Help Shape the Future of Anime Studio

General Moho topics.

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eago
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Post by eago »

Thankyou for this topic.

The two things I would really love to see in AS as I've said in other threads are:

1. Better timeline so its easier to work on animation happening in multiple layers. I think maya dopesheet is a nice example. (I'm trying my luck with a script for this. But will more likely be something I'll never finish)

2. Easier editing of multiple layers. Like what you can do in most illustration packages. You lock and unlock layers but can tweak several at once. Would make easier to edit and do point animation for complex characters that use several vector layers or multiple characters that interact.

And some other things that come to my mind:

3. Viewport lines look quite different to final render. I'd like having an option in the realtime render to work on an exact preview.

4. As tools are scripts we users can develop our own, so is not really a core issue. But still having a more competitive out of the box freehand tool would be great.

5. Some way to share stuff between files. External references or shared assets or whatever.

6. I'd love support to multiple scenes in a single file.

7. Better interaction with flash would be great. Exporting to swf seems to work fine, but import is missing. In general better in/out to other vector apps would be great.

8. As far as I've seen scripting it seems cool. But I'd like better docs about it. It wasn't too clear to me at first how much I could do with it and I'm sure I'm still missing a lot.

9. This is probably just a very personal stupid wish, but as I guess is quite simple to implement I'll just mention it. I've always wanted being able to set the 'exposures/drawing' of automatic interpolation. Like setting an interpolation to be on 2's or 3's. For many toony actions 1s looks too soft.

10. Question/Request. Is there a way to set parameters for layer embedded scripts?

EDIT

11. I'd love a curve deformer and a grid deformer too
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Manu
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Post by Manu »

Hi Fahim, good to see you back here. I could write a long list, but I'll stick to one request as I think it could be a real game changer if implemented well:

Sketch layer: a layer where you can sketch out your animations in rough before conforming them with the precise vectors. The element here is speed and simplicity. A limited colour palette, a simple bitmap based brush with a size range from 1 to 20 pixels or so, possibly pressure senstive. A lot of 3D packages have that feature already as the developers have realised it can be difficult to create expressive poses when you're just rotating bones.
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GCharb
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Post by GCharb »

Manu, perhaps like an enhanced version of the lost doodle tool?
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rylleman
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Post by rylleman »

As many others here I'd like to see stability and a focus on easier and faster workflow for the professionals.

My improvement wishlist:

1. Bezier curves with handles in graph editor. Current interpolation method is a good start but does not come all the way.

2. Workflow speed. The software shouldn't be an obstacle, it should work with you.
Why not create a new settings panel, much like the style panel, that can be open all the time, where you can have layer and scene settings close by for fast reach? Having to click layers, switch tabs etc. takes a huge amount of time.

3. Hierarchical timeline. Meaning that we should be able to move keyframes of children layers along with parents keyframes. retiming or moving animation is now a nightmare when we first have to move parents keyframes, then go into every child layer and move those keyframes separately. Also a huge time consumer.

4. Linked assets. Linking instead of importing. If source is edited link is also updated.

5. svg-support. ai and eps are proprietary formats that requires expensive software. Svg are a free standard that can be created using any vector image software.
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Manu
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Post by Manu »

GCharb wrote:Manu, perhaps like an enhanced version of the lost doodle tool?
First time I've heard this one being mentioned. I'll have a look at it later on. Thanks for the tip.
My gut feeling is that a tool like that wants to be tightly integrated by the core developers, so I'll be curious to see how well it works.
Rudiger
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Post by Rudiger »

Manu wrote:
GCharb wrote:Manu, perhaps like an enhanced version of the lost doodle tool?
First time I've heard this one being mentioned. I'll have a look at it later on. Thanks for the tip.
My gut feeling is that a tool like that wants to be tightly integrated by the core developers, so I'll be curious to see how well it works.
The thread for Ramon's Lost Doodle tool can be found here: Lost·AS·Tools (LostLayerTool, LostDoodleTool...). By the way it only supports AS7 and above.

Ponysmasher has also developed another very promising bitmap editing tool that works completely differently Bitmap drawing tool test. It can do multiple colors, unlike the LostDoodleTool. It supports all versions of AS, but only for windows.

