Some of my favorite new features

bartender · Post by **bartender** » Thu Jul 16, 2009 10:21 pm

So since upgrading to 6.0 I really hadn't done much in it since I bought it becuase I've been busy writing scripts rather than working on the animation portion, so today I started building a character and I found a few things changed and it really sped up my workflow

1. Color dropper- man does this save time! When I would create a new shape, and i wanted to match the color to another shape that wasn't a pallette color I would have to copy paste the color code and then do the same for the line color. Now you can copy a shapes color fill settings, and a button to
copy paste is right there in properties

2. The scatterbrush- I thought of so many times I had to do monotonous background detail that I could have used this tool for, as well as the ability for custom brushes that I'm sure some on this forum already are on top of...

3. The sequencer!- ok I haven't used this myself but watching Verns tutorial I was very excited about how much this was going to improve working with audio, AND more important I don't know if anyone has ever wanted to change their framerate after animating, only to realise they would have to completely rework thier keyframes! Now by scaling keyframes it might not be completely out of the question

I'm sure there's more but I'm impressed with these new features... And I know everyone has their own needs from their animation software and I was always happy with this software since it was moho, but if there was ever a better time to be an armchair animator, I would defy you to tell me when!

Blue · Post by **Blue** » Fri Jul 17, 2009 1:35 am

I'm new to AS, so all the features are new to me. I love the shading and image texture features. You can add volume and detail that is too labor intensive in hand drawn animation.

toonertime · Post by **toonertime** » Fri Jul 17, 2009 2:28 am

nice character design!

windstormer · Post by **windstormer** » Fri Jul 17, 2009 5:43 am

Nice. Looks like a new character, the abominable snowman captain for Monkey Island.

redroses · Post by **redroses** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 1:50 am

Not sure if you guys are interested in this program, its supposed to be like 50 bucks and since a new verion came out they are giving it out for free. I got the link from twitter.

Its all legal and all that good stuff.
simulation credit immo - Simulation credit immo. L’Internet a rendu encore plus facile d’obtenir de l’aide pour trouver le credit immo.

Blue · Post by **Blue** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 7:35 am

the abominable snowman captain for Monkey Island

HAHAHAHAHAHHA!!! Well, I'm happy that you understood he's an abominable. I wasn't sure if I made it obvious enough...although I'm not sure how I would make it more obvious.

I don't want to hijack this thread so I'll make this quick...I just wanted to point out that characters can easily start looking like potato sacks if you don't pay attention to curves. The dude above is starting to lose some of his shape and I probably need to sharpen some of the curves a bit.

I'm also going to have a hellofatime rigging his arms with bones. The fatter your limbs the harder it is to set bones up for them. Thankfully you can do bones AND point animation, see we came full circle with the conversation. Animating with bones and shape vertices are great features!

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 8:29 am

Blue,

Entirely up to you but a great way to handle those "fat limbs" is with bone "extenders'. Just a few bones 90 degrees out on either side of the main limb bones. You can then either animated them individually or use bone constraints to create secondary motion.

I often will use extra bones like that with constraints to a set of OTHER bones not in the skeleton so I can tweak the shapes without using point motion. I will use scale constraints so you can "squish" the arms or body as needed to make things work.

I should probably put this on my list of tutorials.

-vern

Blue · Post by **Blue** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 8:41 am

Yeah, the 90 degree angle setup idea is the way to go, I saw it in one of your setups.

If I could have the 90s scale down in size on the inner elbow (acute angle side) that would allow for the crease when the arm bends, but I can't seem to get that to work...