Moho Animation Forum

Hi guys!

I'm a new user to Anime Studio, and so far I absolutely love the potantial of the software. With that being said I'm still experiencing quite a number of issues when I can't understand how something works and why does it work/doesn't work that way. Usually I get most of answers just googling my questions, but for some reason with Anime Studio this doesn't work very well.. so here I am to ask for help.

I'm not sure if I need to create 3 different topic for different questions, I'll just ask all at once.

1. Project background color vs Editor background color.
When I changed a project background color in project settings, nothing changed in my workspace. I was a bit surprised, but found out that the background color has changed in my final exported video. But for changing workspace background color I had to go to Editor settings and change color there. Now that color changed my workspace background but had no impact whatsoever on the final animation when exported. I got really lost at this point as I saw no logic under that, but the source of confusion. Still I believe that should be some explanation to that, maybe I'm just missing something.. so it'd be great if somebody had a point on that.

2. Importing SVG. I do all my graphics in Xara Designer software and than export it to work in Anime Studio. For some reason Anime studio can only import my drawing is SVG format (others just turned to be emply when imported). But the thing is that SVG drawings appear in workspace far far far far far huger than they're supposed to be. I need to zoom and zoom and zoom out to see the drawing and than scale scale scale it down. I've checked my SVG files and they seem to be quite correct, without scaling problems, and they also are displayed in browsers with a normal scale. It's only Anime Studio who translates them so strange. What could be the problem here?

3. Scaling. As I was forced to scale all my imported drawings I found out that line widths always stay the same (and for some reason they're imported a bit thinner than it's supposed to be). So I wanted to do a usual trick when you scale down a picture without line's scaling and than scale up with line scaling. So that would make all the lines a bit thicker as they're supposed to be. But I can't find out if I can turn on line scaling... so far is seems I can't. I can do it with layers but that isn't really helpful because after I scaled a layer I can't copy some shapes and past them into a new layer with the same scale - cos somehow it's connected with layer's scalefactor... I hope I didn't make it all sound complex.
Anyway, the question is - how do I scale shapes/objects with line width scaling?

Thanks for the help guys. I'm looking forward to get through those frustrating parts as soon as possible and get used to the product, cos it seems to be really awesome.

1. Project BG colour makes sense because the default render result will be on transparent BG (if you choose a codec to render with alpha), so you can import it into another application, but when you render without alpha the BG will become the colour you specified, without interfering with the elements in the project window which could be hardly visible on any vivid colour. If I want a specific BG colour, I just create a layer with a rectangle in a solid colour.

2. AS treats all imported stuff as it were made at 72 dpi. I don't know your Xara software, but maybe it exports as 300 dpi or something similar, for printing? Try to change that setting.

3. If you scale a layer, all lines will scale with it. If you select the points within a layer and scale these, line thickness will be preserved.

2* - svg has a different treatment of curves from AS and from time to time it would cause a problem, but scaling should be prevented with scale compensation checked in AS (before importing).

slowtiger wrote:1. Project BG colour makes sense because the default render result will be on transparent BG (if you choose a codec to render with alpha), so you can import it into another application, but when you render without alpha the BG will become the colour you specified, without interfering with the elements in the project window which could be hardly visible on any vivid colour. If I want a specific BG colour, I just create a layer with a rectangle in a solid colour.

2. AS treats all imported stuff as it were made at 72 dpi. I don't know your Xara software, but maybe it exports as 300 dpi or something similar, for printing? Try to change that setting.

3. If you scale a layer, all lines will scale with it. If you select the points within a layer and scale these, line thickness will be preserved.

Thank you slowtiger.

1. That's what was completely opposite to how I felt.. having background color different from workspace color doesn't allow me to see how colors match each other. And having a transparency option wouldn't hurt the project background color at all. Well, anyway, I guess that's just the thing I will need to deal with.

2. For the SVG I believe it's an AS bug.. I've tried to open the SVG file in question in Inkscape and it was open with the right dimensions. Than I resaved it in Inkscape and opened in AS again and got the same huge result. Checked all the resolution DPI parameters, doesn't seem to have any of them. So I'll just notify the support team.

3. For the layer and points, yes, I get that. The only problem with the layer scaling is that you can't scale it and then copy some objects from the layer and put in into another layer hoping they'll be the same size.. because they get rescaled. Well, I guess I'll need to get used to that as well

Maestral wrote:2* - svg has a different treatment of curves from AS and from time to time it would cause a problem, but scaling should be prevented with scale compensation checked in AS (before importing).

Hi Maestral!
The thing is that scale compensation works only for layer. And it seems that all the objects are scaled in SVG file, not the layer itself. So I get a huge drawing with very very thin lines.

I`ve just imported an .svg drawing (Inkscape) which is 1500x700px. It`s a very detailed one, although not so big - 180KB.
Guess what... it imported perfectly and fitted in 480p Widescreen without deformation. Even the line widths were preserved and predictably, more points were added.

Could you upload your .svg?

Maestral wrote:I`ve just imported an .svg drawing (Inkscape) which is 1500x700px. It`s a very detailed one, although not so big - 180KB.
Guess what... it imported perfectly and fitted in 480p Widescreen without deformation. Even the line widths were preserved and predictably, more points were added.

Could you upload your .svg?

Yes, sure
The initial file is here
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/568 ... cktail.svg
The file proccessed and resaved by Inkscape is here
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56823691/test.svg

I use the latest version of AS. Both files are imported as some huge pictures although they are shown the right size in the browser.

Both of these worked well for me.
Could be cause I forgot to mention it before - there are also "Auto-scale imported vectors" and "Auto center new layers" among the options in Preferences. Give it a try.

Maestral wrote:Both of these worked well for me.
Could be cause I forgot to mention it before - there are also "Auto-scale imported vectors" and "Auto center new layers" among the options in Preferences. Give it a try.

And yes, that worked!
At least now it's the size of the working space, not the juge huge
Thank you so much Maestral!