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.

In Session Four I built a pair of rigged eyes. Now it's time to add to eyes to the Grimdore character. This is very easy to do. In the File menu click on Import and choose Anime Studio Object. Then find the eye file and open it. That will bring the eyes into the Grimdore file. The first thing to do is drag the Eye Bones layer into the Grimdore Bones layer, so there is a bone layer within a bone layer. That way the eyes will track the head and stay in the right place. The next thing to do is to use the Translate Layer and Scale Layer tools to move the eyes to the proper location and size.

For a fancier character we might allow for hair styles to be on switch layers, which would also make it possible for the character to wear an optional hat or helmet. For now, I'm just going to take the easy way out and save the fancy stuff for later. On the head layer, I simply drew a simple spikey hair style and called it good enough.

Before going on I should point out that I made a couple of adjustments to Grimdore since the last anme file. When his leg was bent the point behind the knee rode up too far and squashed the thigh so that it became very skinny. I fixed that by moving the single point behind each knee further down the leg, checking the bend until it was far enough down to correct the problem of the skinny thigh. The second adjustment concerned the problem that when his legs were lifted, his waistline got pinched in in a very unnatural way. I selected the six point where the belt meets the edge on both side, and using the Bind Bones tool, bound those six points to the spine bone. That corrected this problem, and now his waist stays the right thickness through all leg moves. Here are the before and after snapshots.

I thought of making a morphing mouth using bones similar to what I did with the eyes, but then it occured to me that this is not a good idea. Sooner or later we will want Grimdore to talk, and when he does, we will want to be able to use standard lip-sych software, which relies on mouth shapes being is switch layers. Now the whole topic of switch layers seems kind of intimidating to me, but I have to learn it sometime, and now is as good a time as any. Bear with me as I muddle through.

To keep things simple, I'm just going to start out with two mouth shapes, a happy mouth and an angry mouth. I started by sketching a couple of mouths with pencil and paper, and scanning them in:

I added them as an image layer, making sure that the image layer was at the very bottom of the layer list, and not within any bone layer. I positioned the image just above the head. I left it large for now, because I can scale down the mouth shapes once I've drawn them. Selecting the head layer, I used the add points tool to roughly outline the two mouth shapes, until I hit a snag.

I wanted to use the Line Width tool to adjust the lines, but I ran into a problem. Notice the two circled areas. I wanted the line between the teeth to taper to a point at the top, but using the line width tool caused the lip line to be taperd at that point as well. If I make the lip line the right thickness, as seen in the right circle, then the tooth line does not taper. I decided it was best to disconnect the tooth line from the lip line so I could control them independently. To do this I added an additional point half way up the tooth line on both sides and then deleted the upper portion of the line. Doing this broke the shape, and so you will need to re-make the shape by selecting the points and clicking on the Create Shape button again.

I hope you remembered to use the Peak tool on the corners of the mouth to make it match the drawing. For the line under the lower lip I just drew three points, selected them and clicked on Create Shape. If you try to create a shape that is not a closed shape, it will create it as an outline only. You will notice when you create shape and hit the space bar the Enable Fill checkbox automatically gets turned off and your shape is treated as a line only, just as if you had drawn it with the freehand tool.

Here are the two mouth drawings with the pencil sketch turned off. At this time we can delete the pencil sketch layer.

Now we need to get each mouth to its own layer. (If I had known what I was doing when I started I would have created the the mouths already on their proper layers, as I do for the nose a little later on. But then, I'm learning this as I go. By making mistakes I can show you how I learned to correct them. That way, when you make mistakes you'll remember how to correct them yourself.) Create two new vector layers at the top of the list. Call one of them "Happy Mouth" and call the other "Angry Mouth". First we will move the happy mouth shape to the happy mouth layer. Go to the Head layer, and using the Select Points tool, highlight every single point in the happy mouth and hit control-C to copy the shape. Now go to the Happy Mouth layer and hit control-V to paste in the copy. Move the copy a little out of the way so you can see for sure that you now have two copies of the mouth. The go back to the head layer, select all the happy mouth points again, and delete the shape from the head layer. Don't worry about deleting the wrong one. As long as you are in the head layer you cannot select or delete any points in the happy mouth layer. Next, repeat these steps to move the angry mouth to the Angry Mouth layer.

