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.

With that goal in mind, I paid a visit to the local bookstore and browsed through a couple dozen books on cartooning and animation. What I came home with was Cartoon Cool by Christopher Hart. (Subtitled: "How to Draw New Retro-Style Characters") This teaches by far the simplest system I saw for drawing cartoon characters, and had the added advantage of using simple shapes that should work well with Anime Studio.

To quote from the description of the first example:

And as the sample of the first lesson shows below, he really means it when he says "self-consciously round".

Of course you don't have to choose this same style of cartooning. This just happens to be what I decided to do. Pick a style that you are comfortable with, or if you already know how to do cartooning, stick with that. Just keep in mind that complex characters will be much more difficult to rig and animate.

The cartooning books I've looked at spend a lot of time talking about posing your characters. For the purpose of designing a character to be used in Anime Studio we can forget all about exotic poses. We need a figure in a simple pose with arms and legs straight out to the side so that we can isolate the seperate body parts and rig each with the proper bones. We will leave the task of posing the character to Anime Studio itself.

In addition, we want the character drawing to be perfectly symmetrical, at least for straight on front and side views. Any asymmetrical elements such as a hair style, should be left out of the basic character sketch and added later. Likewise, eyes, nose, and mouth should be left out of the character sketch. This is because facial expresions need to be flexible with different mouths, eyes, and possibly even noses added later in switch layers. (More about switch layers later.) This needs to be done so that we can lip-synch the facial expressions to the soundtrack.

My dungeon and fireball monster obviously need a worthy opponent, so the first task is to design a stalwart hero, Grimdore, Champion of Skolvang, with his sword and shield. Of course we don't want the sword and shield to be a permanent part of the character, so we will add them later, perhaps as switch layers so we can have him change weapons by turning switch layers on and off.

The method I used to get my hero perfectly symmetrical was to sketch the full figure on paper, and then refine one side till I got it the way I wanted. Then I divided the drawing down the center line and scanned in only the right half of the drawing. Once scanned in a copy of the image can be flipped in any image editor and the two halves pasted together. Here you see the original scan, and the scan after being cloned and welded together.

You'll notice I gave him a tunic and some shoulder pads. If you anticipate using the same character in different clothing it would be better to draw the basic character without clothing, and then add various costumes as additional layers. But in this case, Grimdore is always dressed for battle.

What I did next was to open a new project in Anime Studio and create a new image layer with the image being the full body pasted image. Now with various vector layers put in front of this image layer I can begin the job of tracing various body parts onto their proper layers. Just as a precaution, you should save the new project immediately after creating it, and even before you add the image layer. Why? Because if you save it to a different folder than where the image file is the next time you load the anme file it won't be able to find the image file because the relative path will be wrong. It's a good rule of thumb to always save an anme file before the first time you add any image layer to prevent this problem from happening.

We can start drawing anywhere, but I decided to start with the right leg. (Grimdore's right, not my right.) Be sure when you decide to name legs and arms that you always stick to the same naming convention. It doesn't matter if "right" means the viewer's right or the character's right as long as you remember that it always means the same thing to you. As a general rule it's probably best to get used to using the character's viewpoint since that seems to be the standard in the Anime Studio characters I've looked at. For the purpose of this discussion, just remember that "right arm" means Grimdore's right arm.

To keep things clean and well-organized I'm going to put each major body part on its own layer. I began by creating a vector layer called "Right Leg". Just so I can see what's filled, and what has had its fill color set, I set the default fill color to be a really ugly purple that I know I would never use by setting the Red/Green/blue values to 255/0/255. That way I won't be fooled by seeing a shape filled with white and thinking it's not been filled yet. Whenever I see that ugly color I will know immediately that the shape IS filled, but a suitable color has NOT been picked for it yet.

To draw the leg I used the simple box tool and drew a four-cornered box. Then I grabbed the corner points and moved then around so that the sides of the box matched up with the sides of the right leg. I let the top end of the box overlap the tunic so that when it comes time to move the legs around we won't have any annoying gaps show up between the body and the legs. DO NOT overlap the legs into the boots, however. The boots will be drawn on the same layer as the legs, and if two shapes overlap Anime Studio may not be able to fill the overlapping shape. Next I created a shape and hit the space bar to fill it with my ugly purple color.

