Fiziwig's Animator Studio Tutorials

Gary's Anime Studio Experiments is my collection of experiments, in tutorial form, put together while learning how to use Anime Studio. I hope you find them useful.

On January 3, 2008 I downloaded Anime Studio (The basic version, not the "Pro" version) and started experimenting with how to make animations. This is a journal of my experiments and the various things I'm learning along the way.

This jumping man is my first attempt at animation in Anime Studio. Doing this project, I learned the basics of using the program, creating layers and objects, and riging bones.

The complete Anime Studio file can be downloaded here: stickman.anme.

In reading the Lost Marble Anime Studio Forum I can see that there are a lot of very sophisticated and complicated techniques to be learned before mastering Anime Studio. Looking at the various articles on head rotation, for example, left me scratching my head and wondering if I would ever understand it all. After a while, I decided that these techniques are far too advanced for a simple-minded newbie like myself. Maybe I will be able to understand them some day, but for now, I need to focus on the basics.

I also noticed that many of these head rotation methods use features only available in Anime Studio Pro, and since I only have the Basic version, not the Pro version, those methods wouldn't work for me anyway. Instead, I decided to play around with trying to rotate a simple cyclops head using only a basic switch layer with sub-layer interpolation turned on.

Since I'm a beginner, I thought I would keep things as simple as possible by designing objects and characters in the most basic way possible. You won't see any eye lashes or blinking eyelids yet; just circles, ovals, and squares.

I drew a circle with the circle tool and set the left and right points to "peaked" to create the "corners" of the eye. The I created two more layers, "left" and "right" and used copy/paste to copy my circle onto those layers. Using the point move tool I pulled in either the leftmost or rightmost point of the cirle until the point changed to a flattened curve.

Next, I made a switch layer and moved all three layers into the switch. In the switch layer, I set "Interpolate Sub-Layers" on. Then I selected the layer "front" at frames 1, 36, and 72; selected "left" at frame 18, and "right" at frame 54. Here is the resulting animation:

(Anime Studio file: eye_test_1.anme)

The pupil is just a black circle with a little rectangular highlight spot in it. For the left and right switch layers, copy and paste the pupil shape, then just move the points around until they look right.

One interesting observation: If you get funny movement during the animation, check to see if you have any events on the timeline when you select one of the switched layers. All the timeline events should happen ONLY when you have the main switch layer selected. If you forgot to go back to frame 0 while adjusting the shapes on any layer, those adjustments will happen on the timeline, which means they will happen during the animation. Be sure all your shape adjustments are done at frame 0.

So here is the animated pupil test, with the Anime Studio source file eye_test_2.anme. Notice that I added a little pause at the two extremes of rotation so you can see the rotated versions more clearly.

To put the eye on a head, simply draw a circle and fill it. Be sure the circle layer is behind the eyeball layer, or the eye will be hidden behind the head layer. The head layer will remain fixed in place while the eye rotates. In order for that to look right, the layer position of the eye pieces must be animated to move left to right within the circle. This is done so that the eye, when looking left, will be aligned with the left side of the circle, and likewise for the right looking eye. (NOTE: I discovered later that animating the "layer translation" is the WRONG way to do this. See below for the correct way.)

At this point it might be noticed that the rotation doesn't look quite right. When looking left, there is point in the animation where the left corner of the eye travels outside the head circle. Not only that, but true rotation would not show up as linear motion across the head, but would appear to move as the trigonometric sine of the angle of rotation. It is not necessary to get involved in sines and cosines to make the animation acceptable, however. Simply note that that as the rotation approaches its extreme left or extreme right rotation, the speed of motion should slow down.

It turns out that we can solve both the problem of the corner moving outside the head, and at the sine/cosine motion problem with one simple cheat. Two frames before, and two frames after each extreme position, add a timeline event to move the eye image until the escaping corner is back inside the head circle. This corrects the escaping corner problem, but it also results in the last two frames of motion before the extreme position, moving more slowly. This slow-down at the extremes is enough to give the illusion of true sine/cosine motion.

Here's the animated eye on a head. (The Anime Studio source is eye_test_3.anme).