And I totally agree. Most of the time, these scripts can really only be prototypes for what the actual tool could be when officially implemented in the software. However, if an SDK was ever released that let us write full compiled plugins for AS, that might change.
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Rai López
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Post by Rai López »

Hi and thanks for the interest and all the effort :). I don't know if it'd be too late, but I've been writing my suggestions too and here they are. As usually in this kind of threads, I always imagine myself writing a super elaborated post with all kind of explanations and visual samples, but as far as that doesn't seem to happen... here is a (kinda) simple wish list:

First of all, I think some of the most basic things still needs more attention before it can be totally forgotten in order to only develop other kind of (OTOH cool) features; and for basic things, I mean things like shape/stroke construction and appearance (what could be more basic than that?):
  • About Shapes:
    • - Please, give us the ability of choose between "Non-Zero Winding" or "Even-Odd" filling rules! This only would help incredibly on any kind (but specially joints) shape construction, and now a days it seems like a very standard feature for any (AFAIK) vector based program.

      - As more as I think about it, more I see that some kind of "Shape Groups" system (visible in layer's panel) must be implemented to complete all the necessities we can need in terms of shape construction and management. This way, things like boolean shape operations (in order to avoid massive use of, always problematic, masking), compound Styles or "Animated Shape Order" (when it be implemented sooner or later) could be easily achieved and managed and, the best thing, once a good shape group system would be introduced, all that other things I named, or any other, could be gradually added with the support of a proved system.
    About Strokes:
    • - Actually, strokes in AS are very limited in "style" terms, I mean, we should be able to get at least two kind of joins, Rounded and Miter (now we get some kind of unsharp? polygon). Miter joins can be beautiful talking in vector terms and they are widely used out there, but we simply can't make use of it in ASP. As a reference of how it could be well implemented (with animation on mind), Synfig Studio (Genete have been posting some not directly related but inspiring examples here and here) is, from my POV, the best course to follow, cause it seems to resolve better than others any extreme situation, applying gradual transitions, you know... avoiding both: jumps (like the ones you obtain in AFX) and/or infinite corners like you can obtain in Flash under certain angles. Plus... now that we can choose rounded caps at least, we should be able to use "projecting" or square caps as well.

      - Brushes are not perfect as they are implemented, but I think I could live with it if, at least, they'd render properly in all situations (from the distance, i.e.) and some kind of antialiasing be applied in consequence.

About the following things, well, most of them have been still widely discussed in this and other threads, but here i go anyway...
  • About Animation:
    • - Of course the so wanted custom interpolation mode for keyframes in graph mode, with tangents (the most proved way) or whatever method you'd think appropriate (although tangents are simply difficult to beat).

      - Definitely, the "Sequencer" could be much more powerful than it actually is! And it should let us see and manage keyframes of several layers at a time, to synchronize and re-time animation easily and quick (a good example :arrow: here). Actually, we have to memorize things (a very hard task to me!) or use any kind of trick to mitigate blindness and, hardly, can do something so recurred and basic during animation tasks.
    About the Project & Layers:
    • - First of all, I want to emphasize about the incredible improvements that have been added (under the hood or not) lately to the program, making it much more powerful than it have been never before, cause it's simply admirable and sometimes can go unnoticed in comparison with other more visible additions. So many of ancient Moho limitations, like layers internal "communication" have simply disappeared and now it's possible to change several layer parameters at a time, or access to the content of one layer to another independently of hierarchy, etc... but! OTOH, the most ancient and horrible limitation regarding layers depth is still there... and layers panel hierarchy still predominates over the "real" layers depth avoiding layers to interact in depth with other layers contained in different groups. In the past, I always have asked for something like a real Z-buffer property for Vector Layers in the same way it acts now over 3D Layers, but if finally that's something very difficult to implement or it simply collide inevitably with other main features or whatever... at least we should count with a solution to avoid the old hierarchy depth limitation, and (as an option) layers Z axis origin position should prevail to the layer's hierarchy situation, I mean, an intermediate solution or something so? Without real "per pixel" Z-buffer depth, but for the entire layer, hmmm... I hope have explained myself well enough... But summarizing (just in case), a real "Sort by true distance" in combination with animatable Shape Order, should be the way to go, contrary to the problematic and limited actual "Animated layer order" system.

