Smooth Live Preview

[TheMinahBird]

Hi. I'm sorry about how weird this might be to you. I'm a 14 year old girl that's been using Anime Studio and I wanted a custom Freehand tool for me that makes my lines less wobbly and more smooth. I use a tablet and I'm used to a live preview of my lines being smooth from Sai Paint Tool and Inkscape:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a9HNJ7qj1c

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGcgglQCvAA
--

There is also a brush on GIMP that makes the brush tool "heavier" causing it to slowly lag and makes a live preview of how smooth it is.


Is it alright to ask for a script request?

[dkwroot]

If you're looking to draw smoother lines, I'd suggest downloading Fazek's tools. http://www.animestudioscripts.com/script.php?script=67
In that mod, there is a freehand tool. Click on the freehand tool, then go to "Freehand Options" at the top. Turn off "Variable Width" and set the "Angle Tolerance" to something like 25. Start drawing and you'll immediately notice that your lines are smoother. You'll find that your pointed ends are rounded, but you can fix that using the "Curvature" tool.

As for the line smooth preview, just go to the bottom right of your drawing canvas and you'll see "Display Quality". Click on that, then go down and turn on "Antialiasing".

[CartoonM!ke]

One thing to keep in mind is that it really doesn't matter how the lines look while in Anime Studio, but how the scene looks like when it's rendered. Command/Control-R will perform a render from the current frame. That's what your animation will look like when exported.

I used to have all my lines be anti-aliased,but soon I found that ASP worked better *for me* with it turned off. After all, it's the render that will be seen, not the workspace.

Sometimes having aliased (stair-stepped "rough" lines) is good, because the computer isn't devoting time in the appearance of things, rather it's doing calculations on animation, smart bones, scripts, etc.... Having aliased lines instead of the smoother anti-aliased ones may result in the workspace looking rougher, but that can help focus our eyes on the animation itself -- what's happening, rather than on how it looks.

Now if you're talking about the smoothness of the lines, meaning how the points work and such. Well, that's an entirely different issue. You may want to experiment with the Curvature tool, the button for it looks like an arc with a triangle with no bottom drawn inside the arc. The bezier tools in AS is different than in other vector programs. I haven't used Sai,'cause they don't have a Mac version and therefore off my radar

I would recommend spending a few hours just messing around with the line tool, making circles by hand, learning how and *where* to join lines. Then learning about filling shapes. When you're reasonably comfortable with that, then install scripts to modify tools. Kind of the learn to walk before running thing, y'know.