I need an accurate count. Would you really like Anime Studio, or were you just trying to get a backlink?

-Eric

NOTICE: YOUR WEBSITE LINKS WILL BE REMOVED FROM YOUR COMMENTS! DON’T INCLUDE THEM! That’s how I tell the spammers from the real animators.

-Eric

I know its the old version but i recently have been working with Anime Studio Pro 7 and was wondering, if i were to use a program like poser or a picture to toon converter is there anyway to add layers or points to the imported one piece file?

And i suppose even more importantly, is there any type of file conversion i will have to do since the images/files were not generated in Anime Studio?

Exactly how many files are we talking here, anyway? How many MB’s or GB were you using in your project?

I’m not a Mac guy, so I can’t help you out with that, but I will say that neither of my computers are anything special, and I’ve never had it run sluggishly from png files. It runs sluggishly if I’m animating on top of video, but you should be able to use quite a few png’s.

If you want a quick way to know what size to import, think of it this way. It only ever has to be larger than your entire scene size if you’re going to zoom way in on the image. Otherwise, make it the size of your scene or smaller. If you want to resize them, just do it in Anime Studio. Size the layer and render it as a still image (control + R). In your preferences you can change the size of the render window. To resize a bunch of images at the same time, just stick them in a folder and resize the folder. They’ll all resize evenly together.

Anyway I scanned a photo I wanted to use at a very high resolution and after using it in several different image layers (I wanted my characters to go in front and behind bits of the photo as a backdrop… so I just used the same png in each layer but just made the part I didn’t want seen, transparent… (this made all the parts fit seamlessly as opposed to cropping each part… I couldn’t figure out how to maintain the size and proportions of each piece if they were cropped… so I just kept the rest of the photo in each layer as a transparency… but this means I have layers and layers of huge files… It sound kind of dumb now that I think of it… but like I said I am new at this…)
Anyway I found the program responding slowly and rendering kept quitting before it was finished… It now occurs to me that the graphics files were too big … but before I go and start figuring out how to reduce all of them (using Gimp… any suggestions?) and still fit them back into the scenes I had them it, I wanted to make sure that this was an accurate assumption… The main problem seems to be rendering… I was doing a trial render and it just keeps quitting before finishing… Do you have, or can you recommend any tutorials on rendering formats and what they are used for? It is all Greek to me but I would like to learn so that I am not constantly doing trial and error. Thanks.

Check out the tutorials I made on how to make a character in Anime Studio. There are 15 parts, but you’ll only need to watch about 5 of them (maybe more) to get the idea.
You can find them on my YouTube channel.

Anime Studio

Tutorials

This should help you out.
-Eric

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If it’s not too late to return the software, though, you can always buy Anime Studio 8 Debut and then upgrade to Pro down the road.

I hope this helps. If he has any questions, there are a bunch of tutorials here, and I’ll usually answer most questions in a timely manner (unless it’s something more difficult that I teach on animationtrainer.com).

That being said…
Question #1: What are you hitting the up arrow for? The up arrow has nothing to do with bone rigging.
Question #2: What does “smh” stand for? I’ve haven’t heard this expression before.

As far as I know, the videos are all done properly with nothing missing. I think you may be mistaking the up arrow for the space bar or something. Try going through the videos again and see if that’s what’s wrong. I’d love to hear back from you.

I decided to look for the answer somewhere else. After I had created my characters I decided to go online and get to the bottom of this problem. I came across your tutorials on youtube. I watched your first video about bone rigging, which you did upon request. I tried it, but I still had lousy results partially because you never said whether to press the up key or not while putting the bones in. Also when binding the bones I kept getting confused as to press the bind button before or after the bone was selected. My characters body parts kept moving all over the place.

Finally I came across another video you did where you took someone elses character and tried to fix them. That video did not work for me. Can you please explain to me step by step how to do this bone rigging.

I’ve used lots of animation programs, and I stand by my review that Anime Studio is the best; furthermore, I believe it’s also the best dollar for dollar.

I can also tell you that the comments left here are from different IP addresses, so if it is the makers of Anime Studio they’re doing a good job of covering their tracks. Plus, some of those leaving comments have become students of my animationtrainer.com course, and I interact with them regularly while they’re in different countries and paying with currency from all over the world, so I doubt it’s the manufacturer.

If anyone would like to respond to this person, please feel free. (Keep the language clean, or I’ll have to edit it.) I doubt you’re doing any mind changing, though. BTW, Death, how do we know that you aren’t a competitor of Smith Micro’s?

Let me know if this solves your problem,
Eric

What could I be doing wrong?

Try reloading the software.

Just got Anime Studio Debut 8 and am puzzled by the bones aspect of the tutorial. No matter what I do the only bone tool that is available is on the right of the screen beneath the drawing tools. It is greyed out, regardless of whatever layer is selected.

I opened the fish image (which already has bones) and the bones tool icon becomes black with a small triangle above and one below. Pressing these reveals nothing. No more tools. The manual/tutorial shows lots of bone tools in the palette to the left.

What am I doing wrong?

Help!

I’d bet that if you are willing to put in the time to learn the software, you’ll love Anime Studio. I’ve tried a ton of 2d animation programs that are out there, as well as 3d animation programs, and my opinion is that none of them compare to Anime Studio. This is Smith Micro’s best animation software, for sure. If you want to do 3d animation, I’d make another recommendation…

I hope this helps.

-Eric

-Eric

I believe you can save whatever file you want in the image part of your library. It’s only labeled “images” to help you organize better. So, you could save .anme files with images in multiple layers there if you wanted to.

I’m new to animation and have been studying your tutorials so I can make a cartoon music video – so firstly – thankyou so much for posting all of this, it’s been very helpful.

