Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

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kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Ok, thank you very much. It would be nice if someone would be able to answer also these questions:
One more question - is it possible to change bitrate of exported animation? I would like to export the animation as mp4 file, but when I do it, the bitrate is something about 22000 kbps. For me enough would be 5000. Is it possible to set it somewhere?
Also, it would be nice if it would be possible to show every bone of my character on separate timeline, because when they are all on one timeline it's a little harder to control what is happening. But it's probably impossible if they are all on one layer?
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Greenlaw
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

kamiledi15 wrote:One more question - is it possible to change bitrate of exported animation? I would like to export the animation as mp4 file, but when I do it, the bitrate is something about 22000 kbps. For me enough would be 5000. Is it possible to set it somewhere?
Instead of rendering to a movie file from Moho, I suggest rendering to frames and then compiling the frames in a compositor or editor program and rendering the movie there. The advantage with rendering to frames is that 1.) it's more efficient for the CPU, especially for complex scenes, and 2.) if the render crashes, you can easily resume where it left off; or if you need to change only a portion of the scene, you can re-render only what's changed. With a direct movie render, if something messes up during rendering or you need to make even a minor change, you'll have to re-render the entire scene each time. FWIW, many animators and studios render to frames first for these reasons.

I guess after rendering the frames, alternatively, you could import the frames as an image sequence and render the movie from that. That should go quickly since Moho doesn't have to perform any extra scene calculations in addition to compiling the movie file. However....

...to answer your question about adjusting bit rate in Moho: generally, no. Some of the movie formats in Moho have options on the panel, or options that pop up when you begin the render, but most of the 'advanced' options are generally hidden for some reason. This is the third reason I generally avoid rendering movie files directly from Moho. I'll do it sometimes but only for quick 'throwaway' tests. So if you need more control, render frames and compile elsewhere. (There are many free tools out there that can do this with full access to output options.)

Hopefully, a future release of Moho will open this area to more options. (I'm mostly wishing for professional studio formats supporting higher bit-depths myself, like EXR or 48-bit PNG, but that would first require Moho supporting higher bit depths.)
Also, it would be nice if it would be possible to show every bone of my character on separate timeline, because when they are all on one timeline it's a little harder to control what is happening. But it's probably impossible if they are all on one layer?
Personally, that sounds like a nightmare to work with. The way to look at the timeline is that the top row is all the keyframes on all the bones, and the next row is the selected bones. This is all you normally need when animating. If you need to see the keys for other layers, enable the Timeline Visibility for the Bones and/or other layers.

Alternatively, you can isolate the bones on the timeline by color. Some animators like this feature but for me, because I use color coded bones in my rigs, this quickly becomes way too much screen clutter and totally unnecessary. Also, I imagine Moho will take a big performance hit when too many rows and keyframes are revealed at the same time.

In fact, one of the first things I do after installing a new version of Moho is to disable the visibility of all color bone channels...

Image

FWIW, many of the animators I work with disable this feature too. We just don't want see all this extra stuff.

But if you really need to see specific bones in their own channel in addition to the All Bones and Selected Bone channels, using the color bone channels is one way to do this. (You're limited by the number of colors available though. Moho really needs a native bone grouping system that lets you keyframe the visibility of the groups...I guess it might be useful if that included a visibility option for the timeline, i.e., 'Show Selected Bone Group In Timeline'.)
Last edited by Greenlaw on Wed May 23, 2018 6:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Great, thanks for your answers. I didn't notice that there is "selected bones" section in the timeline, I think that this will be enough for me.
I guess after rendering the frames, alternatively, you could import the frames as an image sequence and render the movie from that.
So it's possible to do in Anime Studio Pro? To render project as frames, then import frames and render it again as a movie? How to do this? I found out how to render it as frames, but I don't know how to render it again as a movie from the frames. I doubt that double rendering to frames and then to the movie would take less time then single rendering as a movie, but I must give it a chance. I know that I can download another program to do this, but it would be better if I could do everything in one. Currently I'm rendering it as mp4 with high bitrate and then render it again in another program with 5000 bitrate and it works good. But it would be great if rendering could be faster.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

It's not necessarily faster, it just makes it more reliable and less likely to crash, especially with complicated scenes that have many layers, characters, actions, etc. To me, it sounds like you potentially have many hundreds of layers? And if you add a lot of controls to animate the artwork/sequences, it gets more complicated. When many 2D or 3D animation programs render a movie file, they keep track of all frames it renders before creating the movie file, and that's on top of calculating animation, dynamics, lighting or whatever else you have going on in the scene. It's better to separate the two processes.

