Anyone use Anime Studio 7pro with Xara P&GD 6 ?

[Magnatude]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has experimented with Xara Photo and Graphic Designer 6 outputs and importing them into Anime Studio 7pro for character rigging.

I was curious if I should create my characters in Xara and export them as AI files... if transparency fills translate well, or should I just do concepts in Xara and vector them out in ASP7pro?

Though I'll likely experiment away hours of time on this, just wondering if someone else has gone through the trouble and might give me some pointers on some "best methods".

Thanks

[Albacore]

I have no experience using Anime Studio 7 but what I do have is loads of experience bringing and exporting files into Illy using various methods. Anime Pro uses vectors and if they like AI's vectors then keep you output simple which in reality is very plain vectors as the AI export filter produces a Legacy file at version 8 level which must be well over 12 years old. What this means:
that all bitmap effects (feathering, drop shadows),
blends (these all get import as individual shapes)
colour fills (all bar a simple 2 pt. linear fills don't render properly)
Transparencies (normally rendered as bitmaps but if very simple as in colour fills will come across)

[Thatch]

I have not tired it with the latest version of Xara but previously my experience with Xara and AS was not good. The vectors imported fine into AS but, the number of points in the objects increased significantly, making them very difficult to animate. I tried a number of solutions and nothing would work the way I wanted it to. I still drew my characters in Xara but ultimately I had to redraw my parts in AS to get them to animate correctly. Which is a shame since Xara has such great drawing tools and AS's tools are horrible, but the fact of the matter is, the AS objects animated well, and the Xara ones didn't and at the end of the day, that's what mattered. I do hope the situation is improved. I've not worked with that combination in about 2 years.

Good luck, sorry I wasn't more help.

[Albacore]

Well the export filter hasn't improve at all so I would imagine that it would be the same! What I can say about animation is that Zeb who uses Toon Boon Studio has great success using Xara as his animation tool from Xara Design Pro have a look at these links: http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...light=ZEBtoonz
and this
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...light=ZEBtoonz
You can see he talks about your problem using Anime Studio. It might be the time to download the trial version and import using PDF?

[Albacore]

Just had a thought. Why not draw your cartoon and then use layers to divide your up characters into individual bone and then export each as a.png file. After importing the .png files assemble the characters again and animate them. They couldn't be scaled up and they would one the same perspective all the time but back in Xara you could use the mould tool to distort the figure so it would seem to turn. Hope you can understand the last bit there but I think this method could work see this tutorial from Smith Micro: http://my.smithmicro.com/tutorials/2306.html

[Magnatude]

Thanks, the layered png idea might be a good one, and I'll try that to see if it works for me.
I've seen Zebtoons' video on Toonboom and that's what had me thinking of using Xara vectors in ASP7pro.

From my experimenting so far, I think it will end up using Xara-made PNG exports for backgrounds and scenery and ASP created rigged characters. I don't find the creation of characters in ASP too bad with 7 now that the copy-fill tools are a lot better (I used to use version 5 pro). But I will try experimenting with a rigged png export character it see how far it goes.

Thanks though for all of your input