might improve support for Tablet PCs such as Windows Surface Pro and Cintiq Companion. That's a subject I'm interested in and it got me thinking. So I decided to put together a little animation on some of my ideas. My primary focus was to think through tweaks to the current interface that could make significant improvements in usage on the Tablets (because of the small screen). It would be wonderful to have an interface that looked and felt like the newest tablet style interfaces, but style issues were not what I was focusing on (and I didn't really touch on swipe in from the edge etc).

From what I can tell the infrastructure in AS is really close to what's needed and so hopefully this will give some ideas that can help the next version of AS really lead in the power mobile space (my made up word for Tablet PCs as opposed to iPad, Androids and phones ) Just some thoughts.

[Greenlaw]

Some nice ideas there. Here are my thoughts:

My experience with touch interfaces has been on three different tablet computers: the Wacom Cintiq Companion 2, HP tm2 and the Apple iPad with Wacom Cintiq Creative Stylus' 1 & 2. I've used ASP on only the Wacom and HP tablet computers of course but I've included the iPad for UI comparison.

Anyway, regarding the video demonstration: I like the buttons idea--that's much quicker to get to panels and it reduces clutter. Undo and Redo can be accessed on the Cintiq Companion 2's Express keys of course but on-screen virtual buttons are a must for tablets that do not have programmable buttons on the bezel. I draw comics in Manga Studio and I really like using it on a tablet precisely because much of the UI is accessible by on-screen buttons, native and custom. (Yes, I know the UI can be modified through scripts but certain situations are fairly common should be standard options.)

ASP 11 has touch rotation and zooming but it seems a little unstable when I use it. Often times, the layout will flip 180 degrees when rotating it only a few degrees. This is on a Cintiq Companion 2 and I don't know if this problem issue is unique to this tablet but I suspect not. In the past, I experimented with touch on my old Tablet PC--I can't recall if I tried it with ASP, but I know it generally worked better in other programs. That said, I usually had this feature disabled for most graphics programs because I found it sometimes interfered with my workflow. I think this was because most programs are not really designed with touch in mind, and touch is enabled more as an after-thought. By comparison, there is a paint program on the iPad called Procreate that is 100% touch and gesture driven, and it's intuitive and a joy to work with. But Procreate's UI is so different from anything else out there, I would think a program like ASP will almost have to be completely re-designed to be nearly as touch-friendly. That said, I would certainly welcome any touch-friendly improvements ASP's devs can come up with.

I used to work on an HP tm2 with Windows 7, which is a convertible laptop with a touch and Wacom penabled screen. Five years ago, this tablet PC was ahead of the game but its one downside was the low screen resolution. Because many of ASP's of panels are more or less fixed in place they tended to block too much of the workspace. I managed to get a lot of work done on this computer but it got awkward at times.

For example, the Bone Constraints panel opens up right in the middle of the screen on this computer. That UI choice has been a horrible idea on lower res screens because the user cannot see the effect of his settings until after he closes the panel (in which case, it may as well be modal,) or unless he pans his focus to the narrow area to either side of the Bone Constraints panel. This panel really needs to be a tear-off or otherwise moveable panel.

When I got my Companion 2, I thought my problems were solved--this tablet has a super high screen resolution screen (2560 x 1440) so it should easily accommodate opening all the panels while leaving plenty of workspace. Well, that's good except the extra-high resolution introduced a whole other problem: now all the tool icons and graphical elements are too tiny to be recognizable or usable. For example, on the Companion's 13 inch screen, all the icons look about 1/8" square so they all pretty much look like the same blobs. The color palette is only an inch square, so each color tile is about 1/8, making it difficult to select specific colors. ASP 11 has a feature for scaling the text in the UI but it really needs something for the icons and graphics too.

(To be fair, Photoshop's UI scale problem is far worse on an high density screen, even in the latest Photoshop CC 2015 version. I've been in touch with some of the devs, so at least I know they are aware of the issues and looking for solutions.)

In recent weeks I've experimented with lowering the screen resolution and adjusting the UI with the Windows 8 options,but this introduced odd problems to other programs that had looked just fine at the Companion's native screen res and scale settings, so I finally went back to the defaults. To address the scale issue, I think ASP really must include the option to either allow Windows 8/10 to scale the UI or give the user more options for scaling it within the program. (Having both options would be great!)

