Moho Forum

Forgive me if this has already been covered in the previous 24 pages, but the .svg import function can only handle files from Illustrator 8 - that's SIXTEEN YEARS ago.

I would like to see two functions added: the ability to import .svg files from Flash 6 or something of that era; and to have them arrive at the same size they were saved, rather than automatically scaled to fill the canvas. I have literally thousands of .svg shapes that I'd like to bring into ASP 10, but it's simply not practical to bring them in one at a time and scale each one back down to whatever size it should be.

Anime Studio would greatly benefit from blend-modes being able to be applied to brush textures. At the moment, we have a VERY broken 'tint stroke' option, but it basically treats the value of a texture as an opacity setting and simply masks a stroke color to a texture. No offense, but it's kind of a hack job and badly needs some attention. I think being able to apply a 'flip axis' option for the brush texture would also be great. It would also be nice if we could define an angle constraint to jitter angle! This would allow us to rotate our texture to whatever we want simply by changing the floor angle amount.

Just in case someone asks, "Yes, I have tried to mask my brush strokes to a separate layer and perform a color blend." It doesn't work...
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=25981

It would also be nice if Anime Studio added a toggle button to switch between the swatches and 3 sliders for controlling Hue, Saturation and Value. I never use the swatches, so it'd be nice if we had something more useful in their place like color sliders.

EDIT:
I figured out a way to make layer masking work with blend modes. You have to set the opacity of the blend mode layer below 100% (70%-80% works good). I still think this feature is buggy, but it's ... workable.


EDIT 2:
It would also be useful if we could control when a texture flips on an axis. For example, we could tell a brush texture to flip on its x-axis every 2nd texture or to flip on its y-axis every 7th texture.

EDIT 3:
Add a Lighten and Darken Blend mode.

Give us the ability move a bone that is the parent of other bones without moving the child bones. For example, we could press alt+ctrl and adjust a parent bone while leaving it's child bones in place.

Also, if you guys ever add bone groups, it'd be extremely nice if we could hide and reveal them using smartbones. This way we could create turn-around rigs and have the relevant bones appear and the bone clutter disappear.

Hi All,

Thanks for the enhancement requests... make sure to keep them coming! We will definitely be reviewing each and every one of them!

Regards,

Fahim

Fahim wrote:Hi All,

Thanks for the enhancement requests... make sure to keep them coming! We will definitely be reviewing each and every one of them!

Regards,

Fahim

Well, since Santa Fahim really wants our Christmas lists.

These are the MAIN improvements that I'd love to see in the future.

- When using "Animated Layer Order" it would be fantastic if the layer order didn't break when you add or remove layers. This make working with animated layer very annoying and definitely needs to be improved!

- Instancing and referencing of layers. This will save on file size and make working with masking and character turn-arounds so much easier.

- Add blend modes to Colorize Layer. This way we can easily do color blends on grey-scale images making it super easy to re-use images for multiple characters. (EXAMPLE: Hands and Eyes)

- Add the ability to change the source image for an image layer AND keyframe the change for smartbones. I made a script that sorta does this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbfaiWRaHA) but it doesn't render properly and only flips through an image sequence at specific angles (not very robust). I'd really like to see this added to the program directly. The main advantage of this system is that only images that are being used by a rig are loaded into the program at one time, meaning that you can make ridiculously intricate rigs with thousands of image parts and still have Anime Studio running smooth as butter. This will make your animators SMILE, like this --->

- Bone Groups. I'm beating a dead horse here and I'm fairly confident you guys got something like this in the works, but ... yeah. I'll mention it again anyway. I already released a script that does this(viewtopic.php?f=12&t=26221) , but it'd be nice to see it added to trunk.

- Add sharp corners for line strokes. When you try to make a pointed end with a line stroke applied, the point looks really rounded. We need an option to make it pointed.

- Compression for target bones. It's great that target bones can stretch, but they also need them to compress.

- Give us TRUE depth sorting. This means that everything in the group is organized by depth, including nested layers! At the moment, nested layers are all grouped together during sorting which is inconvenient.

- Allow us to control smartbones using bones Scale, X location and Y location. This would allow us to control up to 8 actions with a single bone! Now that's efficiency.

- When binding vector points to a bone, it'd be fantastic if we could tell the points to ignore certain things about the bone. In other words, we could tell the points to be effected by the bones position, but not it's angle or scale. If you combine this idea with the idea above, you'll see where I'm going. Animators will have a very natural way to combine their smartbone controls with their rigs, allowing them to integrate everything together into one pretty package without a bunch of controllers scattered all over the place.

An example of this in action would be creating bones that are tied to the eyes. The eyes would be effected by the X/Y position of the bone, allowing the user to move them by moving the bone around in vector space, but the eyes are immune to the angle and scale of the bone. The animator could then use the angle of this bone as a smartbone action that makes the eye blink. They could then make another smartbone action that is tied to the scale of the bone and this would make the eyes get big or shrink. We can mimic this using position, angle and scale controls across several bones, but this isn't efficient on time or system resources.


