Request for top 10 Anime Studio Pro Version 6 Features

[heyvern]

This last one is kind of crazy, but bear with me (and if this already is a feature, let me know cuz I'll use it all the time) - what if there was some way to do animation live, runtime?

You can sort of do that now actually. It can produce an awful lot of keys and the timing isn't accurate (what is "real" time? )

In a couple of experiments I did I hit the play button and moved bone/s around. The trick to this for me was having a simple rig setup. For instance I have a very complicated mouth rig with lots of bones, but it uses just one bone to open, close, stretch etc, the lips. I could almost do lip sync in real time by moving the mouth like a puppet while I listened to dialog on my headphones. Unfortunately I couldn't match the real time key framing to the sound file.

Another tip for this if you want to play with it, make the animation length as long as possible, otherwise it loops around and you overwrite the motion.

It can work but the program is not set up for it if you know what I mean.

-vern

[ink animations]

I second the non rendering (or even option to render?) sketch layer.
Could be vector or bitmap based. Would be fantastic for rough preliminary sketches that can be traced over.

Great Idea!!

[Dodgy]

Coloured Brushes. If a brush has no alpha, then the lightness is used to determine the shape. If it is 32bit, then use the colours in the image, with the ink colour as a multiplier. So for the original brush colour you have white as the ink, but if you make the ink red, it tints the brush colour red.

[huertaaj]

If I could have ONE THING added to Anime Pro I would request motion capture with the mouse. I used to animate with the mouse using the old Autodesk Animator Pro in DOS and early Windows. Now I NEED to do the same with Anime Studio Pro. Does anyone know of a way to do this in Anime Pro?
TNX,
huertaaj

[Rudiger]

If I could have ONE THING added to Anime Pro I would request motion capture with the mouse. I used to animate with the mouse using the old Autodesk Animator Pro in DOS and early Windows. Now I NEED to do the same with Anime Studio Pro. Does anyone know of a way to do this in Anime Pro?
TNX,
huertaaj

Um, did you see Heyvern's comment a few posts above? Basically, if you move stuff around in ASP while it's playing then it will create keyframes for you.

[jupitor6]

These upgrades would greatly improve my user experience:

01) Combine "Select Points" and "Translate Points" tool into "Translate Points" tool - Select and translate with one tool.
02) Combine "Scale Points" and "Rotate Points" tools and rename to "Transform Points" tool - Scale & optionally hold down the "Shift" key to rotate.
03) Multiple layer selection - Hold down "Shift" key + left-click (and drag) mouse to select multiple layers.
04) Add "Lock" button to Layers panel - Click to lock/unlock selected layer, or multiple selected layers.
05) Right-click on layers to open "Layer Settings" panel.
06) Use "Delete" key on keyboard to delete selected layer, or multiple selected layers.
07) Add "Copy Bone" and "Paste Bone" to Bone pull-down menu.
08) Add "Flip Horizontally" and "Flip Vertically" tools to Bone Palette. Similar to said tools in Layer Palette.
09) Improve gradient palette - Add more than 2 colors to linear and radial fill with added adjustment options.
10) Add "Audio Layer" to Layers panel that supports multiple soundtracks + volume and stereo settings + shift audio along timeline incrementally, using left and right arrow keys.

These capabilities would greatly aid my productivity speed. Thanks!

Jupitor 6

[synthsin75]

1&2 already exist in Fazek's modified tools.

5-Double clicking on a layer opens the layer settings window.

That said, I definitely agree with 3, 4, 9, & 10.

[jupitor6]

Many thanks for the efforts of Fazek and others, but I strongly believe requests 1 & 2 should be standard features that are shipped in the application. Many users of Anime Studio may never visit a forum so they can benefit from the generosity of fellow users. They just buy an application to get a job done and that's it. So the best configuration of a tool should be standard, not something you stumble upon on a forum.

[realsnake]

How about light layer(omi'n other) that works according to the AS 3d camera mechanics, Rotate able in 3d space etc. and can be blended with images, that could also be used in special fx such as fire and sunlight etc

[Dodgy]

The ability to have switch layers morph between nested switch layers.
For example, I have a front head and side head, which have blended switch layers to determine eye/mouth shape etc. It'd be nice to be able to morph those as the face blends from front to side, without having to have all the shapes in one layer.This could be acheived by matching the names of the sublayers or just by layer order.

At the moment it switches, but doesn't morph, even with the blend switch on.

[Dodgy]

Further to this, a 'Morph mixer' layer would be well useful for those of us who use interpolated switches. Basically what I mean is for you have one vector layer which has point animation on several frames, moving parts or all of the shapes, so 'MMM' on one frame, 'OOH' on another, Head Left on another frame, and Head forward on another frame. This is so when you need to make a change to the shape later, the morphs will stay point consistent.
Then you have the Morph mixer (MM) layer, in which you can assign names to each of these frames, and checks the deltas from the 0 frame to see how each frame changes. Then you have an interface with sliders (with configurable min and max values) which opens when you open your MM layer. This allows you to mix those morphs by any percentage. This works really well in LightWave.

[Dodgy]

Also something would be good is autozipping of anme files. At the moment .anme files can quickly grow to megabytes in size. However, if you zip them up, they crunch down to tiny sizes. It would be awesome if AS did this automatically, packing on save, and unpacking on load, so it would save a lot of space on disk. You would be able to extract the file yourself using a zip utility to edit the file by hand, if need be, but for day to day use, it would just mean .anme files being so much smaller by default.

[heyvern]

Also something would be good is autozipping of anme files. At the moment .anme files can quickly grow to megabytes in size. However, if you zip them up, they crunch down to tiny sizes. It would be awesome if AS did this automatically, packing on save, and unpacking on load, so it would save a lot of space on disk. You would be able to extract the file yourself using a zip utility to edit the file by hand, if need be, but for day to day use, it would just mean .anme files being so much smaller by default.

The beauty of the file format is that it is plain ascii text. Many of us rely on editing files as raw text. I have many projects where I rely heavily on opening and changing the file format directly. I also use it extensively for scripting and extracting data.

Adding this feature would make the AS file format proprietary. Zipping is so simple and is now pretty much "built in" to most OS's, just right click and zip. I can live without this feature.

Just an opinion... and a simple explanation for why AS is the way it is. It's a good idea... maybe as an option. A separate "save compressed" option. Many applications have this.

-vern

[Dodgy]

Yeah, and option would be good. I'm a scripter so it's always handy to have the ascii file, but most of the time I don't need that, so a .anmz file format would be good. Being zipped doesn't make it proprietary, just smaller

[Benz]

1. Proper *eps/*.ai import (Illustrator to AS curve conversion problem)
2. Better timeline control. For example, the ability to move all keyframes related to a group layers, or multiple layers at once in the timeline and jump from keyframe to keyframe hotkey
3. Improved text tool (kerning, vertical scale, font size, leading, etc and no forced conversion to vector curves, maybe text could be a layer type)
4. Additional “Elastic” Interpolation mode (to make elements behave like rubber)
5. Render farm feature
6. Additional layer blending modes like “color burn”, “darken”, “lighten”, etc
7. Static SVG import, maybe integration of the SVG filters effects, since they are powerful, free (I guess) and compatible to Illustrator and other SVG tools. (Animated SVG+SMIL export?! Since animation works already excellent in Opera browser)
8. Improved gradient tool with more options
9. Bézier-like control over motion paths
10. Hotkeys and basic tools more similar to other common software (like adobe suite)


…I count on you mike