Are Effects 1 and Effect 2 Animateable?

[dreddie]

In the Styles Window, are Effects 1 and Effects 2 Animateable?

Can I have the Degree of Splotchiness or the Size of Spots change?

I have not needed the effect until recently.

For some reason, I thought this was possible, but I cannot seem to do it.

Any Suggestions?

DrEddie

[ulrik]

Hi Dreddie, I hope you're allright!
I know the gradient function in effect 1 and 2 are animatable but it's very hard to control 'cause the effects don't have it's own keyframes.
I just tried the to animate the shade and the spots fx but could not make them change over time so I guess they are not animatable.

Try the gradient fx, make a setting at frame1 and another at frame 12 and render thoose both and compare and you'll see it's working, I don't know about the other effects, I have not tried making them change over time.

cheers!

[Rasheed]

Yes, I think they are animateable, but only through layer scripts. If I'm right, then it would mean that such scripts would control the effects of a shape's style based on the frame number, or some other control.

Effect 1 and Effect 2 are just controls for the animator built in the Styles window. With a special layer script and a tool script you could theoretically control the shapes with much more effects, and dynamically.

[dreddie]

Ulrik,

Good to hear from you! Yes, things are going very good. I hope the same is true with you as well! Students seem to be doing great in the class.

I have one that has gone on to use Anime Studio for TV commercials! He saya his boss loves them. He does great work!

I appreciate your experiments. I tried something similar with similar results. Oh well, let's hope for this in a future version.

Best Wishes!

DrEddie

******

Rasheed,

Great answer. I have not played with scripts, but I will have to look into them.

To learn scripts, is there any site you recommend?

I sure would love to see the Effects 1 & 2 easily animateable.

Thanks to both of you for your answers! They are deeply appreciated.

DrEddie

[Rasheed]

@dreddie: Unfortunately, there isn't a specific site that has tutorials for learning scripting for Anime Studio. To make matters worse, the scripting documentation seems to be out of date. I am trying to piece together a tutorial, but at this moment that tutorial seems to go nowhere.

The scripting language is called Lua, which can't be learned through the good documentation on Lua.org. The (slightly outdated) documentation of the scripting interface can be found in the scripting forum (here). Even then, it is still a lot of work to learn how to script.

The advantage is, of course, that you suddenly have a lot more power in your hands than with the standard tools, because you can make your own, and make Anime Studio do things it wasn't intended to do. Beware that the scripting interface isn't complete and has a lot of "holes" in it. Mike (Lost Marble) has left out some features that actually would be very useful if he would put those in.

Until now, most scriptwriters have limited themselves to writing small extensions on the existing tools (and have left the forum, unfortunately). At this moment, only I and heyvern are active scripters, and we are trying to push the envelope of Anime Studio. It is hard work, because we are both not trained programmers.

[rplate]

In the Styles Window, are Effects 1 and Effects 2 Animateable?

Can I have the Degree of Splotchiness or the Size of Spots change?

I have not needed the effect until recently.

For some reason, I thought this was possible, but I cannot seem to do it.

Any Suggestions?

DrEddie

I was experimenting with changing splotchiness over time
Perhaps this may be a work around.
Dublicate your layer that you want to change over time and for each layer set the splochiness differently in each layer as you like and then use the opaque settings to ease into the changes on the timeline.

[F.M.]

On the subject of animating gradients, I was thinking that it would be good to have gradients controled by something like a(Pseudo) light for shading effects. (maybe for the next upgrade).