Help Shape the Future of Anime Studio

[jayfaker]

Hey Chucky,

Yeah, I made some shortcuts to switch between Front and Camera views. It works pretty well. I'll try splitting the view sometime, though.

[Nicohk92]

A small indicator somewhere to signal when the cursor is placed on a key-frame. Sometimes when the timeline is zoomed out, it happens to be clicking beside it, thus creating a new one. It's rare but it shouldn't be a a big challenge either.

[dkwroot]

Corrective actions. Suppose you have two smartbones, one that opens a characters mouth and another that controls their expression. When you open a character's mouth and then try to change the character expression, you'll often get weird shapes that require correction. Corrective actions would be dependent on TWO smartbones and would be 0 if one of the bones is in the rest position, but would scale by a percentage as both smartbones are used. This would be incredibly useful to getting a wide range of expressions and movement out of characters while using relatively few bone controllers.

Blender has something like this: http://youtu.be/6mrceZ6fe-o?t=2m47s

[wip]

Though of this earlier, turns out Breinmeester has mentioned this before:

- Styles and actions in the Library!!!

To elaborate on it a little:
Actions in the Library — The ability to store actions or animations from the timeline in the library, which can then be dragged into the actions window.

So for instance: a walk cycle of a character, stored as an action in the library but not in the character bone rig. Which then only gets stored as bone animation data.

Not only would it keep the actions window of a character clean, it's also an easier way to share stock animation between members of a team and making animation (relatively) applicable to multiple rigs, provided bones are named the same. This would eliminate having to include lots of stock actions into a character rig or having to open up a specific file and copy paste the bone keyframe data. Thumbnail could be the first frame of the animation.



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[RichardU]

Add Layers By Reference.

I'm a cutout animator, and a lot of my "parts" are used for multiple characters, particularly hands, mouths, feet, etc. which are typically switch layers. Whenever I add to or modify one of my parts, all of my existing characters are outdated.

It would be fantastic to be able to add a layer (e.g. mouth) to a character which is a reference to another .anme file, so that any changes in that referenced file would automatically appear anywhere that file is referenced.

For that matter, you could always also your characters By reference, and whenever you make a change to the base character it would propagate through every scene where that character has been added By Reference.

Also, +1 for Styles and Actions in the Library. Although I am currently the "Walk Assist" script to effectively get a library of actions and it is invaluable.

[RichardU]

Additional thoughts on the Action Library. Since I'm already doing this, I can say from experience it would be great to be able to save actions by bone color. If I have a stock action for a head scratch, and I import it, it will reset all the other bones as well. So if my head scratch was created for a character sitting down, when I import it on a standing character, he will also sit down.

Typically, I go to a blank area of the timeline to do the import, then grab the bone colors I need, but it would be better to have a head scratch that only affects the needed bones.

[dkwroot]

Not sure if I said this before, but the ability to control interpolated switch layers with smartbones would be awesome. In order to argue why this is important...


Suppose we have 14 mouth shapes and we want to smoothly interpolate between them. How many actions would be required to accomplish this? This is actually a permutations problem which can be solved with the following formula:

n=number of choices and we're allowed to choose r of them.

In this case, n=14 and r=2 since there are 14 mouth shapes and we're interpolating two at a time.

Now, assuming I'm not a complete idiot and did my maths right. There are 182 in-between actions required to smoothly rig 14 lip shapes together.
So yeah, switch layer interpolation is the way to go. We just need it to play nicely with smartbones.

[jayfaker]

Has anyone asked for the ability to use a slider to blend between FK and IK positions? If not, here's a vote for that. It would make it nice so you could have and arm locked on to a target and then let go and move freely. Of course, then the ability to switch/blend target bones via keyframes would be awesome too.

[Nicohk92]

The ability to convert a profile curve into real points for a given shape where it is applied. It will make drawing complex shapes much faster and open up many possibilities.

[Nicohk92]

More Ctrl-z ( or cmd-z ) steps back. I remember being able to undo further back in time than now. Has it been reduced? Anyway, we should be able to go much further back in time. Thanks

[dkwroot]

A basic 'auto-rigging' script would be pretty cool. Basically, the animator would setup their character using a specific file structure method and then activate the script which will auto-rig the character and give it a bunch of actions that they keep stored in an actions file. The user would then just adjust the rig to fit their model and presto, they have a fully rigged character with a bunch of automatic smartbones and actions already in place. This would be a cool replacement for the wacky character wizard we have in place right now.

[jahnocli]

A basic 'auto-rigging' script would be pretty cool. Basically, the animator would setup their character using a specific file structure method and then activate the script which will auto-rig the character and give it a bunch of actions that they keep stored in an actions file. The user would then just adjust the rig to fit their model and presto, they have a fully rigged character with a bunch of automatic smartbones and actions already in place. This would be a cool replacement for the wacky character wizard we have in place right now.

See Mike Kelley's Autorig for details on how this can be done...

[RichardU]

A basic 'auto-rigging' script would be pretty cool. Basically, the animator would setup their character using a specific file structure method and then activate the script which will auto-rig the character and give it a bunch of actions that they keep stored in an actions file. The user would then just adjust the rig to fit their model and presto, they have a fully rigged character with a bunch of automatic smartbones and actions already in place. This would be a cool replacement for the wacky character wizard we have in place right now.

This is actually two requests in one. Autorigging would be less valuable to me, because my rig will probably be different than yours. But the ability to save and reuse actions would be fantastic. I'm currently using Mike Kelley's Walk Assist, which is great, but having native support would be better. If you add in the ability to reliably manipulate switch layers with bones, you could animate everything from one bone layer, save those actions and either reuse them or transfer them to another character. Awesome.

[dkwroot]

Another really great improvement would be additional handles for controlling gradients. In Illustrator there are two handles, one to control vertical scale and another for horizontal scale of radial gradients and it would be really nice if Anime Studio also had this feature.

[dkwroot]

Support for normal maps would be awesome. Basically, when we load an image we can choose to create a normal map for its lighting or map one in the program similar to how toon boom does. We would then just place lighting nodes around the canvas and watch in awe as shading and highlights are applied automatically.