Moho Forum

Haha I'm so brain dead I think every other week I ask something.

Well hi blah blah ok.. So how does 3D stuff works in Anime Studio? Like can you actually create a character or is that too complicated? I actually like how it doesn't look like common "CGI" like in Pixar.

I like how it still looks like a cartoon. But can I create cars or doors? Or even people? I can't find many tutorials on it that get straight to the point.

I also can't find many tutorials on creating masked characters. Hm.

Thanks so much for all the help guys it's just a real pleasure to know there so many imaginative people on here. Everytime someone helps me with my project I just feel more closer to finishing it.

No, AS is not a 3D application and can't create 3D characters. It also can't handle 3D characters imported from elsewhere, other than importing them as 1 single object which you can turn around but not doing anything else with it.

If you need to work with 3D characters, use a 3D program.

Well why does AS have the 3D option? You're able to create 3D objects..

That's what I was saying but maybe people don't really work with them??

The 3D environment in AS is mostly used to stack 2D planes in space, which works quite well. Of course there are some who spent lots of time and work to build more complex 3D stuff in AS, but I think for that task a real 3D program is better suited.

Ah I see. Ok! I just thought the option meant you could creat boxes or cars or something. Aha. Yeah I'm trying to create glove hands or hands in general and I thought it would be useful to just animate them 3d in AS.

You can create basic shapes in 3D in Anime Studio, but if you're looking to make hands, you're not going to get anything close to that without using a dedicated 3D program.

You can extrude and revolve vector layers to create basic 3D shapes with shading that can be rotated and translated to create more elaborate 3D shapes. Look at the vector layer 3D Options properties tab and experiment. It is very basic. There is no "sculpting" or high end 3D modeling.

Keep in mind that Anime Studio is primarily a 2D program. 2D layers can be manipulated in 3D space to create parallax and multiplane effects.

If the only thing you want is simply 2D shading with the power of 3D modeling and animation, it would make more sense to use a dedicated 3D application. Almost every 3D application has 2D "cell style" rendering options.

Just remember.. With great power comes great... complexity. 3D is a whole level above 2D when creating and rigging characters. It has an entire extra dimension to keep track of. It's this complexity that eventually brought me to 2D animation. I started with 3D when learning to animate but found that 2D gave me so much more freedom and flexibility.

With 3D animation I would still have to start with my drawn characters... sometimes drawn in great detail and finished style... only to have to spend hours and hours with 3D tools sculpting and texturing those models.

I found that 2D animation is...."closer to the paper". 3D is... many... steps above the medium I learned to create on since I was a young child scribbling with crayons on brown paper grocery bags.

heyvern wrote:You can extrude and revolve vector layers to create basic 3D shapes with shading that can be rotated and translated to create more elaborate 3D shapes. Look at the vector layer 3D Options properties tab and experiment. It is very basic. There is no "sculpting" or high end 3D modeling.

Keep in mind that Anime Studio is primarily a 2D program. 2D layers can be manipulated in 3D space to create parallax and multiplane effects.

If the only thing you want is simply 2D shading with the power of 3D modeling and animation, it would make more sense to use a dedicated 3D application. Almost every 3D application has 2D "cell style" rendering options.

Just remember.. With great power comes great... complexity. 3D is a whole level above 2D when creating and rigging characters. It has an entire extra dimension to keep track of. It's this complexity that eventually brought me to 2D animation. I started with 3D when learning to animate but found that 2D gave me so much more freedom and flexibility.

With 3D animation I would still have to start with my drawn characters... sometimes drawn in great detail and finished style... only to have to spend hours and hours with 3D tools sculpting and texturing those models.

I found that 2D animation is...."closer to the paper". 3D is... many... steps above the medium I learned to create on since I was a young child scribbling with crayons on brown paper grocery bags.

I couldn't agree more. I tried my hand at 3D, did quite a bit with different packages, but when it all came together, I find I much prefer 2D over 3D. It still requires a great deal of time and effort, and mucho practice at creating good content, but I find working in 2D so much more satisfying than 3D. I also have CrazyTalk Animator 2, which focuses on 3D motions with 2D characters, and it's fun to tinker and play around with, but nothing looks nearly as good as a smoothly executed and well thought out true 2D animation.

Well I guess my real question should've been on creating the illusion of 3D with Anime Studio?

-because I mean I love 2D more than 3D anyday but I'm just having trouble trying to create dimension like with the hand I was talking about for example.

I work in both 3D and 2D, and quite often in a 2.5D mix. For film and TV visual FX (my day job), it's almost always a combination of methods.

As mentioned above by others, I find ASP's 3D environment is fantastic for simulating a multi-plane camera rig, which is a method of layering 2D images in space to create the illusion of depth and parallax effects. ASP goes one step farther by allowing you to import 3D meshes or create 3D primitives to co-exist with the images. That's very useful but it's also pretty much the extent of the 3D support. A far as I know, there is no way to rig the 3D objects and deform them--you will need to do that in a 3D animation program.

In our short film 'Scareplane', Anime Studio's 3D environment was very useful for several scenes, most notably the scene where Sister goes tumbling through the air and hits the cabin door, and the scene where we see all three characters in the cockpit. Three of the four airplane shots, however, were animated in a 3D program called LightWave 3D, simply because it was easier to set up and animate the plane and camera in that program in the way I wanted them to move.

G.

Oh wow! I loved how well It was animated! See, it doesn't look like how generic vector animation or puppet animation looks.

It is snappy but also flows naturally too!

TheMinahBird wrote:-because I mean I love 2D more than 3D anyday but I'm just having trouble trying to create dimension like with the hand I was talking about for example.

There are the usual techniques used by artists to create the illusion of depth in 2D. You can overlap lines, vary the line thickness, add shading, and use negative space:

@TheMinahBird, thanks for the nice comments.

@neeters_guy, oh yes, thanks for bringing that up--I meant to say something about ASP's shading effects but you beat me to it.

@TheMinahBird, in the film, you can see shading effect being used to simulate 3D. The first scene with Sister is a good example--notice the cast shadow on the seat, which helps lift her from the background artwork. This is a simple layer option in ASP and it's very effective for creating 3D depth when there is a background that's supposed to be very close to the character.

The highlights and shadows on the characters are also standard shading effects in ASP for simulating 3D--this effect is not always convincing but if you design around the limitations, they can be very effective.

G.

I know about shading but ok I guess nobody is getting me here,

Say I had like a gloved hand or an ethnic hand (brown on one side and light on the other), what if I wanted to turn the hand over? Like it'll feel like 3D when It really isn't?