Question – I’ve got loads of head turn switches now, and facial expressions and eyelid combinations. And now I’ve started to try to create a body turn. I tried doing it the same way you created the head turn (creating body turn switch layers), but I’m having problems binding the bones – they originally worked, and now that I put the body in the switch layer it doesn’t correspond to the skeleton anymore. I’ve tried re-doing the skeleton within the switch layer and using the bind layer tool but that creates some very odd and unwanted results! I don’t think you’ve covered this – I’ve had a look – but sorry if you have. If you get the time, could you let us know how to create successfull body turns please? I’d like to eventually get my character to have at least 8 different angles of her so I can do 380′s.

Thanks,
Ross

P.S. You can’t weld bones together. It’s impossible.

I know you said you followed the tutorial, but so far 100% of the people who have said they followed the tutorial and had issues have gone back and found where they deviated from the instructions somewhere.

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I really need help with this. Thank you

By the way, nice comment section.

The very first time I opened it…CRASH! I thought, uh oh, this isn’t good. Of course, I was trying to do a few things within the program at the same time, and that may have been what did it. I haven’t had the problem since then, but I haven’t really pushed it to the limits, either.

Here’s my suggestion, based on what I’ve seen in the past. Try to reinstall it. Once installed again, don’t open the program until you’ve restarted your computer. I’ve never had problems with Anime Studio as long as I follow those simple steps.

How are you finding Anime Pro 8?

Mine keeps crashing.
It happened sometimes with earlier versions
but never like this.

Although I can recover the crashed work
it’s a bit time consuming to constantly have to do this.

I tried the search feature on your website but nothing came up.

Kind regards,
Henry.

If Adobe wants to give me a review copy, I’d be happy to review it, but they seem to be too big of a company to care. Someone from Adobe, if you’re reading this, please prove me wrong.

Top animation software in the future: I actually still wonder why Toon Boom is the top software, to be honest. Personally, I’d love to see a cheap piece of software like Anime Studio come out ahead in this industry, but it would take animation schools changing their curriculum to include it and a few cartoons to become hits while using it.

I agree with you on the patch layer; not worth paying full price for the upgrade, but it’s a nice tool to have.

I have to disagree with you on the tracing feature, though. I haven’t tried it with simple art, yet. I’ve actually been using it for the really difficult stuff, and would upgrade just for this one feature alone. What used to take me hours now takes under a minute by turning jpegs and png’s into vector layers. I’ll post some samples here.

From myself and the thousands who read this blog every week,
Thank you again for your review,
Eric

I have been playing with Anime Studio 8 Pro for a few days now and here is my take.
1. Tracing Tool: OK for “VERY SIMPLE” art tracing. Some of the artwork that I traced didn’t look too good and I tried many different settings. But the simple artwork looked great! But it is cool tool.

2. Character Wizard: Not too good. You can’t create unique characters with your own bodies. The bodies that they provide look very amateur. The artwork is not very professional to say the least. The Character Wizard needs a lot of work! Cool idea, but its still not there. It does have a lot of potential if implemented properly.

3. Patch layer: That’s nice, but nothing to make me pay for the full upgrade price.

4. Etc. The other few features are OK, but again nothing to make me pay for the full upgrade price.

I think Smith Micro drop the ball on this one. I will be requesting a full refund very soon. That being said I am a big fan of Anime Studio and it is a great piece of software. I would still recommend it, but not as a full upgrade from version 7 to version 8. I am hoping that Smith Micro will consider dropping the upgrade price or start fixing and/or adding to the character wizard ( and fix the bugs that still exist in the software from previous versions ) to make it worth the full upgrade price from version 7.

As for the character wizard, though, they didn’t put nearly enough hand switch layers on the characters. What are there, 3 hands? That’s pretty useless. I think I have about 50 hand switch layers for the characters I use in my cartoons. I actually have to add mine to the character wizzard characters, delete theirs, and add a patch layer. I have to agree with you about the clothes, too. It would have been pretty easy for them to add different pockets and collars, so you could change from a polo shirt to a button down, or shirt and tie. That’s what I do with my master cartoon character files.

Oh, well.

I just ordered Anime Studio Debut 8, and it’s on back order. ToonBoom as you wrote, is just out of the price range for normal folks. I do have Flash CS4 and see a lot of users using this to animate. I have made some simply walking animations with it and moving banners. My question is how come you didn’t mention Flash as a top animation software? I see a lot of people using it. How do you compare Flash to Anime Studio? What do you think is going to be the top animation software in the future.

Your site is very informative. Keep it up.

Thanks.

Joseph

Thanks.

-Eric

Thanks for your feedback, Matt.

The new rendering options are also another feature I like, it’s a nice simple way of creating different styles for your animations. If you want a sketchy animations that looks like you drew it all on paper with pencil, just go to project settings and switch Stroke style to “sketchy.” They also have different fill styles and layer styles.

There are some other new features, but I haven’t played around enough yet to know exactly what they do or how to use them. For instance, In the layers section there are now “patches” and I guess they work as mask.

I’m not an expert with animestudio, there’s still a lot in it that I haven’t quit gotten to yet. In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting your videos to help me out some.

Any more personal feedback you can offer?

It does have some limitations though. For instance you can’t change clothing on your character. It only comes with plain single-colored shirt, shorts or pants and I see no way to change them. So if you want your character in a particular uniform (say as a police officer) you still have to add it the old fashion way.

For people who don’t care to spend a lot of time making advanced looking characters and just want something quick and easy to work with, the new wizard alone will definitely be worth the upgrade.

I wanted to say that this is the first time I have commented. I had been educating myself on Anime Studio debut 7 through searches on Youtube. After watching just one of your tutorials I realized where my new classroom was. your lessons are clear and well organized. Thank you