Customer Reviews

Anime Studio: The Official Guide

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book by Kelly L Murdock is an extensive resource for both the novice and advanced Anime Studio user. The short, single-topic chapters are organized to make it easy for the reader to find information throughout the project workflow. Murdock uses simplified example files, included on the book's CD, to demonstrate each step of the production process.

Murdock begins with something that I haven't seen included in computer software books of late which is a history of Anime Studio. Next, he jumps right in to a discussion of the layout of the user interface, keyboard shortcuts and customizing the workspace. With that out of the way, he walks the reader through starting a new project, and opening and saving existing projects.

As with most animation and graphics programs, layers are used for structuring and organizing your project. Murdock thoroughly covers the basics of vector layers as well as blend modes and masking. Now you are ready to create the objects that you will eventually animate. He discusses aspects of vector drawing including freehand drawing, points, curves, regular shapes and built-in drawing scripts, a very nice feature of Anime Studio. Text is next on the agenda and Murdock covers adding text to your project and how to work with the text once it has been converted to curves and points.

In the next few chapters, Murdock reduces Anime Studio objects down to their primary elements which are points, curves, fills and outlines. He covers the basics such as selecting, deleting, editing and transforming each of these individual parts. Most of the color and effects applied to these primary elements are controlled through the Styles palette. You will learn how to apply color to outlines and fills as well as use brushes and special effects.

Now that Murdock has covered all the basics for creating objects or content in Anime Studio, its time to introduce animation. He starts with a discussion of camera motion and 3D space and moves on to cover bones and skeletal hierarchy which you will bind to your characters to control their movements. Once you can move your characters like a puppeteer, you will build a sequence of movements into an animation using keyframes, graphs and scripts within the Timeline palette.

Next, Murdock switches gears to discuss the Content Library and several ways to import content into your project such as movies, 3D objects, vector images from Illustrator and non-vector images from Photoshop. Finally, he discusses the Actions palette, the LUA scripting language and creating reuseable scripts.

You have several options for publishing your animation and Murdock discusses how to preview a render of your scene and how to export your animation in the Flash, AVI and QuickTime formats.

Kelly L Murdock has worked on several large-scale 3D projects and is the author of many computer graphics books.

Anime Studio Pro is an amazing software package that seems to linger in the shadows of its more well-known competition, Flash and Toon Boom. While it costs less than half the price of either of these, feature wise it defeats them in many areas when it comes to creating vector-based animation. While the Adobe community is all agog over Flash's new `armature' feature, it is almost laughably limited compared to the extensive bone-controls offered in ASP. It is therefore a good thing to have a serious-looking guide that delves beneath the deceptively simple surface of the program and offers a complete insight into its many possibilities. Users of the non-Pro version should be warned that this book extensively describes many features that will not be available to them.

The book is well-produced, on thick, slightly glossy paper and is in full color throughout. It will deliver what it promises, discovery of all the features of the program. Subjects are arranged so that they more or less follow the animation work-flow. Many features are explained tutorial-wise, for which you can use the files included on the accompanying CD-ROM (which, by the way, does not contain the promised trial version of ASP; not that anyone is likely to buy this book without owning the software). You may or may not like this; personally, I find that using functions by being guided through them step by step is the quickest way to master them.

That said, the book does leave a few things to be desired. For one, the writing can hardly be called inspirational. It doesn't venture much beyond a bone dry summing up of functions. This can be annoying especially when an effect can be achieved in different ways, and you want to know when to use which approach. For instance, what is the advantage of using animation graphs over simply manipulating layers in the scene view when conforming the movement of an object to a landscape? While both options are described, there is no answer to the question when you would want to use which. Nor are there pointers for imaginative ways of using functions for less immediately obvious purposes (such a the example included in the ASP help files, of using a particle system to cover an area with grass).

Wholly in tune with this, the artwork featured in the examples is pretty dismal. If ASP wants to appeal to professionals and wants to look like a serious alternative to Flash or Toon Boom, this book won't be much of a help. Also, clearly some things went wrong in the final editing: some titlepages of the parts that separate themes within the book are in the wrong place (e.g., Part VI, which is dedicated to working with layers, opens with a chapter on exporting video which obviously belongs to the previous part; it is also unclear why Part III, which deals with bones, opens with a chapter on camera movements). Throughout the text typo's can be found (e.g., `affect' instead of `effect'), and sometimes a stray sentence will have landed in the wrong place.

However, as this is the only reference book of its kind for this software and it does offer a complete overview of its features, it will be useful to many ASP users.

Kelly Murdock has given a great deal of consideration to this book in the outreach to a lot of questions most folks will generate in the use and exploration of Anime Studio Pro (currently at version 5.6). Since the change over from e-Frontier to SmithMicro ownership, Anime Studio, both in Debut and Pro offerings have undergone a 'hiccup' since this book was originally conceived. There is no free 30 day trial of Anime Studio Pro 5.0 on the disc. And even with the App. fully installed (I have the full legal version of Pro 5.6) I cannot get some of the examples on the disc to function properly. And for the most part the examples that are laid out in the book are for function exploration and experimentation... The reason this book doesn't receive a 5-star rating from me is that the examples are overly simplistic!.. Let's face it the artwork projects don't do much to sell the product!..
However IF one overlooks the lack of quality artwork in the examples one will get just what the book promises... A COMPLETE GUIDE to Anime Studio Pro (and Debut if you apply it to that). The book is straightforward and easy to read and use for instruction. I intend to use it with kids who want to learn basic animation, and to use it as a class manual for Anime Studio instruction. The REALLY nice thing about this book is that it is multi-layered in its purpose: It can be used for basic, intermediate and advanced instruction. It includes in the chapter on 3D work information on using rather sophisticated softwares such as AutoDesk's MAYA and 3ds MAX, Adobe's PhotoShop and Illustrator as well as apps like Anima8or and Poser with Anime Studio.
Overall from beginning to end this book will get you up and running with Anime Studio (Pro or Debut) and in a lot less time than trying to just use the examples from the software's 'lessons'. Concise, compact and all in one book... SO if you have either of the Anime Studio offerings at your disposal, have THIS BOOK close at hand! (Do make sure you visit the online forum at 'lostmarble' though... updates are always just around the corner and new references too!) Happy animating!!!

