Some questions about Anime Studio

[Strawberrycocoa]

Hello everyone. I am an animation lover who saw Anime Studio 5 (regular, not Pro) in a store one day and decided to gather some information for pre-purchasing considerations. I am very interested in getting this program, but I have a couple questions about using it:

1. I would like to know about the programs ability to manipulate heads and bodies. I've seen some videos where the animator got very smooth life-like movements and others where... not so much. From what I've been able to gather, the ones with good body/head animation were using Pro. Can the regular version accomplish realistic smooth body motions, or is it only Pro that has the tools necessary to do this?

(examples: rotating the head from a profile view to a three-quarter view, or a track athlete running a sprint, or dancing joyfully to a fun song)

2. I've heard mixed reviews on Anime Studio's ability to tweak or animate "frame by frame" similar to traditional animations. If I place a skin on a bone rig and set up an animation but do not like the way it looks, do I have the option to adjust it frame by frame, or is that not possible in Anime Studio?

3. How much control and detail do the bone rigs offer? Can I set up a character rig with a large number of small bones and use that for small motions and subtle details?

4. Can bone rigs be saved as a template? Like, could I set up some skins and bones for a character named Rita, save that seperately from the project being currently worked on, then load up Rita's rigging whenever I need her in a scene?

Thanks for your time. From the threads I have seen this seems to be a very helpful supportive community, and I eagerly await responses.

[slowtiger]

1. The ability to create smooth head and body turns lies only in the animator, not in the program, so the version (pro or normal) doesn't matter in this case. I would always buy pro (it's still a bargain) because I like my software uncrippled. There's a comparison chart somewhere (but I don't remember where) which lists the differences.

2. You can work frame by frame as well as let the software do the tweaking, but you cannot draw frame by frame. Every object exists for the duration of the timeline and can only be manipulated or made visible/invisible. In this respect it is like all 3D software.

3. Some people here do very complicated bone rigs with lots of controls, others prefer it simpler (like me). Subtle details are always possible.

4. Not in the way you would expect. AS (as we call it) works on a file-by-file basis, there is no support for libraries or linking content from different files. You could, however, create and animate a fully rigged character, then duplicate the file and strip the bones off all artwork to replace it witth different shapes.

[jahnocli]

Hello! Welcome to the forum. Here is my take on your questions:

1) I don't think the Pro version is necessary for smooth life-like movements; it's probably that the people interested in producing these movements are more likely to have the Pro version...Plus, of course, some people are just not so interested in this kind of animation.

2) Frame by frame animation is not one of Anime Studio's strong points. It's just not designed with that in mind. You can do it, in a number of different ways, but if this is your main interest, you'd be better off with something like Toon Boom Studio.

3) You can have control bordering on obsessive compulsive disorder...

4) Yes. You can rig a character, save it, and then import that character into other Anime Studio files.

[mkelley]

1. The main difference between Pro and the regular version is the ability to use actions. This is sort of a "macro" like function and can be very helpful in workflow (I wouldn't do without it) but doesn't give you any additional abilities.

There are some other things that Pro does (no length limit, for one thing) but nothing to do with smooth motions versus unsmooth ones -- it's the same engine for both.

Any kind of head or body rotation is always going to be more of a challenge than moving limbs or body through parallel to the camera. You should probably search some of the threads here on head rotations for the details.

2. You can certainly adjust every single frame, and AS has the onion skin tools to allow this easily. AS in general isn't built around cell animation which although also done frame by frame has different attributes. But I always tweak my animations on a frame-by-frame basis in AS (for example, when using bones to move a limb I want the clothing to move more realistically at times so I will adjust the point vector positions at certain frames. AS will interpolate between frames in this process, making it easy to get exactly the look I want).

3. Absolutely. Bones can even be programmed with their own "physics" so they move in response to other bones' movements (like moving hair) as well as allow you to put constraints on them.

4. Yep. I do this all the time -- I have files of all my main characters that I load into each scene that I need them. Now, you can't simply substitute one bone rig for another -- those bones are rigged to that set of drawings -- but you CAN take a rigged drawing and modify the drawings on top of it, if that makes sense.

For me it's simpler for new characters to just make a new rig. But I *always* reuse my characters. AS makes reloading objects from other scenes a snap.

[DarthFurby]

In addition to what everyone else has said, a free trial for both Standard and Pro are available on the SmithMicro website:

Standard:
http://my.smithmicro.com/win/anime/trial.html (Windows)
http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/anime/trial.html (Mac)

Pro:
http://my.smithmicro.com/win/animepro/trial.html (Windows)
http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/animepro/trial.html (Mac)