Question about upgrading to AS8 Pro from 6 Pro

[SpaceBoy64]

Today I got two calls about doing freelance animation. After having no animation work for a very long time, this is quite a surprise, two in one morning. Both jobs involve character animation from the client's designs, both are in vector format. One has single color silhouette style characters, and the other has more colors, but is more cartoony.

My first question is, does version 8 do a better job of importing vector drawings from Illustrator or Inkscape SVG? (I use Inkscape, and I'm able to edit these characters in it) Or, would I have to separate the pieces, rasterize them and use the new autotrace function?

[Rainer]

Hi SpaceBoy, congratulations on the (presumably paid) work. There's probably other stuff on this forum, I upgraded from 5.6, which only imported AI and I don't know how well. From my pov AS8 does a reasonable job importing Inkscape .svg. It doesn't preserve layers, groups or effects/filters, but paths and vectors import fine with (for me so far) the right colors - you wouldn't need to rasterize.

[slowtiger]

I found that re-drawing stuff in AS is stll the fastest way for me. Of course this depends on your skills and training with AS.

[SpaceBoy64]

Well I did upgrade. The benefits seemed well worth it.

There are still some problems with importing vectors. SVG import just doesn't work right most of the time, messed up shapes, missing shapes, things out of position, color wrong, etc.

The AI import works much better, but it's a pain to convert SVG drawings to the correct version of AI to be imported. (AI version 7)

AS8 still doesn't have drawing tools that I would like to see, like ability to clone, duplicate shapes in position, ie; rows, columns, circles. There's no rounded rectangle tool either. That should be a basic thing.

I do like the new trace drawing function though. That's come in handy.