Custom Brushes not rendering correctly (pictures!)

[PaperWaspNest]

Hello fellow Marbles. I'm new here and am excited to get to know you all and share work, but my immediate concern is this:

FIGURE A:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwh2ZQ ... sp=sharing

FIGURE B:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwh2ZQ ... sp=sharing

Here is a work-in-progress rig of a character with a very painterly style. I have created 4 or so custom multi-brushes to use as strokes to keep him accurate to the style - the orange and blue are all strokes, and so forth.

He looks as I intended in FIGURE A, which is a screenshot of Anime Studio's stage. FIGURE B is the render preview and you can see it gets all janky - and it looks this way if I render one frame of the 'animation' too (There is no actual animation yet).

I've been poking around and haven't solved this, but I have learned the following:
1) When I switch layers or do certain transforming effects, his appearance temporarily flickers into looking like FIG B.
2) This appears to affect the default AS Multi-Brushes too - the rainbow brush gets a big white outline around its edges, for example.
3) It appears to affect multi-brushes with no alpha channel LESS - but I do still see a change there. All of the multibrushes I am using for this character are 24bit PNG files with alpha channel. I tried converting one of the brushes to 8bit PNG (no alpha channel) and only helps somewhat.
4) Turning off "Shape Effects" in the display settings seems to force my rig to take the FIG B appearance, however I have that turned on for the rendering... yet that makes no difference.

Since I am new to Anime Studio I wasn't sure if this was a bug or me missing the big obvious shiny button. I hope this is in the right forum!

Once I have this character farther along I would love to show it off and go into detail on some techniques I found useful, or help others do a similar painterly rig... but first I need your help

If you're curious, this is the model sheet I made earlier in AS's step-sister program Manga Studio:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwh2ZQ ... sp=sharing

[PaperWaspNest]

Here is a better image of the problem:




I had someone via Anime Studio's tech support suggest that I remove the alpha channel from my custom brushes (That is, add a white background to all of them). This helps, but the main problem there is brushes that have white backgrounds are forced to have "Tint brush to stroke color" checked, always. I can't achieve the effect I want with that. Is there really no other way to solve this? Why on earth would AS's stage view look more correct than the export?

If anyone has time, could you try downloading one of my brushes, drawing a stroke with it, and exporting? Do you see the same problem? I am using AS10, I wonder if AS11 is any different.
You can get the brush I used for my character's orange stripes here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwh2ZQ ... sp=sharing

I've tried so many things, and still no luck... I hope someone here can help. Thanks for reading.

[braj]

Check if you have 'enable GPU' checked in Preferences, I am guessing you don't.

[braj]

I'm guessing you'll want to reduce the line width in your character, and maybe reduce the brush spacing. BTW I really like your character

[PaperWaspNest]

I saw a "Disable GPU" option in preferences, which was unchecked - I tried switching that on, but my renders still give the same broken color result.

However, trying to space out the brushes lets me see this:



It looks like the horrible color problem comes from when the edges of the brushes overlap. I had spacing set to 25% before, and in this screenshot here its 75%.
Doesn't solve the problem but it does lend some knowledge...

I'm glad you like the character! This is my first rig in AS so I'm learning everything as I go. Trying to get all his bone rotations corrected with Smart Bones while also looking for solutions to this problem here.

[braj]

So your brush is made with the colors you are using? I think if you can make the brush just monochrome (I don't make my own brushes so I don't know the details on that) then colorize them with the color picker you would have less issues. Check out the rainbow brush, it looks like crap when rendered for me too, I do think there is an issue with color brushes that needs to be resolved before they work as expected.

[PaperWaspNest]

You are correct, the colors in my brushes come from the brush images themselves and apparently this causes the problem.
I didn't think twice about doing it that way since I tried it out and it looked fine on stage - but near the end of the character's construction I tried exporting for the first time and had my heartbreaking realization. If the stage view had looked that ugly, I would have quickly moved on to try a different technique for his stripes and shading.

The black and white, AS-color-tinted brushes export fine, the only problem there is they don't look as nice...
I put a lot of grain and slight color variation into my brush splotches, and all of that gets lost when I am forced to tint them in AS.

But there are more ways to accomplish this, I guess I just need to go back to the drawing board (literally) and try some. The tinted brushes still have a great fuzzy edge to them, so perhaps I can use those as a mask for a painted texture layer...

So, is this problem really a bug that I can only hope gets fixed at some point? I'd really like to report this, if that's the case. What a bummer!

[braj]

Yeah, I would say it is a bug because the manual only says you need to use PNGs, but doesn't specify that transparencies aren't going to work well, and ASP's own included rainbow brush with transparencies doesn't render like the preview. I would maybe try making brushes without transparent pixels, transparencies in the file seem fine and it seems rendering transparent pixels specifically is the issue. This is definitely not ideal. Maybe you can use PSD image files for the stripes within a masked body. The PSDs do render like you designed the PNGs to look, it would be a matter of controlling the images within the layers effectively when animating whether it would work ok or not.

[PaperWaspNest]

I just remembered/realized that a single vector path can have multiple strokes/brushes applied to it, which all follow the path's movement. I can really use that here - I can make two or even three separate (non-transparent) brushes meant to be tinted to slightly different colors, and that will give me the speckled, painterly look that I want.

I'll give that a shot!

By the way, I really love that AS seems to cycle through the brush blobs in each frame of animation. That helps the animation look like I hand-painted every frame

[braj]

Cool BTW, you could also try using image texture as fill, that would work too, probably easier than doing a mask But if you you are looking for the brush itself to animate, your method will probably be better. I'd love to see this guy animated when you are done.

[chucky]

Do you have the 'layer blending mode' set to 'normal' , check the layer setting of all your layers. The blue in there looks a bit like it's on add mode or overlay

[braj]

Do you have the 'layer blending mode' set to 'normal' , check the layer setting of all your layers. The blue in there looks a bit like it's on add mode or overlay

That definitely isn't it. Download his pngs from the first post and check it with those on a blank new layer/project. Also look at the Rainbow Lens brush.

[chucky]

Braj , have you seen the .amme file then?
There is no way to know otherwise.
If the render is different to the display, and it has those glowing edges, then render modes are a strong contender, in my experience.
Multiple strokes as you mentioned is still a very strong possibility though. with bright yellow strokes or something.
Just suggestions

[braj]

Braj , have you seen the .amme file then?
There is no way to know otherwise.
If the render is different to the display, and it has those glowing edges, then render modes are a strong contender, in my experience.
Multiple strokes as you mentioned is still a very strong possibility though. with bright yellow strokes or something.
Just suggestions

I used the same files myself, plus made my own colored PNG multi-brushes, same issue. It isn't the blending modes. It could be our video cards possibly. Have you used his brush images? What are you personally seeing?

[braj]

(sorry double post)