I bought Anime Studio Pro 5 to exercise my grey cells and have fun with art. Murdock's book, which I first saw in a library, convinced me that this was the right program. The "Official Guide" is such a useful reference that I had to have it and so purchased a copy from Amazon. The 500 page volume itself is nicely designed with loads of color images and text boxes, printed on quality coated paper in the United States. The companion CD includes all the exercises and sample files referenced in the book; but if you are looking for the trial version of the software, you'll need to download the latest files off the Web.

Regarding which version of Anime Studio to buy (the "light" intro v5 or pro options), chapter 1 makes the limitations of the intro version very clear. I can't imagine trying to create animation frames without such basics as trace or onionskin functions, which are only in the pro version. The pro version also offers 3D object and camera paths, which is where a lot of fun is at. Murdock's book makes all the tools within Anime Studio Pro accessible and is many times more informative than the HTML help that comes with the program or available online tutorials. He's an accomplished writer of guides to other graphics programs like Poser and LightWave, and so he really knows his way around the field.

Anime Studio: The Official Guide is a great resource for learning all the features of Anime Studio. I still have Moho, which was Anime Studio's original title and unfortunately, the CD's examples are not loadable into Moho since file extension names have changed during the switchover from Moho to Anime Studio. Otherwise, it's a beautifully produced book and full color throughout.

I wish that a couple of areas had been developed more: frame by frame animation and Actions both of which get very little coverage.

I learn best when I see features encorporated into useful examples. This book goes into great detail about the features in Anime Pro, but uses isolated examples for the most part. Its chapters are organized by feature, rather than by workflow. Though you can find information about all the features available to do a particular task, you have to know that those features are able to achieve this result in order to seek them out in the first place.

I know a good deal about creating animations. What I don't know is how to best do them in Anime Pro. The book relies heavily on sending you to Youtube to gather this basic information. For me that is big disconnect, especially when using a product for the first time. Since the company that bought Anime, Smith Micro, does basically the same thing, there is no organized plan of study for applying the program's features to different animation needs and styles. The approach needs to be more from that of the creative artist using the program. It would have made sense to teach each feature by applying it to several continuous projects that flowed through the book.

If you have used similar programs and have a good idea how to set up your project, this is a good book for you. If you are expecting to be walked through an actual project and shown how to apply features to enhance that project, look elsewhere. I got more useful information about using this program from a film maker named smpfilms on youtube than I got from the book. Check out his video Animation Made Easy w/ Anime Studio 5 for Mac and PC. It explains bones, bone strength and hierarchy as well as several ways of using the timeline to rig and animate a simple character. His 20 minute video is the kind of stuff that should have been on the CD.

I recently bought Anime Studio and wanted to get a good reference book to help me learn how to best use the features of the new software. This book had good reviews so I decided to get a copy.

The book is well written and easy to follow but, as I discovered, the book covers both the Anime Studio edition and the Anime Studio Pro edition in the same book.

My only criticism of the book is that it is hard to tell when the info presented is for one or the other. Often you have to read though a section to find that "this is only for the Pro edition" and its all been a wast of time. I think better visual queues or clearer separation of the material on Pro and non Pro would have been better.

If you need to learn not just Anime Studio (Pro or Debut), but how to work with a vector graphic program, then this book will get you started. If you want to learn the ins and outs of the program with concrete examples of proper boning, setting up colour palettes, managing multiple layers in your animation, then you'll be as frustrated as I am. Murdock knows the program fine and I've never been more impressed with a "how to draw with vector tools" explanation, but I was disappointed basic tools wasn't summed up in less than 4 chapters so the rest of the book could cover actually working with Anime Studio.
Simple concepts that should have been explained better like: you can't import multiple files at once like say After Effects or Flash, bone layers have to contain of all the layers they will affect, how to set up outside created artwork to move it into Anime Studio, those were very brief compared to all the how to draw chapters. In this, I will say I already know how to use multiple vector programs, so in a "Pro" level book, it seemed unnecessary. I found the true worth of the book in chapters 13 to 20, 27, 29-32. There's solid information there and you may need to reread it to get it. Once you do, it'll become simple. The CD is worthless, despite the supposed free trial copy of anime pro it barks on the cover. I sprang for Debut before I even knew there was a book and just worked on my current animation project to learn. Many of the lessons will probably make you want to upgrade to Pro. It would have been nice if the Official Guide had "Pro" features called out and "Debut" features with some attempt at workarounds included. Frustrating, but informative and if you need a demo version to earn, you're out of luck.

Good manuals are hard to find. This one is good. Not only clear explanations, but a CD with all the files you need to do the exercises and the final files to see how various functions are built.

I did a video course for Anime Studio Pro, and it helped get me up to speed rapidly. This manual fills all the little gaps where I still had questions.

If you use Anime Studio Pro, I'd suggest you get this manual. I recommend it.

Whether you're a new Anime Studio user or came over from the Moho days, this is the book you've been looking for. Gets into the nitty-gritty of the software. How to do task quickly so you can concentrate on your art.