Rendering the pre-rendered frames alone in a separate pass for a movie file doesn't have all that overhead, so this step goes very quickly, probably just a few seconds/minutes if nothing else is being done to the frames.

For Moho, to render the sequence as a movie, just import as Image Sequence to a new project. (Please read the manual.)

As mentioned, you generally won't get all the advanced video options in Moho like you would in a video editor or compositing application, but this is one way to do this.

Hope this helps.
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

I understand what you mean, when I need to fix something it's easier with the frames, so I will probably use it sometimes. Thanks for advice.
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Hi,
I have another question - I have a character with bones and animations, but now I want to create an effect, when a bee stings it and whole body starts to deform at certain points. I found this tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFY8sHZDZOo
But it's for another version of program (I have Anime Studio Pro 11). I created a vector layer, which is above my character layer, I created points around my character, which I can move, but now I don't know how to attach my character to these points - when I move them, my character doesn't react. How to do this? This is how it looks now:
https://i.imgur.com/W09dNG5.jpg
The name of my character layer is "Pies Syrena" and this is the layer which I want to deform.
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hayasidist
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by hayasidist »

smart warp / smart mesh was introduced in moho12; and it doesn't work on bone layers - only vector / image layers. You'll need to adopt a different approach - such as adding extra bones to the Pies Syrena layer.
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Thanks. You say that smart warp works only on vector / image layers. But does it work in Anime Studio Pro, or only in Moho12? If I could add it to single images, without affecting bone layer, it would be fine.
About different approach - how can I do this with bones? I know that the body can deform with bones, but I selected an option "Use selected bones for flexi-binding", because I wanted the body to move without deforming. Now I want to add this deforming effect and I don't know how - I would like "old" bones to act without deforming and new ones do deform the body. I hope that you know what I mean - the body already has skeleton and every part of body is another image - another one for arm, head etc and bones are attached to it. So when I rotate the bone, the head rotates smoothly without deforming. Now when I try to add new bones, which would be able to deform the body, I can't do this. Could you give me some advice? Or maybe I should create another character without any bones and add new bones from the beginning? I need this for short scene, about 6 seconds.
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Hi again,
too bad that you didn't answer my previous question, but I need your help.
When I assign bones to objects, some of them rotate correctly, and some don't. I have no idea, why. For example, this is part of a tail:
Image
But when I rotate it, it moves in wrong way:
Image
It seems that the hot spot of the rotation is in wrong place, but how can I find it? The origin point is set here:
Image
I have no idea, why it behaves like that. Of course I used "use selected bone for flexi binding" for every part of tail. When I try to rotate the whole tail, it falls apart:
Image
As you can see, all bones move correctly, but objects which are assigned to them don't.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

In theory, you can do this with Flexi-binding and adjusting the weights in the bones and adding 'holder' bones to keep the shapes.

In practice however, Flexi-binding alone this doesn't always work well when many shapes are present. Fortunately, most of these problems can be solved using Use Selected Bones for Flexi-binding (USBF).

I believe you understand that, however, seeing the example images you posted, I'm not sure you're using USBF correctly. If the shape was properly bound with USBF, all of the arm bones would be highlighted when you select the layer. In your example, it looks like the layer is bound using only one bone. While USBF can work with a single bone but a single bone cannot deform a layer. You need to select at least two bones for USBF to deform a layer.

Here's an example of a selected arm layer that has been properly bound using USBF with the two arm bones:

Image

To correct your example, select the layer(s) you wish to have bound with USBF, then select the bones you wish to use. Next, apply the command Use Selected Bones For Flexi-binding. (Note that you can bind more than one layer to the selected bones at the same time...this is a real timesaver.) You'll know if the command worked when you see the selected bones become bolder in appearance.

