Frame Rate on Multi-Brush "frame-to-frame randomness"

[PaperWaspNest]

Hello, I come bearing a video!



Please help me get a combination of Examples 2 and 3!

Here is my character all decked out with lots of masked multi-brushes, giving him some texture. I really love that the multi-brushes can 'wiggle', or cycle through, via turning "Minimize frame-to-frame randomness" OFF in the brush settings. However, as you can see in Example 1, the brushes cycle way too fast and it is very distracting.

In order to get the brush cycle speed under control, I often export this character's animations as Example #3. The brush speed is much better here, I quite like it. The character animation gets choppy, which is sometimes kind of natural and charming, but other times I lose some crucial detail, like how his ear wiggles a little before the head turn.

The question: Is it possible to force the brush cycle speed to be different than the frame rate of the scene? Ideally I want the scene to be 24 FPS, but I want the multi-brushes to animate at 12FPS. If this feature doesn't exist I would love to propose that it be added in the future.

Thanks!

[slowtiger]

Haven't worked with that feature myself yet, but have you tried copying each brush (1, 1a, 2, 2a) so by cycling through theyll effectively look like on 2's?

[synthsin75]

It may not be quite the effect you want, but have you tried leaving minimize randomness on and using animated vector noise? At least with vector noise you can specify the frame interval.

[PaperWaspNest]

Thank you both for replying. I tried both techniques!

Slowtiger, I was so excited by your idea. It's so simple yet clever, exactly the kind of workaround shenanigans I would use all the time back in my Flash-using days. But, sadly, this doesn't seem to have any affect on the frame rate of the multi-brush. I even tried adding 3 or 4 duplicates of each brush, and all sorts of different combinations of the brush settings such as Random Order On/Off, Angle Jitter On/Off, and so forth.

I'm rather stumped on this one. Logically your idea should work! But for whatever reason, no matter what the brush samples are, it still wiggles at the full frame rate. I'll try making a new multi-brush that is merely an identical brush blob duplicated 4 times and see if that does anything unexpected.

Synthsin75, I have tried your suggestion as well and while it does give me excellent control on the amount of its type of wiggling, the brush blobs in the "chain" never change, they all simple move around slightly. This will be useful for some other effects down the line, but unfortunately it won't work for my goal here of having every frame look like it was colored in via traditional media.

I'll keep fiddling around with both your suggestions some more in case I missed something. Any other brave souls want to take this one one? Or hack Anime Studio into letting me control a multi-brush's frame rate?

[synthsin75]

Would this work?

[PaperWaspNest]

It looks like you got the brush on the left to cycle at a slower frame rate than the brush on the right. And that's all in the same file? I'd love to know more about how you did it

[synthsin75]

Yeah, the brush on the right is cycling twice as fast. Same file...no need to export to a different FPS.

I did this by stacking stroke shapes on the same curve. In case you don't know how to do that, you just need to add a curve off to the side with at least one more point than you used to create the previous shape(s). This allows you to create a new shape (including this extra curve) on top of a curve that already has a stroke. After making the stacked shape, you can delete the extra curve.

I used multi-brushes with minimize randomness enabled. I stacked three strokes on each circle, animated their opacity (with step interpolation) to show each in sequence, and cycled the last keyframe. For the second circle, I just copy/paste the first, changed the brush, and adjusted the stroke opacity keyframes to speed it up.

[Little Yamori]

Any other brave souls want to take this one on? Or hack Anime Studio into letting me control a multi-brush's frame rate?

Well, I'm in way over my head here as I'm new to all the features on Pro and am slow finding my way (and it looks like sythsin75 already solved this), but being as I would find many work-arounds for myself while using Debut 6, what I would have tried here would be a switch layer for the fill with several variants switching in a cycle with or without interpolation, this way you could exactly control the frame speed on which they would, well, "switch".

Just a thought

LY

[PaperWaspNest]

synthsin75, would you mind uploading that file so I could take a look? I am familiar with stacking strokes on top of one another (some of my characters have a stroke with three different brushes stacked onto it, in parts), but I can't quite understand how to control the keyframes of each individual shape easily, since they are right on top of each other. Accessing the shapes that are lower in the stack is a cumbersome process of shifting around the shape order on that layer until the one I want to change is on top, and then scooting it back down into its proper spot in the layer order once I am done.

Am I missing something in that process or is that what I am supposed to be doing?

[chucky]

You can choose the shapes in the shape dropdown of the styles palette.
You can name them to keep track and when you select there, they will be highlighted red in the timeline.

Alternatively you could use reference layers with different brush settings?

[synthsin75]

Yeah, what Chucky said. Just use the shape drop-down to select each one. Shape order shouldn't matter at all, since only one shape is visible at a time.

[PaperWaspNest]

While you guys were responding here, I was in Anime Studio setting up a cycling opacity swap animation on three different brush strokes - all applied to the same path.



It works! I didn't know about the Shape drop down list at all, so I animated these by changing the shape order so each one was "on top" briefly just so I could select it and set the appropriate opacity keyframes. Cumbersome, but it worked. However, I like your drop down method MUCH better

Especially if I am now going to go through and set this up for the 20+ layers in my character that need this. I better be smart about this one, I really want it to be a miracle one-and-done maneuver. Here's hoping...

This is REALLY exciting!! Thank you, guys! I'll post a new character animation @ 24FPS (but with 8 FPS brush wiggling) soon.

[synthsin75]

Nice 2.9D effect, and glad I was able to help. I love it when new questions gets me to figure out new ways to use AS.

Retrofitting this technique to existing art could be tedious. I was thinking about this earlier, and my first thought is to create the effect on like a three-point curve. Then you could copy/paste this as many times as needed, without redoing that work every time, and just add extra points where needed. I'm not sure if doing that for closed/filled shapes would be any faster than creating the effect on the existing curves.

If I have the time, I may see about writing a script to help automate creating this effect.