What would you like to see in 10.5/11?

[Víctor Paredes]

First, a fix for Dynamics. In 10.1, it's significantly slower than it was in 9.5. in fact, I would say it's practically unusable when you have a lot of bones in your characters, let alone multiple characters in your scene. Similar character setups in 9.5 calculate in near realtime but I don't want to go back to 9.5 because it lacks the constraints I need in 10.1. Frustrating.

The way dynamics are calculated in the preview changed on version 10. It was actually a feature request, because previously you weren't getting the same result in the preview and in the final render, which was confusing for many users. The new exact calculation is harder to process, so if you have many dynamics bones, the software can become slower. That's why now there is a new menu item: Animation>Enable bone dynamics
With that menu you turn on/off the dynamics in the preview (you also can assign a shortcut to it, for quick testing).

You know what makes me nuts? The position of Constraints panel.

I agree with you. Anyway, in the meanwhile you can manually edit the position of that panel, by modifying the Select Bone tool script. I don't have here the exact information to do it, but you should try to ask for it in the scripting section of the forum.

[Greenlaw]

Resolution control: still cannot believe you are stuck with web resolutions, offer higher quality, please!

In Pro, you can set your resolution to a maximum of 9000x9000. I don't see your point.

Yes, we just finished a 1080p job in ASP Pro, hardly web resolution, and the program handled this just fine. With the Layer Comps feature, we were even able to break out multiple passes for HD compositing very easily.

[Greenlaw]

The way dynamics are calculated in the preview changed on version 10. It was actually a feature request, because previously you weren't getting the same result in the preview and in the final render, which was confusing for many users. The new exact calculation is harder to process, so if you have many dynamics bones, the software can become slower. That's why now there is a new menu item: Animation>Enable bone dynamics
With that menu you turn on/off the dynamics in the preview (you also can assign a shortcut to it, for quick testing)

Thanks for explaining what' going on. The other problem I'm finding is that disabling Enable Bone Dynamics is not working--even with the mode disabled, ASP 10 bogs down unless the dynamics are completely removed from the bones or directly disabled on the timeline.

I started a thread about this a few months ago and the solution I was offered was to set up an action to disable the feature by keyframing directly on the timeline. That works, and it's what I wound up using for the heaviest scene with dynamics, but I'd much rather have 'Enable Bone Dynamics' actually work. Or maybe have the option to choose the older, faster calculation mode even if it is a little less accurate...the current ASP 10 system completely grinds the software to a crawl on certain scenes, even on my main workstation. In fact, it is so much slower than 9.5 that performance gradually discouraged us from using Bone Dynamics on our recent job except for the simplest things.

I should clarify that the last time I tried disabling Enable Bone Dynamics for 'bones heavy' scenes was a couple of months ago. I'll check if this feature is working in the recent update in a minute.

Also, thanks for the tip for overriding and modifying the Constraints panel position. I'll certainly look into that.

G.

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, disabling Enable Bone Dynamics in 10.1.3 still does nothing to actually disable Bone Dynamics--that 'heavy' scene still takes about 5 secs/frame even when Enable Bone Dynamics is disabled. On 9.5, the performance for this same scene is near real time--this is a significant downgrade, IMO.

[Víctor Paredes]

Yeah, disabling Enable Bone Dynamics in 10.1.3 still does nothing to actually disable Bone Dynamics

That's weird. It's working here.

[Greenlaw]

Hi Selgin,

That is weird. FWIW, I get the same behavior on three different computers, so it's consistently not working here.

I'll PM you to continue this.

G.

[synthsin75]

Hi Selgin,

That is weird. FWIW, I get the same behavior on three different computers, so it's consistently not working here.

I'll PM you to continue this.

G.

With any random performance issues the first thing I'd try is enable/disable GPU acceleration. Might have to do it in the layer display settings as well as the preferences.

[PRIMAL MORON]

Resolution control: still cannot believe you are stuck with web resolutions, offer higher quality, please!

In Pro, you can set your resolution to a maximum of 9000x9000. I don't see your point.

DPI, or dots per inch, is stuck on 72 dpi for preview, and 96 Dpi for rendering, this is very small on printing documents, which isn't good if you want to be able to print and show documents at a professional quality, such as for cover art or logos. it doesn't matter how big the document is in pixels, if it's 72/96 DPI, the results at a proper 300 dpi or 600 dpi will either look bloated or very tiny. it might not be useful to most users, it's a nice thing to include for power users or people who pipeline multiple programs using anime studio pro. A prime example of this, look at the cover art in past and current anime studio pro case, they wouldn't print that out of the program because it lacks the proper quality and even colors (CYMK mode is related, that's why i mentioned it, i know quite a bit about printing.) I'm not saying it's a nessicary feature, but it would up the professional level of it, even in photoshop, they ask right off the bat what DPI you want the document to be if you print, it's not what Anime studio puts out, that's for sure..

