These drawing tools suck!

[jahnocli]

I've been using Anime Studio (and before that, Moho) for a number of years, and, yes, the drawing tools suck. You can work around it, being human, but that doesn't mean they're good. A long time ago I likened constructing shapes in AS to positioning weights on a water bed. That's still true, and it makes for a very disjointed drawing "experience" in the software. Fortunately, AS has a lot of other great features, but let's not kid ourselves.

[Diana Kennedy]

I'm all for good planning, because I know from experience how important it is and that I can't expect to work fast without it, especially in bigger projects. At the same time I'm a very sloppy artist, changing stuff all the time everywhere, so sometimes it's a sheer miracle the scenes get completed.

every word could be mine!

I agree that it needs some time to get used to the different tools and with some of them, you may never become friends.

I still prefer to hand draw and scan-in characters and backgrounds and use AS to draw and animate accessories and assemble scenes in AS. Or ad bones to png Layers of Figures, providing them little movements I hence don't have to draw by hand.

A mixed use. I think everyone has to find out for him/herself what exactly can be done in AS and what should be done elsewhere. What I can say is that every time I *really* understood an AS feature and how it actually works, it provided me great opportunities.

[crsP]

The problem is that most of the 'drawing tools' aren't drawing tools. If you are familiar with 3d apps then you will understand these tools better. For example, expanding a bezier line in Blender means extruding the end vertex out - which is equivalent to the add point tool in AS. The one drawing tool [the freehand], is restricted because you cannot customise the amount of smoothing it does. If the drawing tools are not to be expanded on, then the shape construction tools should be - like booleans added. And Bezier handles.