Moho Forum

I noticed the provided anime characters in Anime Studio use rasterized graphics. I have a few questions.

1) What pixel per inch resolution/screen format should you work with in your paint program so that exported graphics will have the proper size/smoothness in AS (mainly intended for NTSC rendering)?

2) a) If drawing by hand on paper, what size/thickness/type paper should you use?

b) Do you include shadows in hand-drawn work or add that in the paint program

c) What resolution do you scan at? (300 dpi too much?

d) What filters or techniques do you use to kill/reduce all the scribbly lines of sketch work and is there a tool that makes those outlines more boldly defined?

And last but not least, is anyone using the above methods in commercial animation?

Thanks!

Usually, animation done in this manner is manually retraced within the animation package, so it can exist as a vector-based image. Once this has been done, you then have the ability to to apply different paint styles and effects to both the fill areas and the outlines. Also, because it's vector-based, it can be scaled to any size, and will be much more flexible when animated.

1) What pixel per inch resolution/screen format should you work with in your paint program so that exported graphics will have the proper size/smoothness in AS (mainly intended for NTSC rendering)?

My call is sufficient resolution so that, say max magnification (as close as the camera is ever going to go) you never have AS scaling your image up. Never. If you are going to go from a wide shot in really close, and your image is small enough that it's going to need to be scaled up to render, you will probably get some blockiness. Don't do it! AS is kinda resolution independant, but if you're using images, they shouldn't be less than "1 pixel equals 1 pixel", ever. It's a trope in image editing preograms, you don't expect Photoshop to give you stellar results when you try to blow up an image 800%, why should you expect that of this program?

Even though it slows thing down good chunk, if I think I'm going to use an image, it's probably going to be pretty huge. If nothing else, I'll never have to go to another app and resize it.

The only time I use images lately is when I have a hugely complex drawn background in AS that isn't going to change size.

I will render the background out and reimport it.

It is exactly the size of my final render so no wasted resolution. This also speeds up the render time...

... I speak specifically of my current nightmare with dozens of boxes bottles and cans on shelves... each with gradient effects.

the render time was such a killer I rendered out a single frame of that group layer and reimported.

-vern