Anime Studio 10

[djwaterman]

Can we upgrade to it or will we have to buy it outright?

[AmigaMan]

Erikk should be very pleased already because half of the new features he really wants are already in 9.5 There are already bezier handles on keys in the Graph Editor.
As always, I'm looking forward to this new release.

[Not An Artist]

I would expect that this will be a paid upgrade.

Personally, I'm hoping for a somewhat improved UI, much improved character builder, and, probably wishful thinking, Papagayo integration in the app (especially since I'm on a Mac and Papagayo hasn't worked for a while).

[drumlug13]

Very pleasant surprise !! I wasn't expecting a new release this soon. Can't wait

[erikk]

Annnnndddd hoping my personal comment on not using other people's rigs doesn't have my foot too deeply in my mouth where other people's hard work and creativity is involved. I do like examining the models to see what I like and what I don't for my own education. Not as arrogant as I sometimes sound, at least I hope not.

And I will have to go back into 9.5. I have been seeking those bezier handles and can't find them. I'm glad I expressed my ignorance on the matter because it has led to something important in my education. I had TOTALLY missed the bezier transition mode.

Halfway there with bezier handles then. It would be nice if the handles were on the vector points so that Illustrator files didn't come in with a billion points. Of course, the drawing tools in AS have improved enough that I no longer wish I was in Illustrator every time I created a character. I am really excited to see the next iteration of this program, it continues to improve in impressive ways.

Off to adjust some of my animation using those beziers. My day is made.

[Greenlaw]

with all due respect

"Target bones, Bounce and Elastic time line keys. Edit keyboard shortcuts. And some more things."

doesn't sound like a major upgrade - I hope its a free one for 9.5 owners.

'Elastic timeline keys' sounds like it could be a big deal but I'm assuming this is a time stretching capability that affects a selected range of the scene. Not sure what Target Bones are--maybe an an extension of the IK system, which could be incredibly useful. I'm just guessing of course.

We finished our first ASP short film today using 9.5! The overall experience was very good even with the limitations we ran into. Can't wait to see if 10 addresses some of these limitations.

G.

[dreeko13]

if it has recordable realtime puppetry for limbs,heads etc like Muvizu has for its 3..d characters then anime studio will stand head and shoulders above the others

[wizaerd]

if it has recordable realtime puppetry for limbs,heads etc like Muvizu has for its 3..d characters then anime studio will stand head and shoulders above the others

Except CrazyTalk Animator had real time puppeteering since version 1. Personally I'm not a fan of real time puppeteering, I'd much rather keyframe my 2D animations. I like the way Muvizu does it as well, although I would not call it puppeteering per se...

No, I hope Anime Studio Pro remains true to true 2D animation, and the more standard animation methodologies, although there certainly is lots of room for improvement.

[ErikAtMapache]

On an amusing side-note, someone posted a work-around for real-time animation with AS: basically hold down the right arrow button while using the mouse to move object/points/whatever and the program will automatically record the keyframes.

[heyvern]

All I can say is... without saying too much... it is an amazing upgrade. Some of the new features are really... freaking awesome. Of course there won't be everything for everyone. There is always going to be a segment of users who won't like a lot of it or think it hasn't gone far enough. There is NO way that SM is going to be able to add all the features everyone wants to make everyone happy. They have to pick the ones that can be done in the time and budget available and that will actually improve workflow in general. Many of the features some people want are very specialized and have simple workarounds by changing how you prepare your assets.

Some of the new features are things that I never even imagined, or even heard about it. Stuff you don't know is cool beans until you see it and think "holy crap! How could I live without this?". Some of the features are also long desired and "about dang time" kind of stuff.

---------------

One other thing to comment on... during testing I completely screwed up and saved a very important file in v10 with no way to go back. Basically I had accidentally opened a finished v9.5 file in v10 and "thought" I had done a save as properly, only to discover I was working on the original v9.5 in v10 with no backup. By the time I realized my mistake I didn't even have a time machine version old enough to revert back to. Dagnabbit. As a result I started work on a "version converter" to go from v10 to v9.5.

At the moment It's about "85%" complete. Still having issues with "extra bits" in keys that have to be removed or changed (big changes to point/stroke widths in v10). I built this converter as a PHP script but decided that PHP is not the best solution and am re-engineering it as a LUA script (PHP and LUA are very similar in functionality. It's all mostly regex anyway.) Having a script do this makes more sense and is safer than uploading/downloading files via HTML on a server anyway.

My hope is this may give people more incentive to upgrade without too much fear of being "stuck".

[GCharb]

V10 will be a major update, stuffed with cool new features and improvments on old ones, well worth the upgrade in my opinion!

[sbtamu]

I believe 10 will allow you to select multiple layers and adjust the properties of them all at once.

[Greenlaw]

I believe 10 will allow you to select multiple layers and adjust the properties of them all at once.

That is one of the things at the top of my wishlist.

G.

[madriver]

I'm just wondering if I (and others) should wait a week for the update and put our projects on hold until then?

If the upgrade is major, it may affect workflow.

It's so cool that a mere .5 update appears to pack a lot of functionality!

[ianmage1]

The suspense is killing me. I haven't been this excited since that one girl equivocally glanced at me... ...forever alone...

...I've always thought that Anime Studio's motion blur was weak (without After Effects, AS users are stuck with motion blurs that look more like ghosting than actual smooth motion blurs). I'd love to see this improved in AS10...

There's probably going to be a load of features that I didn't even know I wanted--just like in AS9.5.
Can't wait.