Regarding using Toon Boom products on a tablet, it's been a mixed bag. I really liked using Storyboard Pro on my tm2 until version 4 came out. I think the problem was that they essentially abandoned compatibility for old tablet tech for new, which was a bit frustrating since I didn't know this until after I purchased the upgrade. I wound up removing it from my tablet PC and using it only a my desktop after that. Recently I moved it to my more modern Companion 2 tablet, so maybe I'll feel differently about it once I start using it again. I use Harmony at work--not on a tablet but I do use it on a full sized Cintiq there. Being able to draw directly in the program is its greatest strength. For drawing, my main quibble with Harmony is probably that it's not as easy to edit paths in the program as it is in ASP, but I would love to see ASP adopt some of the their drawing concepts. I just installed my license of Toon Boom Animate Pro 3 (which is nearly identical to Harmony,) on my Cintiq Companion but I haven't had a chance to use it much on this computer yet but I imagine the experience is similar to using Harmony on the Cintiq at work though. Anyway, yeah, I would love to see the drawing tools in ASP improved further. I think 11's drawing tool improvements is a very good start but it can still be better. In fact, I would direct the developers to look at Smith-Micro's other flagship product Manga Studio for some ideas.

If the ASP developers would like to ask me questions or have me test something on this tablet, feel free to PM me. Thanks for listening guys.

G.

P.S., I'd like to thank Fahim for starting this thread. I know the developers are very busy people but I hope they've been able to pay some attention to it. I think there are a lot of great ideas here and, for me anyway, it's been educational.

[braj]

It would be cool if there were a way to exclude specified layers within groups from the 'clear animation' function. Say, a cycle that always will happen with a character or prop. Something like 'lock animation in this layer' in the Layer Properties dialog. "Immune to 'clear animation' " I don't know what the best terminology would be.

[strider2000]

Bind multiple layers to a bone at once.

I don't think you can do this currently, please correct me if I'm wrong. I've had some trouble with using smart bones to rig faces if I bind the group layer to the head bone.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=27407&hilit=+head#p155096

As a result it would be nice if I could bind all the children of a group layer to a bone in once click (ie if I could select them and bind them, like the new group with selection tool, ie multiple select then act).

[dkwroot]

-- Multiple Smooth Joints on a single image layer

[dkwroot]

-- Add the ability to set default interpolation modes for individual bones.

[dkwroot]

-- Add the ability to toggle layer transformations on/off. This would allow the user to temporarily zero out all layer transformations so they can do things like adjust points and then just toggle the layer transforms back on when they are done.

-- I keep stressing the need to allow us to work with layers in true 3d space. I think this would be best done by just treating the entire layer like a 3d plane. The vector layer is just drawn onto the plane and then the plane is placed in 3d space.

[dkwroot]

-- Add a preset bone dynamics drop down menu to bone constraints. Some of the presets would be things like "Rope", "Hair", "Blob" and so on. This would auto set the dynamics and give users an easier experience.

[chucky]

-- Add a preset bone dynamics drop down menu to bone constraints. Some of the presets would be things like "Rope", "Hair", "Blob" and so on. This would auto set the dynamics and give users an easier experience.

Yeah wanted that for years.

[Greenlaw]

I mentioned this before but I wanted to ask for this UI change separately since it seems like it could be a 'low hanging fruit' for the developers:

In a future release, can the Dynamics panel be turned into a tear-off or otherwise repositionable panel? On smaller laptop screens (Like my old tm2) and even some desktop monitors, the Dynamics panel opens almost in the middle of the workspace, which is super annoying when trying to tweak settings because you need to reposition your view to the narrow space on either side of the panel. I would love to be able to move it to the side like the Actions panel, or in a column like some of the others, so it stays more or less clear of the workspace.

Additionally, it would be good if there was more consistency in how all the panels appeared throughout Anime Studio. At the moment, some panels can pop out while others are permanently fixed.

Thanks for listening.

[mkelley]

I've mentioned this one before and it's SUCH a tiny thing to have happen I'm not sure why it hasn't already, but there really ought to be an option to reopen the file at the frame you were last at. All that would have to be saved in the file format is the current frame (when saving). Can't tell you how much time this would save in a production environment.

At the very least this ought to be an option when you use the "load last file you were working on" (or whatever it's called) is selected in how you want AS to open up (in that case all it has to do is store the frame externally, not even in that particular file, in whatever file it uses to know what file you were last working on), although I would also argue it would be easy to extend this to all files in the "most recently opened" list.

[braj]

The ability to 'paste in' bitmap images as a new layer would be swell, for instance, you see something on the web, copy it like you would to past into Photoshop etc, but when you paste into ASP it creates a new bitmap layer. A dedicated menu item 'paste bitmap' could be under the 'paste' command. I know you can already do this in several steps but having it work more like other graphics apps would be swell. It would make working across apps very fast.