Glitches in Display and Timeline?

[gnat]

I was working with this animation, and I find that two odd things are happening, as can be seen in this screen capture:


- There is a mask over the figure of the dog, which should cause the dog to appear in black in the working display window-- but only the head appears in black. In preview and render mode, the figure appears correctly as black.

- In the timeline there are Inserted References to a "Walk" action. Originally these appeared as pink blocks in the timeline, but now the keyframes are appearing following the arrow marking the inserted reference. This occurred after I had modified the action after inserting it into the timeline.

These could easily be something I have unknowingly done in the program, but they seemed to come up rather suddenly as if they were bugs.

Thanks,

Gnat

[gnat]

Okay, I located the "pink blocks" of the inserted references in the "Foreground Leg" layer. Being a rookie, I might have had some funny layer selected when I built the Action, so that may be a roundabout explanation for the peculiarity. But, in terms of usability, this isn't making a lot of sense to me even if this is what happened. I would think the Action would appear the same in the Bone layer.



Thanks,

Gnat

[myles]

Hello Gnat,

looking good!

- There is a mask over the figure of the dog, which should cause the dog to appear in black in the working display window-- but only the head appears in black. In preview and render mode, the figure appears correctly as black.

I'm seeing only the head as black in preview and render also.

To fix this problem, try changing the overall Skeleton layer mask option to a simple "+ Add to mask" - you could then modify sub-sections by changing the masking options on individual sub-sections.

- In the timeline there are Inserted References to a "Walk" action. Originally these appeared as pink blocks in the timeline, but now the keyframes are appearing following the arrow marking the inserted reference. This occurred after I had modified the action after inserting it into the timeline.

Odd - I'm not sure what's happening here - possibly you've hit a bug.

Regards, Myles.

[myles]

- In the timeline there are Inserted References to a "Walk" action. Originally these appeared as pink blocks in the timeline, but now the keyframes are appearing following the arrow marking the inserted reference. This occurred after I had modified the action after inserting it into the timeline.

I've managed to get a similar looking timeline by creating an action, inserting it by copy rather than by reference (gives you the plain keyframes), editing the action back to a frame one keyframe only, then inserting a reference (gives you the arrows without the pink blocks), so it is possible to create something similar by user action.

I think we're seeing something happening with actions being edited after being used, particularly back to frame one only. Somehow Anime Studio thinks the action is still only one frame long.

Experimentation (replacing an existing keyframe with a new keyframe to refresh the action length):

Select the Skeleton layer in Layer 4 - open up the action, copy the keyframe on frame 26, paste it into frame 27, delete the keyframe in frame 26, and move the copy in frame 27 back to frame 26.

In effect, this has done nothing but replace the keyframe with a copy of itself. However, to Anime Studio the newly pasted keyframe is a new keyframe, and back in the main timeline the pink blocks are back again (for the Skeleton layer, at least).

Regards, Myles.

[myles]

Odd - I'm not sure what's happening here - possibly you've hit a bug.

Which makes it quite appropriate to have it in the bug reports forum, he says, extracting his foot from his mouth.

Obviously time for more caffeine.

[gnat]

Myles,

Thanks for looking at my problem and sharing my puzzlement. I think I have an idea what is going on in each case, or at least which of my behaviors created my situation.

For the "missing pink squares" for the inserted references for an Action, the problem wasn't that I had accidentally copied the action to the timeline. I noted that, though the pink boxes didn't appear when the bone layer was highlighted, they did appear when the Foreground Legs was highlighted. This was because, as a final step to the creation of the Walk Action, I had to tweak a couple of points in that vector layer, so that's where the pink boxes appeared. When I made a couple of final adjustments to the Action in the bone layer, presto, now the pink boxes appear when the bone layer is highlighted. Sort of glitchy if you ask me.

For the "why is the black mask only showing up on the head in the working display window, but it displays properly in the preview and render window", I think this is principally because of how the image is laid out in frame zero. Because I am using Offset Bones to set up the bones layer, I have the component dog parts scattered all over the screen in frame zero. The black square shape I am using in the mask covers the entire dog shape in frame 1, but in frame 0 it only covers the head. I'm guessing that the working display is working off of the data from frame 0 to display the masking results. I'm not sure I explained that intelligibly, but that's the best I can do. Again, this isn't very intuitive.

Thanks again for helping me wrap my head around this.

Regards,

Gnat

[heyvern]

I have found that a lot of masking stuff never shows correctly until you render.

I believe Mike indicated once that the cause was... nested masking.

If you started getting into masking lower than one level... it would render fine but not display exactly right.

Did I get that right? The mask displays correctly when rendered or preview rendered but not on screen?

-vern

[gnat]

Heyvern,

That sounds like the masking problem. I guess my interpretation involving frame 0, frame 1, and all that hoodoo is probably off base. With Anime Studio, I am confused enough about what I am doing that this kind of thing gets me all off kilter.

Thanks,

Gnat