That's my Christmas List, but ... uhh ... I also want a Surface Pro 3 ... and a kitten.

I would love for Anime Studio 10.5 or 11 to have some of these amazing features from After Effects to help us animate easier and efficiently.
The video shows us a lot of cool and amazing techniques from After Effects used in the Angry birds cartoon series.

Great rigging there.
Oddly I didn't see anything you can't do in ASP.
And you wouldn't need 3 months or code writers to achieve it.
Have a closer at the tools and techniques available you'll see all that and more.
AFX is an amazing bit of kit and excels in areas that ASP doesn't have a foothold, but the features in that video ASP are all over.

I would love to see a revision to the way curved/straight vector paths are controlled. A problem I run into every time I draw with the add point tool is when you have more than two vector paths going to a single vector point and some of the paths need to be curved and some need to be straight. AS requires that all paths must be curved or all paths must be straight. I can work around it by adding extra points to control curvature, but it doesn't look as clean and is also harder to work with. I suppose while I'm at it, I wish line thickness was not controlled by vector points either. Sometimes you want a thin line to intersect a thick line, for example.

Got another one! It would be interesting if we could tell every FILL and STROKE whether or not it will effect the mask for that vector layer. At the moment, we have a small checkbox that allows us to ignore strokes, but with this new system we could click on any stroke or fill in the vector layer and next to its stroke and fill properties, we'll see a masking checkbox that we can toggle to control whether that stroke or fill is used or ignored by the vector for masking. This would be insanely useful when masking eyes and mouths.

Undiscovered wrote:I would love for Anime Studio 10.5 or 11 to have some of these amazing features from After Effects to help us animate easier and efficiently.
The video shows us a lot of cool and amazing techniques from After Effects used in the Angry birds cartoon series.

Thank you for the video, Undiscovered
But I'm with Chucky. This rigs look great, but there's anything you couldn't create in AS 1000% faster (and I'm not exaggerating). This guys are extremely smart, it's awesome all they created in a After Effects, a software which is not specialized on character animation, but it just confirms me how cutting edge is Anime Studio in 2d character rigging. Mike Clifton should be on that podium.
I specially liked the shadow rig. I made something similar once (I can't remember in which exact project), but the bending shadow according to the ground look specially interesting (and I already have some ideas to reproduce it in AS), but , just like he showed, sometimes cool rigs are not as useful as we thought and it just doesn't deserve the time invested.
The illumination also looks cool, but it could be relatively easily to reproduce using Smart bones.
The great advantage I see is the animator works directly on After Effects, so you have all its cool composition tool at hand. That's cool, but I think it doesn't worth all the effort (even less considering the "no real time" issue).

lwaxana wrote:I would love to see a revision to the way curved/straight vector paths are controlled. A problem I run into every time I draw with the add point tool is when you have more than two vector paths going to a single vector point and some of the paths need to be curved and some need to be straight. AS requires that all paths must be curved or all paths must be straight. I can work around it by adding extra points to control curvature, but it doesn't look as clean and is also harder to work with. I suppose while I'm at it, I wish line thickness was not controlled by vector points either. Sometimes you want a thin line to intersect a thick line, for example.

You either need to construct the vectors with those curvatures in mind or use the Fazek curvature tool. Fazek's tool allows you to select three point to define which curve going through a point to adjust the curvature of. It changes all three, but after you fix the one you can individually reset the other two. To construct different curvatures on the same point you just need to draw each curve separately and then weld the points. A smooth point and a sharp point can be welded and will maintain their curvatures, as long as you don't use the stock curvature tool on this point after welding.

I use both methods all the time.

Anime Studio needs a script that will render every layer in our composition individually and auto-crop all of the excess alpha information.

It would also be cool if we could fuse bones together. What I mean by this is that the tip of one bone is the beginning of the next bone. Blender does this with their bone system and it's extremely convenient.

I have a dream, that next version of Anime Studio, could incorporate Spline IK into smartbone features. If it can happened, that will be HUGE improvement over its character animation system.

You can compare it with 3DCutout as shown in here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nek9gEk ... GKOIkRguuA

synthsin75 wrote:
You either need to construct the vectors with those curvatures in mind or use the Fazek curvature tool. Fazek's tool allows you to select three point to define which curve going through a point to adjust the curvature of. It changes all three, but after you fix the one you can individually reset the other two. To construct different curvatures on the same point you just need to draw each curve separately and then weld the points. A smooth point and a sharp point can be welded and will maintain their curvatures, as long as you don't use the stock curvature tool on this point after welding.

I use both methods all the time.

Thank you, synthsin!! I will try this.

For the Timeline window it would be nice to have the ability to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. Maybe with + shift or + control if necessary.

I catch myself trying to do this every time I work with AS. We can do it in the display window as well as with the other software I use with AS (Pro Tools, Sony Movie Studio & Music Studio). It would be nice to carry that action over in the AS Timeline.