InfoCentral wrote:To sum in all up in one word I would pick, Import.
I am seriously looking at the next version of Reallusion's jump into the 2D market with Animate! The sole reason is that you can animate just about any picture you want. From photos to drawings. Just import the image, add the bones, and off you go. Well nothing is ever that simple but the fact is that it has superb image importation. Something AS really needs to work on.
BTW, I did upgrade to 8 Pro.
I also upgraded to 8 pro but I would say if I was on a pc animator would have been my first choice for the type of animations I do.
So far I have not found any sensible tutorial on distorting an image properly and animating it. Which brings me to a major point. I always was disappointed in AS's drawing tools until the most recent webinar showed me exactly how powerful they are.
I even went back and checked v 7 and they also had these same tools. So somewhere along the lines the tutorials are failing to really show what anime studio is about and how it works as I can now say I enjoy drawing within anime studio more than my normal vector drawing apps.
Of course the next issue is the fills are fiddly to control so that is a bit of a let down but perhaps once again it will take a simple video to show a better way or even the right way to do it.
I was more talking about the ability to warp part of a photograph. What is the best way to laydown the bones so that they each only affect the area you assign to it.
For example - If I have a photo of someone and I JUST want to wiggle the eyebrows on the photo and nothing else. I cannot even in the manual find the full and proper way to layout the bones to do this. Because the are all parented to each other they all affect each other.
mykylr wrote:I was more talking about the ability to warp part of a photograph. What is the best way to laydown the bones so that they each only affect the area you assign to it.
For example - If I have a photo of someone and I JUST want to wiggle the eyebrows on the photo and nothing else. I cannot even in the manual find the full and proper way to layout the bones to do this. Because the are all parented to each other they all affect each other.
Cheers
Mike R
There must be many ways. This is what I'd do. In Photoshop (or Gimp, or whatever), cut out the eyebrows and put them in a higher layer. Tidy them up if necessary. Go back to the face and fill in eyebrow holes with face colour. This will probably need tidying up as well. Export as layers -- or export face and eyebrows separately if you can't do this. Import into AS, and place eyebrows inside a bone layer. Place first bone between the eyebrows, then subsequent bones on either side. REMEMBER bone dependencies -- you want a chain of bone links proceeding from either side of the central bone. Now you can animate just the eyebrows and nothing else is involved.
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
You'd get better results with a little effort and cutting it up in layers like jahnocli said, but basically you have to put bones on areas you want to move and areas you don't want to move.
Because the are all parented to each other they all affect each other.
To create unparented bones, create a bone then before you create the next bone click on open space anywhere in the drawing interface to deselect the first bone then click and create the next one...then so on and so on.
Ha ha! Looks good, ponysmasher! Her hair does look like it's glued to the skin at the ends, but apart from that, she is a real human goldfish! (probably also best to point out that you need an image of someone with an open mouth to do this...)
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
I'm still perfectly happy with ver 6 with CC & Fazik's scripts. It's a workhorse for me and does everything I need when 2D is required.
Ver. 8 looks fun but I don't really need the sketching capability, character wizard, or the real-time physics -- tho that looks fun, it doesn't have a practical application for me. I'd like the timeline ALOT more if it were like After Effects where you can isolate everything at once within the same timeline.
Don't get me wrong, I remain a BIG ASP fan/prophet.
My wishes were:
1. Be able to see and edit multiple layers in the timeline
2. Be able to edit vertes of multiple layers in the viewport
3. (Not that important) Multiple scenes per file or better asset sharing between files.
As I see it, judging from last couple of updates, the auto/easy animation market is being targeted over the freedom/flexibility/power market.
I recently purchased AS 7, my last experience with it was back in moho times. I feel for my needs the old moho or the latest AS8 would be prety much the same (I can't remember if coding custom tools in moho was possible but that would be the only thing). So I guess while this tendency continues I won't be upgrading AS.