      - Mesh Instances, or some kind of new "Instance Layer", to outwit/evade hierarchy (and many other) limitations and easily get what (all?) we actually do by means of the Fazek's MeshInstance script, but with the easily and efficiency that an official feature would bring, and probably with much more (curvature, line width...) possibilities to choice? :) Well, only add that I don't like/use to ask for things that we actually can do by means of scripting, but due to it's wide usage, this case is always THE exception...
    Other (for me at least) important things:
    • - Improved motion blur, cause in the way it works right now, the most you can achieve is something like a layer trail/ghost effect, thing that makes me think... couldn't simply that feature consequently renamed to "Trail Effect" (or something so), and another totally new "Motion Blur" effect be added in the "Project Settings" window under the Camera settings? Hmmm, it'd be nice :)

      - Well, maybe not so primary, but I think it could be time to revise "Particle Layers" as well, and make it more powerful/controllable, with repellents and attractors, animatable parameters... some kind of integration with the Physics engine maybe?

      - And talking about it... In general, I love to see advances in the Physics part, but I think that efforts should be established or focused having the following question in mind: "and how this could be useful for character animation?", cause that's just what ASP users are expecting most of the time! So if it's physics time, I'm happy with it :D, but focus it too in a way that we can automate things like cloths, hair, more advanced secondary motion than bone dynamics can actually offer, soften collisions, etc... Summarizing, more "soft" than rigid kind of physics, although (of course) I understand how it could be much more difficult to achieve.

      - And yeah, about the FBF or bitmap issue... well, I understand why others are asking for a more complete solution but, as I always have said, in this case I'd be content with some kind of very basic and simple sketching system (in the finest Cinema 4D (preferably) or Blender way) mainly conceived to improve planning tasks inside the program, cause since we can manage audio and re-time layers in Sequence (although, as said above, some improvements will be necessary), this only addition would become Anime Studio Pro in the perfect Animatic/Storyboarding tool! With the convenience of make any change on the fly and blah, blah, blah...

      - More advanced bone kind of constraints it'd be nice too, things like Aim Constraints, Path Constraints, better Bone Locking, animatable Translate Constraint to facilitate "pick up" things, etc... would be greatly appreciated, as well as the ability of constraint bones between different layers.

      - Of course... as much access and transparency to internal functions and hidden stuff talking about scripting the better! Even if all this issue is driving me totally crazy :P

Some of them, I must admit, are big features surely very difficult to implement, like in the "Shape Groups" case, but hey! Wouldn't they be the kind of new features that all we should expect for a new release? ;)

Well, sorry for the lecture (it didn't seem so long on my text editor :roll:), really... Fahim summarized the feeling very well in his six points of the first post, and I still was very happy with that direction, so maybe I well could have save some time here, but... OTOH I simply couldn't resist to emphasize some aspects.


Greetings,
Ramón López.
Last edited by Rai López on Wed Sep 07, 2011 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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heiseman
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Post by heiseman »

I haven't used actions in a while, but I remember being really frustrated by the usability of it. Especially, when an action was recorded over multiple layers. I believe if you had a walk cycle action and it was separated into layers of animation like head, body, arms legs etc., you had to click individually on each of the layers if you wanted to move the action forward or backward on the timeline. Maybe there should be an 'action' channel in the timeline. That would be simpler. Anyone feel free to elaborate on my point if I have missed anything. I have not worked with actions for a long time.
Rudiger
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Post by Rudiger »

heiseman wrote:I haven't used actions in a while, but I remember being really frustrated by the usability of it. Especially, when an action was recorded over multiple layers. I believe if you had a walk cycle action and it was separated into layers of animation like head, body, arms legs etc., you had to click individually on each of the layers if you wanted to move the action forward or backward on the timeline. Maybe there should be an 'action' channel in the timeline. That would be simpler. Anyone feel free to elaborate on my point if I have missed anything. I have not worked with actions for a long time.
I can't recall that ever being the case, but perhaps it was before my time. What I do remember is it exiting out of an action when you changed layers, but that was fixed a while ago.
Rudiger
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Post by Rudiger »

Ramón López wrote:.
Other (for me at least) important things:
  • - Improved motion blur, cause in the way it works right now, the most you can achieve is something like a layer trail/ghost effect, thing that makes me think... couldn't simply that feature consequently renamed to "Trail Effect" (or something so), and another totally new "Motion Blur" effect be added in the "Project Settings" window under the Camera settings? Hmmm, it'd be nice :)
I see motion blur effects being used in a lot of animated shows I watch, and agree that it would be cool to get the same effect in AS.