Now to make the whole thing look more interesting, I've added a background image to provide an environment for the eyeball to explore. Note that the background image was built using the "Unreal Editor", a 3D level editor that comes as part of the old PC video game "Unreal". After building the stage set in UnrealEd, I set the camera in a good location and took a screen shot. I then manipulated the screen shot in Paint Shop Pro to give it a more "painterly" look.

One important note: While I was trying to animate the eye within the environment I couldn't get the movements of the eyeball within the head to work properly. Forum member "Genete" on the Lost Marble Anime Studio Forum found my error and got me pointed in the right direction. When animating movement of a switched layer, always animate the movement with the translate points tool, NOT with the translate layer tool.

Here's the completed animation with the fake background. (Flash Animation) The real background can be seen in the next video clip below. (The Anime Studio file is eye_test_4.anme. The file does not contain the background image, but uses simple shapes for the background. You can provide your own background image if you like.)

Up to this point I've been rendering the animations as swf files, since these are the smallest of all the rendered files. However, Flash files cannot reproduce all of the effects in an Anime Studio animation. For example, the skin on the head is set to render as "splotchy", but Flash renders it as a solid color. Also, I added a shadow as a semi-transparent shape which simply shows up as a black circle on the floor in Flash. In true video formats the shadow shows up as a darkened region with the same basic color and texture as the underlying surface.

I rendered the little animation of the floating eyeball, plus a shadow on the ground, using avi format and the "Full Frame (Uncompressed)" option. The resulting file was 21 MB! Compare that to the 16K of the swf Flash file. That's over 1300 times larger! Surely that won't do.

Within the avi option are several different compression methods or codecs, for compressing the output video to a more reasonable size. Some of these don't work with Anime Studio, and some that do can't be loaded by QuickTime Pro in case you want to do further editing. I've also downloaded QuickTime Pro to be able to edit and save my movies in MOV format for streaming.

The two codecs (or is that codices?) that seem to be most compatible all the way around are Cinepak and Intel Indeo R3.2, so I will stick to those two.

Important note about rendering to MOV format: If you are on a Windows machine and want to render directly to QuickTime MOV format from AnimeStudio then you will need to install the QuickTime player, and in the Windows Control panel, click on QuickTime, select the Advanced tab, and click on the option for "Safe Mode (GDI Only)". If this option is not checked then attempting to render to MOV will crash Anime Studio.

Here's something fun I just discovered. In a vector layer "Settings" dialog there is a tab called "Vectors". In that tab are some checkboxes for "Noise Settings". These check boxes control how a shape outline and fill are randomly altered to create all sorts of effects varying from "coloring outside the lines" to the crazy, glowing fireball I made by applying noisy fill to the eye's head. You can have a lot of fun playing with these!

Here's the complete Anime Studio File for you to play with. And this is what the results look like.

Notice that I changed the layer opacity so you can see through the fire ball. I also changed the shadow to a glowing spot on the floor, and added another white circle (also with noisy fill) to give the fireball a glowing halo.

You can draw text on any vector layer. This allows you to put titles on your movie. Like any other shape, text shapes can be filled and outlined with various colors. You can also fool around with pan and zoom to get other interesting effects. In the clip below I even added our friends "Noisy Filll" and "Noisy Outline" to the lettering in the title. Here I made the setting less severe so that instead of looking like flaming letters, they just look kind of jittery.

Since my flying eyeball looks like the kind of monster you might encounter in a video game, and since the background image looks pretty much like a dungeon game of some sort, I've decided to give my little epic movie the title "It's only a Game". You can see it a little further down the page after I talk about scrolling and zooming scenery.

I built another background image in the Unreal Editor (You can build your backgrounds with any image editor you like.) This new background is extra wide so I can scroll across the background to give the impression of motion.

Important Note: When I first started scrolling my background around I use the translate layer tool on the image layer. It looked just fine, so I thought I'd done the right thing. Later, however, I decided to add a character figure to the scene, and that's where my problems really got started. I had to try to pan and zoom the character at the same rate to match the pan and zoom I'd applied to the background image. That resulted in having my character look like he was sliding around on an icy floor. His feet just wouldn't stay put! That's when I realized this cosmic truth: To pan and zoom scenery, always move the CAMERA, never move the scenery layer! That way, you can place your character on the background scene and he will stay put.

Next, I'm going to share my mistakes in learning to rig a character with bones, but before I get into that, here's a little preview of my movie so far. It shows all the elements I've learned up until now.