does Anime Studio has this features

[pagou]

Design its a necessity, and you just tell us yours necessity, making the need of better UI more obvious.

AI is an industry standard and for a a good reason, and for that reason i don't expect to draw a single line inside AS, just import things. Unfortunately i had to learn things, like animation with the AS logic, but i will try.

[jahnocli]

If you're going to import a lot of Illustrator files, each of those files will have WAY too many nodes. All these extraneous nodes (points in AS) will slow your animation down. Tracking down and trimming out all the unnecessary nodes can take longer than drawing the damn thing in the first place.

When I first started with AS (it was called Moho back then!) I eventually found that converting vectors to .png files was better if I was importing stuff. Just remember to up the dpi to 300 or so to take any zooming into account. If the imported drawing HAS to be converted to vector, it's usually faster to trace it -- and optimise it -- in Anime Studio as you go along.

Not what you wanted to hear, I'm sure. I didn't want to hear it either, but like a lot of things, you get used to it. And eventually, you can even come to prefer it! Hope this helps...

[slowtiger]

AI is not a standard. It's just for marketing and convenience that some other software designers decided to import AI files. AI is not even a standard to itself - ever tried to open a recent AI file with an AI version just one subversion below?

AI is not even the best vector illustration program. I worked with FreeHand and found it much easier and faster, unfortunately Adobe bought it to let it die. AI is for static images. AS is for animation. To get good animation the positioning of points is crucial, so it's pretty useless to create stuff in AI and expect it to be ready for animation in AS.

There is no industry standard for vector file exchange besides EPS which is a pretty limited excuse of a format. That's why you can't have easy exchange between AI, AS, Flash, to name just the more common ones.

[dueyftw]

Design its a necessity, and you just tell us yours necessity, making the need of better UI more obvious.

AI is an industry standard and for a a good reason, and for that reason i don't expect to draw a single line inside AS, just import things. Unfortunately i had to learn things, like animation with the AS logic, but i will try.

AS is a unique program with its own quirks. Don't expect to animate with it on day one of use. Or week one. If your jumping into animation for the first time you will have to learn some things. If you can draw really well you didn't learn how to draw in a day or a week. Some animation skills a unique to Anime Studio,but most are not. The biggest thing is what happens in 24 frames. Newbies want to make longs animations so they will do something like a jump in 24 frames then render it. They end up will some slow motion animation. This sense of timing is needed for any animation, hand drawn or by a computer program.

Because of the center line vector you are better to just redraw with the vector tools that AS has. Importing vector art only works well if it doesn't move. And then your better off as a PNG file.

Dale

[pagou]

Lets keep one moment of silence in memory of my beloved, and way before his time Freehand.

[slowtiger]

Ah, another FreeHand veteran!

Of course FH didn't have all the bells and whistles vector software has today. I started with v3.0 in 1993 and still used v10, IIRC. FH was an astounding example of a clean and intuitive GUI. I still keep the manual ov v4.0 because it's one of the best manuals ever, IMO. It still could teach other manuals a lot about how this should be done.

Of course Adobe had to kill it, then rip the carcass of features to be implanted into AI.

[pagou]

i want mind, if i had saw Illustrator end of line, and that is from someone that work with AI, since V.3
Actually, in V.: CS4, Illustrator manage to catch up with freehand (FH = 50MB )

[Greenlaw]

Re: UI. I think that's the reaction many users have when they have an established history with other packages. I know I certainly did. But most users here, myself included, who have been using ASP for a while now will also say that animating cut-out style is faster and more efficient in ASP than it is in pretty much any other animation package out there. Once you've worked on a few productions using each program, you'll know what I mean. That said, each program works very differently, whether it's Harmony, AE with DuIK, or whatever, and each has it's own strengths that can make it more suitable for certain styles of animation.

The best recommendation I can make is to actually learn the program and use if for a while before judging it. Produce a short animation in each and see what's more fun for you to work with and more efficient for creating your style of animation. (Or, as the case may be, the style required by your employer or client.)

FWIW, I've been involved with animation productions using all three animation packages mentioned in this post at the same animation studio this year. I've enjoyed working with all of them but personally, I do find ASP is quicker to rig and animate with in most situations and, in all situations regardless of the 2D package I'm animating in, I've wound up assembling and finishing scenes in AE.

(For my own personal productions, I also like to use Fusion for compositing--it's what we used for the short 'Scareplane', as well as our 3D productions.)

My feeling is, use whatever it takes to get the best results in the quickest amount to time.

Re: AI import...it's doable but, in practice, you may be better off creating the paths from scratch in ASP. The paths in ASP are not the familiar postscript based bezier curves found in AI, so you may find the conversion unacceptable for proper deformations. (The conversion may be okay for static items though.) ASP offers a handful of different methods for drawing paths but it may take some time to develop the skill for drawing quickly and efficiently with them because it's quite different from drawing paths in AI. Not necessarily easier or more difficult, it's just a different skill you must master.

G.

P.S., When we made Scareplane, (which was my first ASP animation,) I initially started drawing many elements for the film in AI. After the first couple of tests, we decided most of the animated elements should be drawn directly within ASP (characters and props) or imported from PSD files (the backgrounds). For us, it was too inefficient to work with AI files for this project so we abandoned the approach. Plus, this decision gave us stronger motivation to fully learn ASP's tools and workflow, which was the reason we started making Scareplane in the first place.

[pagou]

Its funny how things sometime turns. I made some aesthetic changes in the final designs that double the size of the AI file, make the PNG the only valid solution.
So i had no special reason to stay n flash, expect the learning curve, and already love the AS camera and some other features.
I will try to run a small character animation test scene, with AS to see if i can learn the logic behind, but deadline for this project is very strict, otherwise i will give time to learn it.