Anime Studio 10

[Greenlaw]

Ah, okay. Thanks for the clarification. Will stick to SmartBones then, at least for my vector art. Personally, I've found SmartBones in 9.5 to be really easy to set up and use once I understood how to optimize the shapes and bone influence for them.

Still looking forward to all the other cool stuff in 10.

G.

[heyvern]

Smooth joints in my opinion is mainly for warping image based characters.

I've always stayed away from a lot of image characters due to the distortions caused when bending joints. With vectors there was always some way to get around joint issues. With image warping there really never was anything to do to fix this easily. I tried all kinds of things, extra "fan bones" stuff like that. Now with Smooth Joints, this completely changes everything and I am excited to try more image based stuff. Those joints for images look freaking awesome. It does have some limitations but it's an amazing new feature.

[RichardU]

Smartbones for me too. I watched a couple of the videos. What surprised me was seeing someone define separate actions for left and right movement of a smartbone when it is easier IMHO to use one action for both right and left. Am I the only one who does that?

[heyvern]

Smartbones for me too. I watched a couple of the videos. What surprised me was seeing someone define separate actions for left and right movement of a smartbone when it is easier IMHO to use one action for both right and left. Am I the only one who does that?

Too many issues when doing that. It's way easier in my opinion to do separate smart bones. It's the exact same amount of work (creating key frames) but none of the strange issues. Overlapping actions in smart bones have to be dealt with when putting both in one action. I always have problems with the "crossing" frame of the actions, the point where the two separate bone rotations cross over or overlap and fight with each other. Yes it can be dealt with but with two separate actions it is quick and easy and no hassles. The only "extra" effort is creating the second smart bone.

[Greenlaw]

I'm with heyvern on this one. When Alisa and I was making 'Scareplane', I started out minimizing the number of SmartBones actions, thinking I was saving on scene complexity and processing, but it became a pain to tweak the deformations once I started animating the characters. When I broke things down into multiple SmartBones actions, often two for each limb, I found rigging and animating became easier and more predictable, and any extra CPU processing the actions added was negligible.

Tip: During rigging, I find it helps to give the bones descriptive names like armUpL, armUpR, armLoL, armLoR, etc. Keeping the bone names generic like Bone, Bone 2, etc., would make me nuts because it doesn't immediately tell me which SmartBones go with which bones. IMO, a little extra work up front can save a whole lot of time later on.

G.

[Danimal]

The smooth joint feature doesn't actually work as well with vectors. It works as expected but the result is quite different. You may still need to use smart bones which defeats the purpose.

Interesting. I guess I'll stick with patch layers for now. I do loves me some patch layers!

[RichardU]

Too many issues when doing that.

You're probably doing more complicated stuff and have found issues I haven't had to deal with.

FWIW, here is how I have overcome all the issues I've found. My SB actions are always 120 frames. Frame 1 is maximum left, frame 120 is maximum right. After I've set those, I go back to frame 60 and reset the bone, then copy the points from frame 0.

[heyvern]

Too many issues when doing that.

You're probably doing more complicated stuff and have found issues I haven't had to deal with.

FWIW, here is how I have overcome all the issues I've found. My SB actions are always 120 frames. Frame 1 is maximum left, frame 120 is maximum right. After I've set those, I go back to frame 60 and reset the bone, then copy the points from frame 0.

Hey! That sounds familiar.

I did exactly that for a head turn so I could go all the way around from either direction. I even got all excited and posted a description of it as cool technique! Another fraking senior moment! (it does require copying frame 0 to actions if you change the character).

I eat my words kind sir and admit there are good reasons to put both sides of a smart bone action in one action. Holy cow. Ha ha! Now I'm thinking I might need to try that with arms and legs as a test. I have had similar issues with "flipping" around to 0 on arms and legs that I had with head turns. Sometimes you do need to "over rotate" an arm or a leg without spinning all the way back to 0 first.

p.s. What I would hope for someday would be "negative" key frame access (and the ability to display that in the timeline). Then you could leave frame 0 just as it is, go to frame -120 to set the opposite SB keys. Frame 0 would still be "untouched" in the actions. It would just be a starting point of either side of the pos/neg keys. I've always wanted negative key frames but... it's hard to explain exactly why we need that feature.

[GCharb]

Did the same for my head turn as well, real easy when you think of it, and I never use more then one action by smart bones, as in numbering them, waste of space really, and I found that copying everything from frame zero from withing the action works perfect, fun stuff!

[hammerjammer]

Hello All

Wow, that was tricky.

My SB actions are always 120 frames. Frame 1 is maximum left, frame 120 is maximum right. After I've set those, I go back to frame 60 and reset the bone, then copy the points from frame 0.

I spent about an hour trying to understand and recreate what's stated above in the quote.
I finally did figure it out. Pretty easy to do after I figured out what I was doing. This is pretty cool, I guess.
But, I'm NOT seeing the advantage to doing this, other than having one less action in the action window... I'm I missing something? Are there maybe other ways to use it that my lack of experience is just is not seeing?

NO big Deal. Just curious. Besides, tomorrow we will all be asking questions about how the use the new features in AS10.
NOT that I'm counting the moments or anything.

HammerJammer

[RichardU]

I spent about an hour trying to understand and recreate what's stated above in the quote.

Sorry if that was cryptic. On the other hand, I have a system for knees and elbows that allows me to change the scale of the upper bone without breaking the joint. No way could I describe that without a video.

[neeters_guy]

Ver. 10 now requires server activation. Anybody know how this is going to work? Is there a limit to the number of computers or activations. Do you need to uninstall the software to return a license for later reuse? I'd like to know the rules since I've lost at least one license due a refomatted hard drive. Tx.

[synthsin75]

Yeah, you have to deactivate the license within AS before you can activate it elsewhere, but certainly there is a way to call SM or use their website to do this remotely.

[Potoroo]

Server activation sucks. I regularly move between two locations, A and B. At location A I use computer C1 and at location B I use computer C2. Since no other person uses my software whilst I use it there is no violation of the principle that I have paid to use the software and only I use it. Server activation that restricts me to using the software at only one location is just brain damaged.

[sbtamu]

Yeah, you have to deactivate the license within AS before you can activate it elsewhere, but certainly there is a way to call SM or use their website to do this remotely.

I have a huge problem with this. I have 2 computers at my desk and I only use one for animating and the other for rendering. My computers are not very fast and when I render an animation that computer is down until the render is done and sometimes this takes many hrs to do.

In fact the computer that I use for rendering isn't even hooked up to the internet.