So I banged and banged on the space bar and the darn leg shape just wouldn't fill. What did I do wrong? Well, it turns out the leg shape was getting filled just fine. The problem is, when I created the new layer, it got created below the image layer, so the filled shape was there, all right, it was just hidden behind the image layer. The solution is to drag the vetor layer, the one named "Right Leg" up in the layer window until it is above the image layer. As a general rule if it looks like something isn't filling, the first thing to check is the position of the layer relative to another layer that might be hiding it from view. This can be a stinker because the points and vectors still show even when the layer itself is really hidden.

After moving the corner point to their proper location, the right leg should look something like this:

The next step is to draw the boot. The boot is shaped by drawing several points around its edges. I used a total of 13 points for the boot.) Where the boot meets the leg you must weld the boot point to the leg. In the curved sections put your points wherever the curvature changes from a tight curve to a looser curve. Don't try to get it perfect to start with because we will be refining the points before we're done. But the corners, places where two lines meet at a sharp angle, need to have points. After putting down a few starting points and closing the curve, use the "peak" tool to change all the corners to sharp angles. There are two at the boot top and one where the boot top meets the front of the boot. Don't fill the boot until the shape has been refined so that we get a clear view of the drawing underneath.

While refining the shape you can click the drawing off and on to see how the vectors match up to the drawing. With the drawing layer on those thin vector lines tend to get lost in the clutter of scanned pencil lines. My completed boot vector looked like this before I filled it.

Since my boot is going to be leather, I'll go ahead and pick a fill color for it now. You can either use standard colors from the color swatches in the Style window, or pick your own custom color. If you pick a custom color it's a good idea to jot down the Red/Green/Blue numbers for that color and jot a note to yourself about where you used that color so you can duplicate it whenever necessary. I just picked the brown from the middle of the little group of 5 browns in the bottom half of the color swatches.

Now we are just about done. The only remaining step is to cut off Grimdore's leg and drag it away from his body. Use the select points tool and then the translate points tool to move the leg into an empty area of the drawing. We will need the leg off by itself like this when it comes time to put in the control bones. So far this is what we have:

When I started out I planned to put the right leg on a right leg layer and the left leg on a separate left leg layer. That's the way I've seen it done in the characters I've looked at. For a side view, one leg must show up in front of the torso, and the other leg must show up behind the torso, so they need to be on different layers at different Z depths. However, for a full front view the left leg and right leg will have the same Z depth compared to the other body parts. For that reason it is safe to put both legs on the same layer in a full front or full back view.

I renamed the "Right Leg" layer to simply be "Legs", and drew the other leg on the same layer. The arms were drawn in pretty much the same way, with the tunic sleeve being made part of the arm rather than part of the body. After all the parts are drawn, Grimdore looks like this: (Here's the Anime Studio file grimdore_1.anme in case you want to use it follow along in the bone rigging process coming up next.)

Notice that I made the shoulder pads a separate layer. They need to move independently when the character shrugs his shoulders or raises his arm. The also serve to hide any mismatch where the top of the shoulder meets the body. At this stage we need to decide what depth order to put the layers in. The legs need to be behind the body layer so the tunic hides the tops of the legs. The arms need to be in front of the body layer so they can cross in front of the body. If we ever need the character to put his hands behind his back we would have to adjust the layer order accordingly, or use a mask to hide the arms as they go behind the body. (More on masks later) The head needs to be above the body layer but below the arms layer, and the shoulder pad layer needs to be above all other layers. In the Layers window simply drag and drop the layers around until they are in the correct order.

Take a close look at the line widths around the ears in the head drawing.

Notice how the lines are tapered at the ends. To the left of the head is a portion of the Tools window showing the line width tool circled in red. Select the line width tool and then click on any point and drag the tool left or right, while holding down the mouse button, to vary the width of the line at that point. This can be used to make your lines look less mechanical.