EDIT: I forgot to mention in my wishes a better approach to frame by frame animation
Well from Moho to ASP 8 there have been quite a few changes. The biggest for me was in regards to lip syncing. In Moho you had a script, Papagayo, and now you have auto lip syncing. The reason for me upgrading. Then 3D import was introduced and again I upgraded. Now there is a Character Wizard and auto Trace. I upgraded again but since these don't seem to work as stated. This might have been a major mistake.
This has left a bad taste in my mouth. In the future I will show more will power and not buy a new release until at least 6 months have passed. Lesson learned is to evaluate first and not impulse buy anymore.
I also agree that there needs to be development of tutorials to get users up and going. It makes no sense to make a piece of software that once you purchase it you don't know how to use it, get frustrated, and say its a piece of crap and move on.
One huge reason I have continued to use and support Xara is the company puts out monthly tutorials. Heck, even Reallusion's Crazy Talk Animator is only in its first release version and they already have put together a training DVD.
Companies that do well in the software business know that training in the use of their software is second only to the software itself. It is that important. The companies that don't get this concept or dismiss it are the one's that usually get bought up by the one's that do.
First of all I have to state that I really do believe Anime Studio Pro is a great product. The following comments are made because I want ASP to be the best product it can be.
I have a friend who has ASP 8 and I sat down at his computer and spent many hours checking it out. I currently have ASP 7.1. After working with version 8, I have concluded that I will completely skip version 8 in hopes that version 9 is worth the price to upgrade.
Here are my issues:
1) Calling the Product Version 8. Truly this should not be called version 8, at best 7.5 and that is being gracious. I didn't see any fixing to the issues I have with version 7.1. One small but annoying one, is if you name the layer and tab to a different tab, it will “forget” the name you just entered. I was fixed in 7.0 and broke with the 7.1 patch. But I digress... Changing the color schema didn't make me feel like it was a version higher. The character generator is not a professional tool as it is very basic and limited. I am with the others; fix the bugs and then add features. We are a vocal bunch and will let you guys know what we want.
2) The price difference in versions and upgrades. If I can pay the same price from non-pro old versions, what incentive do I have to stay current? I bought version 6, and payed $130 to upgrade to version 7 when it came out. But to pay $130 again for an upgraded interface that still has 7.1 bugs and has a main tool that I will never use but it's got shinny new colors... No way man!
3) Not having real vector importing. Toon Boom imports Illustrator vector files flawlessly. ASP recalculates everything and it's not what I started with. What would it cost the company to purchase the coding from Adobe that would give perfect importing? I would pay an additional $100 for that one feature. I have gotten used to drawing in ASP but nothing matches drawing in Illustrator. On this note, the ability to export vectors would be a draw come true. The problem with drawing everything in ASP, is I cannot export the vector for other uses. But drawing everything in Illustrator importing to ASP and fixing all the issues is also time consuming, and stalls my projects.
I apologize if I sound harsh, I don't mean anything personal, and I know the ASP development team puts their heart and soul into their work. I mean no disrespect from my criticisms. I am a software developer myself and as good as I am, I could not write the kind of code that makes ASP work. I tip my hat to the developers.
As I said at the beginning. I want ASP to be the best that it can be.
Kalamonkey wrote:
3) Not having real vector importing. Toon Boom imports Illustrator vector files flawlessly. ASP recalculates everything and it's not what I started with. What would it cost the company to purchase the coding from Adobe that would give perfect importing?
This would be great but as I understand it AS works with vectors in such a different way that you can't really convert it 1:1.
I guess one solution would be if you could make special vector layers that used the same kind of vectors that Illustrator uses or something.
But yes, like you I would easily pay $100 extra for proper vector import/export.
eago wrote:As I see it, judging from last couple of updates, the auto/easy animation market is being targeted over the freedom/flexibility/power market.
I don't see anything wrong with this, there's no reason not to target that market and turn them onto ASP. The upgrade didn;t remove any of the already included and capable power tools, you can still do with it what the previous version did, which was still immensly powerful. So a few of your wishes didn;t get included, but that certainly doesn;t mean it's any less powerful, it's just now able to appeal to a greater market.
And eventually those "easy animation" users will delve deeper into the tools that allow them more control, thus hopefully evolving into a more power user.