From what I understand, commercial motion blur plugins use two steps; the first is to calculate motion vectors for the frame and the second is to apply a convolution filter using these motion vectors. AS already has a blur filter, so turning that into a motion blur filter shouldn't be that hard. While there are lots of good algorithms for calculating motion vectors, it occurs to me that AS has a big advantage over these plugins, which is that it can calculate the motion vectors directly since it generated the motion in the first place. This approach should be quite accurate and lot faster than having to render and combine sub-frames.

In addition to this, more cartoon-like motion blur effects, like motion lines and stretching and distorting of the outline would be awesome as well.
SvenFoster
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Post by SvenFoster »

The little things..

* hierarchial keyframe editing.. Its so painful to go through child layers (yes I know there is a nudge script, but unless I'm absolutly forced to I dont want to install 3rd party stuff)
* Fills. I cannot believe that I cant, select a procedural texture or even a pre-preared one and use it like a bump map.. That is; take its grayscale or whatever and impose the texture on the vector shape. I've been able to do something unsatisfactorily with a grayscale image and additional masking with screen modes but its not fun just to generate some noise on a shape.
--Sven
What *if* the Hokey cokey *is* what its all about?
Genete
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Post by Genete »

Rudiger wrote:From what I understand, commercial motion blur plugins use two steps; the first is to calculate motion vectors for the frame and the second is to apply a convolution filter using these motion vectors. AS already has a blur filter, so turning that into a motion blur filter shouldn't be that hard. While there are lots of good algorithms for calculating motion vectors, it occurs to me that AS has a big advantage over these plugins, which is that it can calculate the motion vectors directly since it generated the motion in the first place. This approach should be quite accurate and lot faster than having to render and combine sub-frames.
I guess that the problem is that in AS, the time value is frame based and it is not possible to sub sample properly unless you can calculate the layers parameters in a time between two frames, what I'm afraid it is not possible at the current design. It would mean to modify all the code of AS to change the time parameter passed to the layers to be a real value instead of an integer value (which is now).
Rudiger
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Post by Rudiger »

Genete wrote:
Rudiger wrote:From what I understand, commercial motion blur plugins use two steps; the first is to calculate motion vectors for the frame and the second is to apply a convolution filter using these motion vectors. AS already has a blur filter, so turning that into a motion blur filter shouldn't be that hard. While there are lots of good algorithms for calculating motion vectors, it occurs to me that AS has a big advantage over these plugins, which is that it can calculate the motion vectors directly since it generated the motion in the first place. This approach should be quite accurate and lot faster than having to render and combine sub-frames.
I guess that the problem is that in AS, the time value is frame based and it is not possible to sub sample properly unless you can calculate the layers parameters in a time between two frames, what I'm afraid it is not possible at the current design. It would mean to modify all the code of AS to change the time parameter passed to the layers to be a real value instead of an integer value (which is now).
I think we have discussed this before, but I'm still not convinced that AS can't do sub-frame rendering. The fact that the interface uses frames just means that you can only create keys on integral number of frames, which is probably a good thing. If you have a key on frame 1 and a key on frame 5 and it can interpolate the value at frame 3, it should be able to interpolate the value at frame 2.5 as well. At worst case, it would have to prescale all of the frame values to make the sub-frame values integers.
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Mikdog
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Post by Mikdog »

better drawing tools, comparable to photoshop.

Aaand, done.
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ErikAtMapache
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Post by ErikAtMapache »

What I would like to see are improvements in work flow.

For example, I'd like to see the controls used to manipulate objects combined so that they are similar to CorelDraw or Photoshop. In those programs, Move, Size, and Rotate object are all in the same control so I am not constantly going back and forth switching modes.

Additionally, in CorelDraw, selecting shapes seems to be much more in control. It seems like I am always selecting the wrong shape or wrong point in AS.

On a semi-related note, I would suggest putting more effort into the presentation of the product itself. For example, the character wizard is not a bad idea, but the actual models themselves included look like something a sixth-grader made.
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