Anime Studio workflow frustrations...
Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 12:13 pm
Hey all,
I'm just working if anyway can give me some insight into what i'm doing wrong, or confirm that it may well be a limitation of the program...
Below are two files - The top one is 'doozey' which is just a run/fall test and the other is 'Samba' which is an animation of a dog strolling...
If you look at the files, you'll see ive taken two approaches to tackle a problem but each comes with their own frustration.
In 'Doozey' I put all of the limbs under a single bone layer... this is great for puppeteering the drawing, except for the fact that once you have moved a few points around the timeline gets extremely cluttered, with no way of knowing which keyframe moves which bone, and so becomes impossible to refine as making changes changes the tweening etc of the rest of the bones...
In 'Samba' i tried to fix this by having lots of bone layers - this gave me the control to have a timeline for each limb, but its made the whole animating process lengthy and confusing, having to switch layers using the mouse constantly... its also made creating actions impossible, because as i go between layers, the actions pallete switches straight back to the mainline... grr . This way i have to control the parts
The only soltion i think would be to be able to see/move all bones on all nested layers above to control them - the way they hide when you go to a specific layer is frustrating! to go to their individual time lines is essencial for animation control, but the fact you cant tweak arms while working on legs, body while working on arms etc doesnt make sense to me.
This program is amazing... i love it... but the workflow issues make it very frustrating - any advice is appreciated.
Doozey
Samba
The reason i have switch layers with bone layers inside, is so that i can switch between a fully animatable limb (the arm in this case) and an exact copy which has bone constraints (angle constraints in this case)... i didnt find another way to control the bones which have constraints assigned, so when i needed to move the constrained limb, i switch it to free the movement...
i found that nesting switch layers inside bone layers cancels the bones affect on its contents - it just rotates the switch layer, but doesnt deform its contents... so i had to add new bones to control the arms to the switch layer...
I'm just working if anyway can give me some insight into what i'm doing wrong, or confirm that it may well be a limitation of the program...
Below are two files - The top one is 'doozey' which is just a run/fall test and the other is 'Samba' which is an animation of a dog strolling...
If you look at the files, you'll see ive taken two approaches to tackle a problem but each comes with their own frustration.
In 'Doozey' I put all of the limbs under a single bone layer... this is great for puppeteering the drawing, except for the fact that once you have moved a few points around the timeline gets extremely cluttered, with no way of knowing which keyframe moves which bone, and so becomes impossible to refine as making changes changes the tweening etc of the rest of the bones...
In 'Samba' i tried to fix this by having lots of bone layers - this gave me the control to have a timeline for each limb, but its made the whole animating process lengthy and confusing, having to switch layers using the mouse constantly... its also made creating actions impossible, because as i go between layers, the actions pallete switches straight back to the mainline... grr . This way i have to control the parts
The only soltion i think would be to be able to see/move all bones on all nested layers above to control them - the way they hide when you go to a specific layer is frustrating! to go to their individual time lines is essencial for animation control, but the fact you cant tweak arms while working on legs, body while working on arms etc doesnt make sense to me.
This program is amazing... i love it... but the workflow issues make it very frustrating - any advice is appreciated.
Doozey
Samba
The reason i have switch layers with bone layers inside, is so that i can switch between a fully animatable limb (the arm in this case) and an exact copy which has bone constraints (angle constraints in this case)... i didnt find another way to control the bones which have constraints assigned, so when i needed to move the constrained limb, i switch it to free the movement...
i found that nesting switch layers inside bone layers cancels the bones affect on its contents - it just rotates the switch layer, but doesnt deform its contents... so i had to add new bones to control the arms to the switch layer...