Onion skin special FX??

[Telemacus]

Although it's a fairly common feature in other animation programs, when I first saw the onion skin feature in anime studio, I thought it'd be cool if it was converted into a transition effect of some kind.
What exactly do I mean?
Something like this:



Im aware that there are some video programs which might help me achieve this, but since AS "nearly" has this feature already, I thought it'd be nice if this (and other!!) Fx were added in the future. (add a tick box to the onion skin saying: "Display when rendering?")

I know that I could also render some frames, use transparency and achieve something pretty good, but you'll have to admit that it would take a fair bit of time!

The image is pretty low quality, it wasn't rendered or anything, as the onion skin doesn't show when you render, so I had to copy and paste 5 frames.

Anyway, just an idea...

[dkwroot]

You can achieve that effect with the motion blur option. Anime Studio doesn't have real motion blur yet, but instead it has a cartoony looking blur like the one in your example, so it should be ideal for what you're trying to accomplish. Just go to your top layer group and go into layer properties and fiddle with motion blur options.

[Telemacus]

Thanks for the suggestion, DK.

Yes, motion blur is an option, but it's not quite the same:

- No option to display the outlines only.
- Unlike onion skins, it only shows the "previous frames" not the ones after.
- The blur frames do look "blurry" rather than displaying different degrees of transparency. (yes, it is supposed to do that! )

[Telemacus]

Test using motion blur.



Ok, I must admit there's probably not a big need for this.
But there should be an option to display frames before/after.

[dkwroot]

I don't know when they'll add that feature, but a work around for your problem is to animate the bullet dodging scene in reverse. You could then either render the scene as an image sequence that you'll have to go through and reverse the order of OR render as a video that you'll then import into a video editing program and reverse. There might be a script that does this though, so I'd suggest asking the scripting forum.

[Telemacus]

Thanks DK.

[slowtiger]

Another way to achieve this would be to animate that boy, then duplicate his top layer several times, shift each layer in time for one frame via the sequencer, and adjust each layer's opacity. This is a lot of work f course, and should be done in a separate project file, then get rendered and re-imported into the original scene. As you say, it's a SFX.

[Telemacus]

Thanks slowtiger, that's something I hadn't considered.

[dkwroot]

I couldn't help myself.

Anyway, in this GIF I went ahead and went the route of animating backwards and then exporting as a PNG sequence which I then imported as a Sequence. What I discovered is that if you select a bunch of keyframes and hold down ALT and then scale those keyframe back, you can actually completely reverse a keyframe order. It's freakin' fantastic!

So, I got this crazy idea for a workflow and it goes like this:
Start off by just animating whatever you want to animate normally. When you finish your animation, make sure everything is keyed the way you want and that frame 1 of each animated layer is keyed. Now determine the frame that the animation ends on and key this frame on every animated channel (For me, it was frame 43).

NOW, select all of your keyframes from frame 1 to the last frame in your animation, HOLD ALT and click drag to scale the frames back all the way to the point that you flip the frame order. When you finish, give the keyframes a color to indicate that you flipped them already, this helps organize.

When you finish, just export the Image as a PNG sequence and then open a new file. In the new file, go to the Scripts > Menu > Image > Import Image Sequence. Now, just select all of the frames in your image sequence and hold alt while you scale them back and reverse the layer order. When finished, you should get what I show in my example.

FYI, I went into detail because someone might find this thread in the future and want to know how to pull this off.

[slowtiger]

if you select a bunch of keyframes and hold down ALT and then scale those keyframe back, you can actually completely reverse a keyframe order.

WOOOT! Is that even in the manual? I missed this functionality so often!

[dkwroot]

if you select a bunch of keyframes and hold down ALT and then scale those keyframe back, you can actually completely reverse a keyframe order.

WOOOT! Is that even in the manual? I missed this functionality so often!

I don't know, but I found this out while trying to find a script to reverse frame order. Needless to say, it blew my mind.

[hammerjammer]

hello

if you select a bunch of keyframes and hold down ALT and then scale those keyframe back, you can actually completely reverse a keyframe order

that is so cool. I reversed an object falling off the TV one time in a test I was doing.
I SO DID IT THE HARD WAY.

I moved each keyframe one at a time and placed them so it would happen in reverse.

What a pain in the ass that was.

I knew about holding the alt button to change the timing of something and what not. But, never tried to double back to reverse them.
It was right there all along.

Anyway, I just tried it. THATS SO COOL!! I'm easy like that.

Thanks for the tip.

HammerJammer

[Telemacus]

Thanks DK, that's really quite impressive!