Moho Animation Forum

Hello,

I'm looking to either purchase a 2D animation app and am leaning towards Anime Studio. Can it do image swapping of images/elements tied to a bone? Can the swap occur while the bone is animating? I'd download the trial but I don't want to have the funds tied up. Lack of adequate image swapping would be a deal breaker. Most of my animation will be created via the use of a bones system, but I do expect to do some traditional type of animation.

I was also looking at Toon Boom Animate. Anyone have any thoughts? It looks like AS will do most of what I want and from what i can see from the videos, looks like it is fairly easy to use. Toon Boom has alot of development behind it, but I'm concerned Animate might have too high of a learning curve, & I'm afraid that certain key features will be left out to get me to migrate up to Pro.

Thanks in advance

"Swapping" is made by AS using the Switch layer.
Here some info:
http://www.lostmarble.com/moho/manual/i ... ayers.html
-G

You can swap vector or image layers in a SWITCH layer while its attached to a bone, but you can't have the bone bend the images within a switch layer.

Meaning that you could have an arm that bends with the bones and have a hand switch layer at the end of the arm, and the hand could switch to different positions.

I use both Animate 2 and Anime Studio Pro. Both are great. I bought Toon Boom Animate to do frame by frame stuff, and it helps to be able to draw straight in to the program with a tablet. For Anime Studio, I was drawing in Photoshop, exporting images to PNG's for Anime Studio, and then animating in Anime Studio.

So. I guess if you read through each package's tutorials you'll be able to figure them out. That and using the program for a while.

Which is better? Hmm...I can't really answer that question. I think they're suited to different tasks for me. I haven't really used the puppet facilities in Animate so I can't comment on that. Apparently it also has bones (Animate) so that'd be interesting to look at.

If you have an idea of the kind of animation you'd like to do, that'd help a bunch in making a more informed decision as to which package would be best suited to your needs. Have anything to compare to? You say you'd like to do some traditional animation: ANIME STUDIO IS A PAIN IN THE ____ for this. The drawing tools in AS aren't great. If you're using a tablet, no good. If traditional animation is anywhere on your radar I'd suggest going for Animate 2. Get yourself a tablet, read the tutorials for Animate, and go for it. If its just puppet animation you're after, with bones, AS is great. People have done amazing stuff with AS; Greykid have simulated frame-by-frame traditional animation with AS, but they're an anomaly. It is possible but for me, its kind of counter-intuitive. I'd much rather draw into one program and onion-skin it and draw into the same program for animation instead of hacking it with opacity in Photoshop and using the animation palette to see how it looks before I export it. You could draw all your frames in Anime Studio neatly by clicking each point, creating fills, shapes etc...but I think this takes way long and again, is counter-intuitive. I like getting the free-flowing motion of drawing with a pen. Animate 2 - good for this.

The learning curve in Animate took me a couple months to get, but once the penny drops (kind of keeps dropping) then its nice and you forget about the technical aspects of it and get on with the job at hand.

AS' learning curve - you can pick it up quickly and get going. Around 5 years since I started using it (Moho in those days) I'm still learning new things about it. Like I learned that you can select a stroke's colour by holding ALT and clicking a colour in the layers palette? Maybe this is new with v.7 but I was like, HEY, check it out, that saves me from copying and pasting a HEX value.

This is a rather long-winded reply, hope it goes some way to giving you a better idea. Traditional animation - Animate. I think you'll only get extremely frustrated with trying to hack it in Anime Studio.

Mikdog wrote:Like I learned that you can select a stroke's colour by holding ALT and clicking a colour in the layers palette? Maybe this is new with v.7 but I was like, HEY, check it out, that saves me from copying and pasting a HEX value.

Or you could just right click in the palette

And yeah, I think that's always been there.

Thanks to both of you for the very helpful responses. Mikdog, I really appreciate the insights of your response!

The reality is going to be that, while I think I'd like the option of incorporating some traditional animation into my productions, the production parameters of the projects will almost always preclude this. Also, I don't have much time to get up to speed. Given that, and other things I've seen, I going with Anime Studio (and am really looking forward to it).

So expect to see me hanging out here at the forum

thanks again!!!

Cool. Its a great piece of software. I suggest reading through each tutorial until you understand clearly what each tutorial is explaining. This gets the technical aspects, well, a lot of them, out of the way and then you can use the tools to figure out what you can do with the software. Using the software a lot and trial and error will probably come into play in terms of learning, but the tutorials give you a really good idea of what goes on.

Hopefully you find it a good piece of software. These forums are a great place, lots of helpful people (at least there used to be) and generally nurturing forums. I've found many great feedback replies to posted work, and what what what.

Anyways, enjoy it and have fun. Peace.