Help Shape the Future of Anime Studio

[Pierre Gombaud]

I don't know if any of you are also on the "Anime Studio Pros" Facebook page (very active, 1,300 members so far, with many professionals),
but there is a post about what members of the group wanted for features and changes to be in Anime Studio.

As Victor Paredes noticed us, it's better to post them here in this topic,
so I take the liberty to add them here, listed by those who had most "likes":

1. - Improved pen. Lines like the ToonBoom brush produces.
2. - A raster layer and pencil for rough sketches would be really useful for doodling while building characters and props.
3. - X Y and Z keyframes in the Motion Graph and the ability to zoom in and out on said Motion Graph. And vector handles.
4. - Spline deformers / Mesh deformers for bitmaps.
5. - vector export. Editability of the tracing image(cmd y). Mesh warp for images. Basic image editing.
6. - Fixed paint bucket tool and an ability to apply actions through keyboard when animation is paused
   (for lipsync through actions, it might be easier to toggle every mouth shape by pressing a key, rather than clicking the "insert copy" at every few frames.)
7. - A way to see all keyframes in a character at once (bone keyframes as well as point-level keyframes on sub layers)
8. - Cuda for exports. Somehow Anime Studio with GPU acc. is slower than Blender NOT using GPU and with bitmapped materials, lights, shadows, actual 3d.
9. - Rulers and guides.
10. - an option to remove the backfaces from 3D vector layers.
    You can do it when creating a cube via the scripts tab but not when you convert a regular vector layer into a 3D vector layer.
11. - See points while adding bones. To get exactly where are the points and adujst the bones with it.
    (For this, Victor noticed me it's possible, by toggling the Paths visibility. While it's indeed working, it is not very convenient, as the point are barely visible in my opinion, plus, as far as I know, you've got to do/undo it for each and every layers).
12. - Also, Jeremy Jones has a cool page you may already know, with updates he wants to be added. The most wanted are chroma key support, better align tools, and switch layer shortcuts with preview.

Finally, my personnal list:

1. - a way to save/load presets for the bones dynamic.
   - fixing the infamous white line around the hidden edge bug!
   - remodeled UI (more modern), cause it feels a bit outdated.
   - better optimized gif exporter (now, you can easily reduce the size by two or three, with a good gif optimizer).
   - a plugin for Adobe CC (WYSIWYG directly into After Effects, ...)
   - fully adjustable render style (right now, it's kinda gadget), something like the Skecth Render in Poser.

[ArsCreativa]

Hi, I have a little idea but don't know if it's already proposed. It would be nice to have a global maximum / minimum line width, that caps any line width by that range in the scene, in case of zooming too much or making a very far take.
Something like scale compensation, but with adjustable levels.

[Pierre Gombaud]

- Except if there is already a script or something to do it, it seems it is still difficult to simply insert frames (add "time"), using the "rescale keyframes".
So, an "insert frame/remove frame" function (to add or remove frames/time anywhere into the whole timeline) would be extremely useful!
UPDATE: it seems there is a script for that. Yay!

- Also, I really would like to be able to keep the same distance when I move things with the arrows key.
(Actually, when you move a point, for instance, with the arrows key on the keyboard, the movement will not be the same, depending on the zoom level).
To do symetrical stuff (for head turn especially), it would help a lot to get a constant shifting.

- Talking about the zoom, I would be glad to have it displayed somewhere! There is no "100%" or a way to get the real actual size of the document, right?

[jayfaker]

Ditto to so much of the stuff above.

But also an addition. I'd like to see reference layers get more robust overall, as I'm developing a pipeline at my new job. The only specific thing I have so far is that I found out that bone constraints aren't updated when you update references. So if you've changed the constraints on a smart bone, etc, they won't update. Not a huge deal, yet, but if you could go through and make sure referencing gets a good polish, I'd appreciate. Thanks!

[eric1223]

Slight improvements to timeline markers maybe? I'm thinking its a good idea to have it so that you can set a default color instead of yellow (document wide) or gray (Layered). Speaking of Layered Markers, how about making them be able to be copied between 2 different layer types? Example: Say you have a FBF Layer for a animation reference, and bone layer for the character. I placed markers on the FBF Layer and copy them on the character layer as well. Now its not possible, but it sure would be helpful if it were

Also...maybe a ability to copy/cut/edit multiple layer's key frames at at time? You can do if you copy the whole document, which is good doing it at the beginning...but it leaves alot of clutter. The idea is like how when u add a keyframe to a parent and it adds keyframe to every sublayer too. (Animation > Add Keyframe) Instead of adding, (or just adding them), it would (also) copy or cut everything at the point in time for the parent and all it's sublayers!

Edit: 6-18-16

This is kinda similar to the first, but can there be a option to set default regular keyframe colors too? I usually do pose by pose, and coloring them keyframes helps alot. It reminds me not to touch them and to work in bewteen them This with the things listed about would really speed up workflow.

[ArsCreativa]

Set global illumination direction and color. I think this is a "must" Even AS is not a 3D oriented program and doesn't have muliple light sources possibilities (and I think that it doesn't needs them), at least the global light could let the user to choose direction and color.

[Greenlaw]

Yes, I agree, a global directional control for shading effects is a fantastic idea! It should be an option for Styles where you want this enabled and controlled either from a common UI area or maybe from any Style that has the 'Global' option enabled (I think I prefer the latter). Currently, it can be tedious to change shading fx direction in scenes that call for dramatic changes in lighting, especially if you have many dozens of Styles to update.

