For my practical research I decided to take a closer look at Anime Studio – especially on how to set up one of my own characters with a bone rig which essentially turns one of my drawings into a two dimensional, digital puppet. As someone who spends a painstaking amount of time on getting my character designs just right I think this is the software that could help me save a lot of time.

I started off by trying to get to know Anime Studio a bit better before I jumped into the deep end. I skimmed through the included user’s manual but I found it a bit hard to follow at times so I also spent a day searching through the internet for online tutorials. That’s how I stumbled across Eric Moore’s tutorial site called “Cartoon Learning.” He provides a variety of tutorials ranging from beginner’s stuff to more advanced in Anime Studio – but he also has some insight into other software. Watching his videos definitely helped me fill the gaps that the user’s manual left. For anyone else interested in Anime Studio I would urgently recommend visiting his site (http://www.cartoonlearning.com/). Once I had studied Anime Studio for a while it was high time for myself to get my hands dirty.

I started off by searching through my sketchbook for a character I would like to animate. I found Dirk Slick.

He’s a character who I think has got a lot of potential but as you see he’s quite detailed which makes traditional frame-by-frame animation very tiresome. However, using Anime Studio I think I can breathe some life into him without having to spend months hunched over my lightbox.

I did another sketchy drawing off him which I then scanned into Photoshop to clean up and colour in.

Once I had a finished character I decided to chop him up in different layers – each layer containing one body part. This will make rigging him a lot easier in Anime Studio and it will allow me greater control over his movements once I start to animate.

After I had finished dividing him up in different layers I used a script to turn the various layers into one single .anme file and imported that .anme file into Anime Studio. Now it was time to assemble our skeleton and Dirk Slick.

I spread the layers out to make it easier to place the bones using the Add Bones tool. Each body part gets a bone of its own – I tried to keep the bone within the dimensions of its image layer.

It was important to remember the hierarchy of the bones – in my case Dirk’s hip and torso bones were the “grandparent” bones which provide the skeleton with an anchored point. I had to be careful when I placed the bones so that my parental hierarchy didn’t get muddled up. When in doubt, I used the Reparent Bone tool to overview my bone hierarchy.

After that I lowered all of the bones’ strength so that they wouldn’t muddle up each other and warp as I’m animating. Then I bound each bone to its appropiate layer using the Bind Bone tool (this at first gave me some trouble as I got the order of clicking wrong – you select your layer first, then click the Bind tool and then on the desired bone! I lost half a day trying to figure this out)…

…and using the Offset Bone I finally put Dirk Slick into his rigged and restored glory!

Now the real fun began as I played around with the Manipulate Bone tool to get a feel for the rigged character. At first all his actions seemed very rubbery, but after an hour or two I began to get a better feel on how to introduce a more solid feel to his movements. It’s all in the timing and efficient use of the key frames.

I also tried to begin exploring Switch Layers. Switch Layers are very useful for animating things such as lip synching or if you want to change only a certain part of your character (ie. in my case I did Switch Layers for Dirk’s hands, mouth, and eyes/sunglasses). Essentially a Switch Layer is a group of images collected in one folder which is bound to the same bone. Using key frames in the timeline, you can then easily switch between the images in your Switch Layer.

In the end I whipped up a little test shot – it’s nothing great but it documents how I’ve tried to play around with moving Dirk around and doing a tiny bit of lip synching using Switch Layers at the end. Warning, may cause seizures.

All in all, after playing and experimenting with Anime Studio for a week I feel that I have only scratched the surface but I will definitely be continuing to use this software. At the moment my character’s movements are still quite rubbery and you can see how the different limbs don’t really link nicely to the rest to the body once Dirk starts moving about but I do feel as I’ve begun to grasp the basics of Anime Studio.