With the introduction of the sequencer in Anime Studio 6, I thought it could work great as a story boarding tool by sketching out frames with the Freehand tool and rendering them to bitmaps to reduce file size. The whole process works really well, although I still want to write a script to automatically render the current view and bring it back in as a bitmap. The only thing was that the freehand tool sets the width of the first point of the stroke as soon as you press down on the pen, resulting in all of the strokes it creates always starting out being quire pointed. In fact, I found myself jamming the pen down on my tablet to try and increase the initial width of the stroke.
Anyway, before something broke I decided to have a bash at modifying the Freehand tool. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. All it does is carry on updating the width of the first point of the stroke in the OnMouseMoved method until it gets outside of the pixel tolerance radius. The only problem now is that the start of the stroke can be quite square, but I'm working on another script that will be able to round off stroke endpoints and I may even add it to the Freehand tool as an option.
So here are the links to my modified versions of the tool:
- Updated 23 April 2011: rt_freehand_v6.5.zip
Updated 11 November 2009: rt_freehand_v6.2.zip
Updated 10 November 2009: rt_freehand_v6.1.zip
Initial Release: rt_freehand.zip
rt_freehand_OrigWidthVar.zip
By the way, I can't thank Mike enough for giving us this kind of access to the core tools in Anime Studio. I can't think of one other commercial program that would let you customize a drawing tool as this level. It's like being able to make your own pencil that perfectly suits your own style of drawing.
By the way I haven't forgotten about posting my nudge keyframe tools that I promised a few people. It's just that I uncovered a few bugs in my scripts and possible also in AnimeStudio in porting it over to version 6. I hope to have something to post sometime this week, though.