[Greenlaw]

I understand your point but ASP is still not limited to 'web resolution'. The program is not intended to render for print art so dpi is meaningless, but it can certainly render at resolutions required for commercial quality printing. As Selgin points out, you can simply increase the resolution to what you need for the final output device (up to 9000 x 9000 as mentioned above.)

For example, to output a typical 16 x 9 aspect animation frame for a 16 x 9 inch highend print at 300 dpi, you would set the pixel dimensions to 4800 x 2700 pixels--ASP will maintain the same art composition even with the increased 'size'. dpi simply doesn't matter at this stage because the rendered pixel resolution is what it's going to be regardless.

If your final output device absolutely requires that dpi is defined as 300 within the data file, you can easily set that in Photoshop's Image Size panel without altering the rendered 'print res' pixel dimensions and re-save the image.

G.

[Greenlaw]

With any random performance issues the first thing I'd try is enable/disable GPU acceleration. Might have to do it in the layer display settings as well as the preferences.

That's interesting. Disabling GPU Acceleration and disabling Enable Dynamics does improve the frame rate...but it only dropped it from about 5 seconds per frame to about 2 seconds per frame when stepping/scrubbing. That's still pretty awful compared to what the same scene's performance is in 9.5 with dynamics enabled.

It's really not a random issue. I think the changes to the Dynamics Engine that Selgin mentioned is the culprit. With four or more characters featuring about 60 bones each, and with dynamics on about 30 bones, a performance threshold with the new engine is reached much sooner in ASP 10 than in ASP 9.5.

I'm not sure what's up with Enable Dynamics though--even with GPU acceleration disabled, I don't get the sense that it's completely disabled--just less enabled. If I remove dynamics entirely from this scene, performance is back up to what we normally expect from ASP.

Just to be clear, for scenes where dynamics use is minimal, like just in the hair of a character, performance is entirely acceptable. We've only run into problems with more extreme situations. What's been frustrating is that 9.5 does not have this problem with the same 'extreme' setup. I just wish I could easily disable dynamics temporarily in 10 and get the same performance as when dynamics are actually removed from a scene like this.

G.

[Nicohk92]

global line width rest is on top of my wish list, along with global line width control.

In the same vein, the ability to select multiple shapes across multiple layers.

The silver bullet for all that would be some sort of tool similar to the old ds_color tool script which allows to replace colors for stroke and fill across individual or multiple layers with a tolerance option. add shape effect to the mix and you have a killer new feature which will personnally save me lots of time when I do my style research and try out schemes.

I know that we have styles and we should use them but it is not always that convenient or obvious in practice for all cases and I'm sure many of us would really welcome this new tool.

[Nicohk92]

Oh and fix the audio issue so we can actually animate over a stable sound guide, not something that slows down and changes pitch at every little effort. Maybe it's just for Macs but I find impossible to use audio for timing or anything else.

[Nicohk92]

Another one comes to mind. I never understood the point of having the opacity of the colorize layer setting act on the whole layer instead of just the color. Anytime I would use colorize would be to give a tint to my solid layer. If I want to see what's behind my layer, I can always use the regular opacity setting so the colorize opacity setting is a big miss for me right now.

[Nicohk92]

Also I'm sure you've heard the cry for a rehauling of the character wizard and the wish for updatable content. It might be a lot of work but in the meantime, you should consider removing the ugliest and most embarrassing elements of the library and character wizard.

They are so far away from what can be achieved with AS and personally was a big turn off the first time I discovered this software. I'm sure lots of people look a that and simply move on to more serious looking programs.

The "randomize" button for example should go, it really repels any interest in this product and i don't imagine or wouldn't want to assimilate with anyone seriously using this feature.

I'm sure we could all send you a couple decent head props or shoes or whatnot if needed (I've never seen a call for content to the forum members in my few years here. You should try, It's quite an active community and we're all behind you)

[Lebostein]

1. Official SVG support (it works with strg+v but why this import is not official?)
2. Please add Layer Markers to the Debut version. It is possible to copy a layer marker from a file with layer markers - then the layer marker track is available in Debut. Why not add an official possibility to add layer markers?