Hardware requirements!!!

[Morghen]

Hallo everybody

I'm considering to buy Anime Studio for a project (a low budget cd-rom with animations). I've tried the demo and purchased one cartoon solutions character, that, being very detailed, is slowing down my machine something like 2 frames a second in preview mode

I own a quite old but frequently upgraded pc, based on an intel Pentium 4, 2.4ghz clock, with 2.5 gb ram and two phisical hard disks for swap files (plenty of gigabytes), and a matrox g550 video card (which is not good for 3d but should be fine with 2d). It runs XP home.

Which kind of system do you suggest to run AS smoothly? Dual core? Any particular graphic card? I'm going to buy a new computer so I think this is the right time.

Thanks a lot in advance

Morghen

[heyvern]

When the files get complex the preview mode is not going to play in real time no matter what machine you have. Also AS doesn't get a boost from graphics cards.

The best way to preview is to do a quick render to a video format. That is how I work. I can scrub through and get a feel for basic timing, but to get a REAL sense of the animation I render it.

Render it small, turn off all the effects so it renders fast. You get a pretty quick feedback.

-vern

[mkelley]

In addition to Vern's excellent advice let me point out that vector graphics are always going to be MUCH faster -- thus I suspect the character you purchased is not vector.

I frequently have upwards of a half dozen very complicated characters in any given scene (which itself is very complicated) and experience near real time preview even with everything (shadows, transparency, etc.) turned on. But all my stuff is vector.

AS pushes around very little data even with very complicated vector stuff. Bitmap stuff, OTHO, is MUCH more CPU intensive (which would be the only way to improve performance -- unfortunately, there isn't anything with clock speeds fast enough to do what you need for bitmap, I think).

Vector graphics have a ton of advantages and few disadvantages. If you are serious about your work you will want to create your own characters anyway, so you might as well do them right (meaning, start creating them with vectors).

[Samb]

Render it small, turn off all the effects so it renders fast. You get a pretty quick feedback.

or just press the F5 button :]

[Morghen]

Thanks Vern, Thanks mkelley and Samb!

I will definitely try with quick renderings. The character is vector (but very detailed... with strokes and so on) and I've had to purchase it because:
- it was ready to animate with bones and I'm a total newbie at AS
- the project should be completed in a few weeks, so when the client approved the character that was it... I'm looking forward to learn AS enough to do it all myself for the next production. At the moment I deeply know flash, but it's a pain to do with plain vanilla flash what AS does.

Anyway, when I scrub to a point in the timeline to see how the bones interpolates it's really slow, almost half a second just to see what's there.
Really, I get sleepy in the meanwhile and quickly loose focus. I wish there was a way (and maybe there is, but I couldn't find) to show ONLY bones without any other outline.

By the way, here it is! My first animation attempt with the purchased kid:

http://us.share.geocities.com/morghen1999/skate.swf

which I bought here

http://www.cartoonsolutions.com/store/c ... 16501.html

[Morghen]

Well... that's strange

As I said before, I couldn't disable outlines to show only bones.
Now I've found that if I just enable "construction curves" in Display Quality the outlines are visible, then if I check also "outlines" they disappear

Maybe there is something broken in my installation?

Greetings

[mkelley]

Hmmm, I looked up the "Cartoon Solutions" characters and they aren't all that detailed (for example -- they have five hand layers, my characters typically have around 40) so I'm not sure why even using two or three of them in a scene would cause any slowdown.

Are you saying you can't scrub through the timeline without delay? It's one thing not to get fully realtime playback, quite another not to be able to scrub.

Even on my old old laptop I can get AS to run quite well with my characters (which, as I said, are much more complicated) so I'm guessing there is something wrong somewhere with your system. How does it run when you load in the default file? (The horrible Anime guy) Can you play it in real time and scrub?

[jahnocli]

I wish there was a way (and maybe there is, but I couldn't find) to show ONLY bones without any other outline.

Try the "Wireframe" setting...it comes close.

[Morghen]

Hi mkelley,

you are very right, the anime guy scrubs and previews perfectly.

As you've pointed out, the number of layers (also if they are not visible) slows down the animations, then I think I found why mine was SO slow.
The original file I bought had all the views one over the other, each with some hand positions, some eyes / eyebrows / vector mouths.
I was animating the side view while the front, back and props were just invisible but present. Now I've deleted them and it's much much better!
I wasn't so confident in my hardware but it seems to be enough (well, until I buy a new pc - very soon!)

Being day two for me with Anime Studio I think I'm doing some progress!

Thank you all