Huff Meets Rice Boy

Huff and Rice Boy (c) Evan Dahm

This is my second try with Anime Studio Debut. Obviously it's too soon to become familiar, with many unexpected behaviors that tested my patience (that reflected color on the umbrella is bad but not touching it anymore... don't ask XP). But overall the result is still acceptable.

Below are screenshots of "frame 0", the staging (all drawings should be done in this special frame). The rectangular border represents the output view.

I thought about adding a bone to the umbrella layer (treating it like an extension of left arm), but not knowing if the animation could potentially involve the umbrella leaving Huff's hand, I decided to just group it with the body parts (in Debut there is no generic "Group" layer, so putting it in the "Bone" group looks like a work-around to me). They are on separate layers and can only be moved together by moving the group they are in.


The previous try demonstrated simple bone rigging, layer mode (multiply, in this case, to let the white of an image become transparent), camera movements, Switch layer (3 different images for T-O-E's face), and loop/cycle (can be controlled using a simple text-based file). Today's try demonstrates combined movement animation (limbs and body moving in various directions) and color animation/transition.


Once I have more time a better review of the software is warranted. But for now here's a basic first impression of the Debut version:
PRO:
* comes with both Windows and Mac installation files (unlike Adobe or Corel)
* inexpensive (unlike Adobe or Corel)
* vector, but can work with raster images too; you can tweak any vector point at any time, so technically you can make an "old-school bouncing ball animation" just by tweaking the points along the timeline
* layer mode (multiply, screen, etc.)
* not so bloated if you exclude the Library content (~300 Mb)
* color gradient (only movie-symbol in Flash can use this effect)
* bone-rigging, like in 3D animation
* lip-synching (but I haven't tried it yet)
* camera control (in Flash you simulate camera control by selecting all objects then move/scale them)

CON:
* cannot export images (work around by taking screenshots)
* can only export to AVI (Windows version), MOV or SWF
* only good for animation (unlike Flash)
* appears to favor one scene per project (unlike Flash), unless you want to use the Switch layer method (aka frame-by-frame animation), which defeats the purpose of using this software as opposed to any image sequencer

NEUTRAL:
* inherent separation of points of different layers (aka, cannot select things across layers), unlike the locking mechanism in Flash
* programmable scripts (Lua)
* used to be named Moho; may have some difficulty finding good tutorial, so try with both keywords when searching