Esotropiart

I am always keeping a close eye on software deals and spring on them like a tiger on its helpless prey. This prey, in the case of a tiger, is probably an animal that a tiger can realistically take on, like a mule, wombat or duck. Sometimes tigers eat other animelts because tigers are what are known as carnivorous beasts. Unlike elfs, tigers are part of the animal kingdom. Some people know about the stripes that tigers have - the colors and struggle tragedies - but not me. Stripes aren't my specialty of knowledge. One of my favorite places to check out for insane sales and rebates is the weekly Fry's ad. Honestly, if you have a little patience, it is a decent chance that you will find what you are looking for and save big. Take anti-virus software, for example. Seemingly every month (certainly far more than annually) Fry's has both McAfee and Norton Anti-virus (or even more full packages) for absolutely free after mail-in rebates. No lie. There is no excuse for paying for anti-virus ever again! (of course many have switched to AVG which is free anyway)

Last week Fry's had Anime Studio 5 for $9.99 after instant savings and 2 mail-in rebates. The software is normally $49.99 (there is a Pro version that costs more but offers more). I downloaded the demo of this animation program some time ago and was fairly impressed. What is really impressive is the gallery of animations people have made using the software. In fact, it seems Anime Studio is one of the most widely used animation programs on the market (within a reasonable price range). There is an enormous community of users sharing their work, tips, advice and tutorials - especially on the Lost Marble Anime Studio Forum. Take a look at the artists' work and prepare to be impressed! There are countless amateur artists as well as experienced professionals, making the community a very friendly and approachable venue.

Several weeks ago I was pulling my hair out after trying to do some simple animations in Serif DrawPlus X2. As cool of a program it is, the recent keyframe animation add-in leaves much to be desired. It is well known to be extremely buggy and pretty much unusable for character animation - aka keyframe animation! So, in frustration, I left some projects unfinished that I was hoping to be able to do in DrawPlus (the keyframing addition was the primary reason I was enticed into buying the upgrade to X2). After seeing what Anime Studio can do, I'm fairly certain it will be way too easy in comparison - once I get up to speed with the program's overall functionality and tools.

Naturally any animation program is better than using Flash. I seriously don't know how anyone can use Flash for creative animations. Sure, it has the absolute best support for advanced scripting (like Actionscript, database connectivity, etc.) and other Flash-specific technology. For animation it absolutely stinks. I still can't get a grip on using it for that purpose - and I find that many extremely experienced people in the industry think the same. I doubt many professional firms use Flash to produce quality character animations. It's simply a waste of time and money when better solutions exist. Anime Studio is one of several animation packages that far outshine Flash. Not only can Anime Studio produce SWF Flash animations, but it can produce significantly higher quality movie files that can contain far more sophisticated visual effects than mere Flash vector animation affords. We're talking prime time TV or Hollywood quality animations if you know what you are doing, folks!

Just to illustrate how sophisticated Anime Studio can be, I'm going to post my first animation ever made using the software. Okay, so it sucks. I realize that. I'm not ashamed to show my process of discovery. I'll start with simple effects and experiments, then move on to worthwhile projects - and hopefully short films (my dream).

In this first animation, I was just playing with one of the key features that sets Anime Studio apart from relative weaklings like Flash and DrawPlus (sorry, Serif - keep working at it!): bone based animation (inverse kinematics). With Anime Studio it is possible to set up fairly advanced skeletal structures for such things as character animation. We are talking the thigh bone is connected to the ear bone here! Um, that would be messed up, but you know what I mean. Your pre-drawn character can be assigned a spine, shoulder, arm, forearm, hand, fingers, etc. Each bodily feature can be posed in any number of positions. Keyframes allow these poses to quickly become smooth animations.

In my junk animation here, you can see that I have two simple shapes that might represent the two major segments of an arm, performing a straight punch, then an upward elbow block (T'ai Chi, flowing style = use your imagination, okay!). I employed what might be called "cut-out animation" style, where each body feature is a separate, disconnected object. Anime Studio offers much more natural looking animation by allowing the user to draw an incredibly detailed arm, and then assign bones to that shape or group of shapes and morph that shape as the bones are bent. It is similar to how bones work in 3D animation software, where the mesh surface wraps around the bone much like muscles, tendons and skin. The simple animation below could not be done in Serif DrawPlus (I know, I tried! Objects tend to jump around randomly.), and it would take some effort to make it look right in Flash. Bones make everything easier, and the results can be amazing!

My First Anime Studio Animation (Test)

By the way, I purposely left out a link to Smith Micro, the company that currently owns Anime Studio, because by the time I finished writing this blog entry, the program will probably have changed ownership several times. As an example, here's the colorful ownership history of Poser, another program currently owned by Smith Micro: Fractal Design, MetaCreations, Curious Labs, Curious Lbas / e frontier, e frontier, and now Smith Micro. The sale of e frontier to Smith Micro was a mere $6 million, which sounds small to me in comparison to so many of the huge mergers in recent memory (Adobe chomped Macromedia for $3.4 billion, for example). It's amazing that these program titles have survived through all those exchanges. One would think that so many takeovers and buyouts would devalue or kill the sales of a product (stubborn!).

For more on vicious tigers, avoid the following web site: MicroDuck.

P.S. though most tigers stand on their hind legs and speak seven languages like Billy here (see above), don't approach a tiger in the wild. It may be of the make-you-tasty-treat-to-his-tummy variety. Don't blame me for misrepresenting the tiger family. I'm no expert on tiger familiarities, kinship and cousinry.