You can now scale and translate each layer to put the mouths where they belong on the face. While positioning one mouth be sure to turn off visibility on the other mouth layer so you can see each mouth seperately. The result should look something like this:

You will notice that the eye pupils are still popped out of their sockets. This is because we are doing all of this in frame 0. (You ARE in frame 0, right?). If we go to frame one to test the animation you will notice that the mouths get left behind. That is because they are not yet bound to the head bone, and they cannot be bound to the head bone until they are in the bone layer.

Create a new layer and select "Switch" as the type. Call the new layer Mouth Switch, and drag it to a position above the Head layer so that it will be visible when placed over the head. If it is moved below the head layer then the mouths will be hidden behind the head.

To the left of the name "Mouth Swtich" in the Layers window you will see a little arrow that is either pointing to the right, or pointing down. When it points to the right all the layers inside the switch are hidden. When it points down all the layers in the switch are shown. You can change from one arrow to the other by clicking on the arrow image. In order to drag our Happy Mouth and Angry Mouth layers into the switch, be sure the little arrow is pointing down, otherwise the layers won't stick to the switch layer when you drag them there. Once the arrow is pointing down you can drag each mouth layer into the switch layer. When the switch layer box turns red, drop the layer and it will become part of the switch.

Now you will notice that only one of the mouths can show at a time. If you click on the Angry Mouth layer, only the angry mouth will show. If you click on the Happy Mouth layer, only the happy mouth will show. If you click on any other layer, only the active mouth will show. You can change the active mouth by right clicking on the switch layer and picking the active mouth from the list.

Now the only thing left to do is to bind the mouths to the bones. If you try to bind Happy Mouth to the head bone, you will discover that this cannot be done. You cannot bind a layer that is inside a switch layer. This is beacuse the entire switch layer must be bound to the bone, then all layers within the switch will move with the switch. Select the Mouth Switch layer and then grab the Bind Layer tool. With the Bind Layer tool, click on the head bone. That's all there is too it.

Now if you go to frame 1 to test the animation you will see that the mouths get put in their proper place when the head gets placed. You can now test the mouth switch animation by clicking various places on the timeline and right-clicking the Mouth Switch layer to select a different active mouth layer. Notice that when the mouth switches, it does so all at once. It does not morph gradually from one mouth to the other. In order for that to happen, both mouths would have to have the same number of points and the same shape structure. We'll take a look at morphing switch when we draw the nose next.

I'm going to make the nose very simple, but I'm going to draw two versions of the nose and put them into a switch layer so we can take a look at morphing from one switch layer to another. This is called "interpolation". First create a new switch layer and call it Nose Switch. Be sure this new layer is above the Eye Bone layer. If it is below, then the nose, if it is big enough, could be hidden behind the eyelids, which would not look right at all. Create a new vector layer inside this new switch layer and call it nose 1. Begin by zooming in on the face and using the Add Point tool to draw a series of five points roughly like those shown below. Use the Line Thickness tool to taper the line nicely as shown.

Using the same steps, create another vector layer and call it "Nose 2". Draw another nose with five points, but of a different shape from the first nose. Notice how nose 2 differs from the points shown which belong to nose 1.

Now that the nose switch layer has two different noses in it, we are almost ready to test it. If you go to the timeline right now, you'll see that when the head pops into its proper place, the noses get left behind. That's because, once more, we need to bind the nose switch layer to the head bone. With that done, we can go to the timeline and test it by setting nose 1 at frame 1 and nose 2 at frame 24. If you try that now the first thing you will notice is that the nose doesn't morph, it just flips over from nose 1 to nose 2 at frame 24. This is because we haven't told Anime Studio that we want the switch layers to be interpolated, or morphed. Double click on the Nose Switch layer to bring up the layer settings panel, and select the "Switch" tab. There you will find a checkbox called Interpolate Sub-Layers. Check that box and go back to the timeline and sweep from frame 1 to frame 24. Now you will see the nose gradually morph from one shape to the other.

Below is the animation of the result. Grimdore is still doing his karate kick, but this time I've zoomed and panned the camera to focus in on his face so we can see the eye movements, the mouth switch, and the nose morph. Here is the complete Anime Studio file for what we've done so far.