If USBF doesn't work, it's possible that you applied a previous binding to the layer(s) that conflicts with the USBF command. Rather than going into all the possible problems that may exist, it's easier to simply reset the binding to the default setting. To do this: 1.) select the layer(s) that you wish to bind with USBF, 2.) choose Reset All Bone Rigging. Don't worry, this won't reset all the rigging in your rig, just the rigging for the selected layer. Now the layer will have the 'bad' binding removed and the default Flexi-binding applied, and you're ready to use USBF properly.

Hope this helps.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Sun Jun 10, 2018 4:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

Alternatively, you might consider using Create Smooth Joint For Bone Pair (CSJBP). (Ugh...these things can really use catchier names.) :)

CSJPB applies a special deformer at the joint of two bones, confining the deformation to a circular region. Smooth Joint works remarkably well with bitmap layers. Here's another quick-and-dirty example:

Image

Here's what the rig looks like with Smooth Joint appled:

Image

To see a more polished example, watch my 'Puss In Book' demo reel here: My 'Puss in Book' Demo Reel. What I like about Smooth Joint is that it allows me to 'spin' the arms without losing volume in the elbow. You can see a lot of that going on in the Puss reel.

Another example that uses Smooth Joint in the arms is Thighsander Plunderhorse from All Hail King Julien, which appears on my DWA reel from last year. Like Puss, Thighsander uses Smooth Joint in her arms. I should point out that Smooth Joint didn't work as nicely with Norge Grindlefist's arms because of how they taper. Smooth Joint seems to work best with very straight limbs with parallel sides. (For Norge, I think I used USBF.)

Applying a Smooth Joint is just like applying USBFB: Select the layer, select the two bones, select the command, done.

There is a significant limitation to be aware of: you can only use two bones in a Smooth Joint. However, if you really need to use more than one, like in the elbow and wrist joints, Victor Paredes explains a clever workaround elsewhere in these forums.

Another thing to be aware of is that, while Smooth Joint works nicely with many image textures, it doesn't necessarily work well with all image textures. Even in the 'cheetah arm' example above, you can see tiny bit of tearing in one of the spots. I actually ran into this problem with Puss' stripe near his elbow. To correct that, I set up an SBD to 'roll' the stripes around the arms when I needed to...the effect was mainly to make the arms appear to turn but also to minimize any tearing that could occur with the stripe in extreme bending.

One last thing about Smooth Joint: Sometimes the on-screen preview will look 'chunky' or not smooth at all. This is just an OpenGL performance artifact and nothing to be concerned about. To check this, make a preview render (ctrl-R) to see what the 'smoothed' result will look like when you render the final version.

Hope this helps.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Sun Jun 10, 2018 5:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

BTW, I noticed you have parenting keyframed on one bone. Did you mean to do that? If not, you should delete the keyframe and parent the bone properly at frame 0.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

If that's a mermaid's tail, or some other tail-like limb, you might consider using Sketch Bones.

Sketch Bones allows you to draw a long bone chain at frame 0, but on any later frame Sketch Bones can be used to animate the chain. It's what I used to animate Puss and Thighsander's tails in the examples at the links posted earlier.

Sketch Bones is fantastic for animating swishy tails. I've also used Sketch Bones to animate plants, hair, rope, snakes, dinosaurs, and, yes, a mermaid's tail. :)
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Thanks, but it was simplier than I thought - I just flexi-binded the bone to the wrong image :D That's why it was behaving this way. Now it's ok.
About parenting - I always do this that way. I don't know whether it's correct or not, but it works.
About sketch bones - yes, it's a mermaid tail. I tried that before, but I didn't like the way the body moves, when it's one single image. But now I added more bones to it and it looks a lot better - before I used only few bones and that's why it looked worse. Thanks!
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Greenlaw
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

Yes, for Sketch Bones, you need an optimum number of bones, and their positions are important to. This is tricker if you're using the default mesh that Moho generates when you bind an Image Layer because you can't see the mesh. If this becomes a problem, you can create a custom mesh that spaces the mesh segments they way you want, plus you can see a custom mesh on-screen.

While having too few bones can create poor deformations, too many can cause bad deformations too and also affect performance. You may have to experiment with different bone lengths to make it work just right. Fortunately, Sketch Bones makes it very easy to recreate a chain with different length settings.

(In the Puss demo video, you can see at the beginning how many bones are used in the tail to get a smooth curls and 'S' shapes in the animation.)
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