Moho Forum

I have a really basic question here, but I come from an Adobe Illustrator background, and I don't know if that makes things easier or harder. It seems that a lot of the standards established by AI are different in Anime Studio.

One problem I am having is figuring out how to select and deselect things, as that is how you tell the software what you want to work with.

I have been following one of the video tutorials and I have a character drawn. However, the right arm and the eyes (but not any other objects) are showing the points around them. I don't think anything is grouped because I haven't even gotten to the part on grouping yet.

I have tried clicking around with the select points tool, the transform points tool and choosing Edit > Select None to no avail. When I click anywhere near a selected object and drag, it distorts the line as if I clicked directly on the line and dragged in Adobe Illustrator.

How do I select and deselect things? I am having trouble completing the tutorial until I figure this out.

I'm assuming you are in a vector layer and you want to select all the points in that layer. In the 'Tools' menu on the left of the screen, top left icon is a dotted rectangle. Select this. Pull the rectangle tool around the group you want to select, and voila!, they are all selected. Under the menu items at the top of the screen is a context-sensitive strip of tool modifiers. You should see 'Lasso mode' there. Click on this if you want to draw an irregular selection shape. Ctrl-A (or Cmd-A on a Mac) will also select all the points in a layer. You can also define groups of points and then select them using 'Select Group' in the tool modifiers strip.

It's all in the User Manual -- access it with the Help|Help... menu item.

Hope this helps.

Selection works pretty much like everywhere else. Some hints:
- you only select elements from one layer at a time (up to version 9.5, has this changed in 10?)
- you can create elements which consist of several closed shapes, sharing the same fill attribute. (Think path manager in AI).

jahnocli wrote:In the 'Tools' menu on the left of the screen, top left icon is a dotted rectangle.

I'm not seeing this. I must be on the wrong layer or something. Top left icon in my Tools palette is Transform Layer.

I think I see part of the problem. In following along with the YouTube video and trying to create a mask layer for the eyes, I think I mistakenly had both the eyes and the arm selected--when I open the saved file, I see a big, red double-bounding box that encompasses both items.

If I delete that layer, that bounding box disappears. My image looks the same, but now I see a new bounding box more tightly encompassing the eyes and the arm.

I don't want this either, so if I delete the eyes layer, the bounding box now encompasses only the arm.

It seems like, when I drew the eyes, the arm was still selected. Therefore, they both ended up on the same layer, which I don't want.

I couldn’t find a section in the manual specifically on selecting and deselecting things.