Ideally, this sort of thing could be easily managed with a nodal shading editor but that's a seriously huge request. Just a feeling but I imagine the above request might be somewhat easier to add.

FYI, I learned earlier this week that AE has a global lighting option for Styles. It's actually even more important there since otherwise, lighting changes are not passed up from precomps to parent comps where the actual animation is occurring, but I think ASP could benefit from a similar option. (Just please don't copy AE's Style UI.)

[Greenlaw]

Oh, what might be even better (and more consistent with ASP conventions,) is to be able to tie shading direction to a specified bone. I would love to be able to do that. (Waitaminnit. Can't I do that now? Guess I'll be checking on this later today.)

[synthsin75]

Oh, what might be even better (and more consistent with ASP conventions,) is to be able to tie shading direction to a specified bone. I would love to be able to do that. (Waitaminnit. Can't I do that now? Guess I'll be checking on this later today.)

Yeah, smart bones can control shape effects. So every effect tied to that smart bone action can be controlled globally.

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, smart bones can control shape effects. So every effect tied to that smart bone action can be controlled globally.

That's good! So all we really need is a better way to access Styles/FX keyframes. Or does that issue apply here? (Sorry, I'm just thinking out loud...I'm not in ASP right now.)

[synthsin75]

Yeah, smart bones can control shape effects. So every effect tied to that smart bone action can be controlled globally.

That's good! So all we really need is a better way to access Styles/FX keyframes. Or does that issue apply here? (Sorry, I'm just thinking out loud...I'm not in ASP right now.)

Well, we can't control global things like saved styles and camera with smart bones, so each shape would need to be "wired up" individually, and the shape effect keyframes for each shape are readily accessible on the timeline.

[Greenlaw]

Ah, okay. Thanks for the explanation. I guess we still need an optional and easier way to control shading fx direction globally, but at least we have some workarounds in the meantime.

I should clarify that the 'global' thing in AE isn't project wide. It allows control of all style fx that use light direction but only within a given item that uses multiple style fx. For ASP, by 'global', I of course mean project wide directional control.

[KimsCreativeHub]

Yes! and ill put an added emphasis on "Fix paint bucket tool" coloring is time consuming and cumbersome.

I don't know if any of you are also on the "Anime Studio Pros" Facebook page (very active, 1,300 members so far, with many professionals),
but there is a post about what members of the group wanted for features and changes to be in Anime Studio.

As Victor Paredes noticed us, it's better to post them here in this topic,
so I take the liberty to add them here, listed by those who had most "likes":

1. - Improved pen. Lines like the ToonBoom brush produces.
2. - A raster layer and pencil for rough sketches would be really useful for doodling while building characters and props.
3. - X Y and Z keyframes in the Motion Graph and the ability to zoom in and out on said Motion Graph. And vector handles.
4. - Spline deformers / Mesh deformers for bitmaps.
5. - vector export. Editability of the tracing image(cmd y). Mesh warp for images. Basic image editing.
6. - Fixed paint bucket tool and an ability to apply actions through keyboard when animation is paused
   (for lipsync through actions, it might be easier to toggle every mouth shape by pressing a key, rather than clicking the "insert copy" at every few frames.)
7. - A way to see all keyframes in a character at once (bone keyframes as well as point-level keyframes on sub layers)
8. - Cuda for exports. Somehow Anime Studio with GPU acc. is slower than Blender NOT using GPU and with bitmapped materials, lights, shadows, actual 3d.
9. - Rulers and guides.
10. - an option to remove the backfaces from 3D vector layers.
    You can do it when creating a cube via the scripts tab but not when you convert a regular vector layer into a 3D vector layer.
11. - See points while adding bones. To get exactly where are the points and adujst the bones with it.
    (For this, Victor noticed me it's possible, by toggling the Paths visibility. While it's indeed working, it is not very convenient, as the point are barely visible in my opinion, plus, as far as I know, you've got to do/undo it for each and every layers).
12. - Also, Jeremy Jones has a cool page you may already know, with updates he wants to be added. The most wanted are chroma key support, better align tools, and switch layer shortcuts with preview.

Finally, my personnal list:

1. - a way to save/load presets for the bones dynamic.
   - fixing the infamous white line around the hidden edge bug!
   - remodeled UI (more modern), cause it feels a bit outdated.
   - better optimized gif exporter (now, you can easily reduce the size by two or three, with a good gif optimizer).
   - a plugin for Adobe CC (WYSIWYG directly into After Effects, ...)
   - fully adjustable render style (right now, it's kinda gadget), something like the Skecth Render in Poser.

[Pierre Gombaud]

I would like the particles to automatically adjust to the frame-rate.

For instance, I have a smoke particle, made at 12 fps. But if I change the frame-rate to, say, 24 fps, the particle will go too slow.
So I have to manually search and edit what's wrong in the particle editor.

Not a big deal by the way, I just think it would be a useful feature when you have a library of particle effects (fire, smoke, rain, ...)
and use it on differents animations at different frame-rate.

[chucky]

Yes, XZS, I agree.
It would be great if frames per second were really just that, if you change the rate, then it should be the amount of frames that change , not the duration.
That would be much more workable when doing outputs.
Sometimes a client might change the specified frame rate after the start of production and, it would be awesome if Anime could use the leverage of its keyframe based timeline to make sense of that.
OF course fractional calculations would have to round things up or down, but, that's the reality of frame based animation eh?