Moho Forum

That was a good read, thanks!

You're only limited by your own 2D drawing and animation knowledge when it comes to AnimeStudio. Wether it's frame-by-frame or tweening. I don't understand the quote above. Oh well.

Well, Anime Studio isn't well suited to type newsletters, I guess he meant

Really, for traditional animators computer animation using interpolation is a hard concept to grasp. Instead of thinking in one frame after another, you need to think in layers and key interpolation. It is just another layer of abstraction. Some people have more problems with that than others.

Good grief.

That wasn't a review for Anime Studio, it was an opinion on what is the best way to animate. At least he admitted he was biased towards "drawn" animation.

Terrible review. And I don't mean terrible for AS, I mean it wasn't done well.

A reviewer should review what the application can do and if it works, not if it can't do it exactly the way he does it. At least mention the key features like point motion along with the bones. He made it sound like you can't do point animation. Did he even try to use any point animation?

Somewhere between Flash and After Effects????? What the... what program was he using?



-vern

It seems to me that the best part of that article was when the author, trying to explain his criticism of AS, wrote, "This frustration partly stems from my bias toward animating by hand." Because he captured, in a nutshell, a real truth about every animation program -- the right one for you depends on how you like to work.

I started out on ToonBoom because I'm new to animation and I found it first. It's an excellent program with a lot of useful tools. It's staff and users are helpful. I produced one 3 minute animation with it and then stumbled across Anime Studio. It's strengths are different from the strengths of TB. Now I'm starting to us AS because the bones system, especially, and other aspects of the program just allow me to work more quickly. There are things I don't like about AS, too, as there are things I don't like about TB. Some of the "problems" seem so trivial I can hardly believe they haven't been dealt with. For example, "Select None," is such an important function in my workflow but there's no shortcut. Argh! But, despite what I see as is shortcomings, I love this program. It fits with the way I work. It's simple and powerful. So my advice to anyone looking for an animation program would be to try out the demo of a number of these programs and pick the one that fits with the way you want to work. Objective measures of which one is better are fairly meaningless. They function very differently and support different workflows. So, in the end, it's a subjective decision.

-HassleHead

HassleHead wrote:For example, "Select None," is such an important function in my workflow but there's no shortcut. Argh!

Try hitting the Enter key. I think that's a good shortcut for most tools.

I agree that this isn't good journalism by Emru Townsend. In good journalism you should clearly separate the facts from the opinions. That is not the case here. Nevertheless, it was very amusing to read. I can hardly call this a review, though, and certainly not objective in any sense.

I sent the reviewer a "friendly" email pointing out all the features and examples he missed.

Like... uh...

point motion, scripting, using bone AND point motion together, Greykid pictures.

I think this guy spent 5 minutes doing research. I hate it when a reviewer doesn't spend enough time. Those reviews are IMPORTANT. They need to be accurate.

The sad thing is, he criticized the wrong stuff AND it was wrong. I would have been more impressed if there had been something about actual functionality issues or other REAL things that are worthy of a review.

-vern

heyvern wrote:I sent the reviewer a "friendly" email pointing out all the features and examples he missed.

You're my hero, Vern!

While it isn't really suited to creating the next Evangelion, it's perfect for simulating cutouts as in South Park or creating silhouette films.

This is not true, I have seen examples of anime characters that were made in Anime Studio. I bought AS because it could make anime characters and have made fairly good one at that.

Someone show this guy some of greykid's work.

D.K

In me email I gave the reviewer a link to Greykid's web site. I also indicated that showing one example of cut out animation (even it is spectacular) was not indicative of the entire range of styles possible with AS.

That particular example in the review has absolutely nothing to do with Anime Studio's limitations. The artist most likely CHOSE that style because that is how they wanted to do it. Not because AS couldn't do anything else.

Quite honestly there was quite a bit of NON CUTOUT animation in the example he used... so I don't know what his point was.

It's a shame people will read that review and not get a complete picture.

-vern

It really was a one-sided article. And all the irritation expressed here is called for. People might read that and be completely mislead. Let's show him up by producing sweet fluid expressive animations -- oh wait, people here are already doing that. All right, let's produce more!

-HassleHead

This really is not a good review at all, in my opinion. In one paragraph he states:

If your forte is traditional, hand-drawn animation, you'll find the resulting motion a bit awkward without serious finessing; and if you're going to work that hard at it you might as well stick with another program.

It seems to me that the essence of any artwork, whether it be animation or painting, or music, whether you do it on a computer or "by hand," is hard work. This is what it takes to make something worth while. What he's said in this review is that with Anime Studio you might have to actually do something that might be considered "work," and he seems to indicate that that is not a good thing. Why should you have to "work" in order to create something worthwhile? Reading this "review" I wonder if he's really even bothered to try the program out very much.

Jack

*shrug* Too much fuss about that. I understood him saying "if you do frame-by-frame, this is not the best tool for it", and that's just true. Bear in mind that his blog is not so much for animators but for animation film audience.