I’m pleased to have bagged MotionArtist 1.3, at some 65% off. It’s Smith Micro’s motion-comics production software with HTML5 output, which was left relatively polished at 1.3 (2016) but which has not been further developed.
It requires Poser Pro 2014 (not 11) to interface with, for importing Poser’s great range of 3D content. This even enables you to drag and drop a .PZ3 scene into the MotionArtist canvas. Apparently MotionArtist can also import from the older Anime Studio 9 and 10 (not Debut), and import layered .PSD files, and vectors(?). Though the latter forum-claim on vectors is not documented in the manual. Anime Studio 11 has a date on it that suggests it may well work, but that’s just a guess. I assume it would work, and probably also Moho 12 (the renamed Anime Studio 12) when that was still under Smith Micro ownership. Then…
“When you update the [MotionArtist] assets in the creation application [i.e. Anime Studio], they will automatically update in Motion Artist.”
Which means you can work with placeholders, initially. I’ve no idea if it could also interface with the sister-software Manga Studio (now Clip Studio).
Anyway, the trick to getting such a hefty discount on the software is to hang around eBay for the search terms “motionartist” and “motion artist”, waiting for these to reveal a sealed retail DVD copy at a bargain price. There seems to be a couple of sellers with a warehouse stacked high with such DVDs, but they just repeat-list them at crazy-high prices. I guess they looked at the Renderosity page, where it used to be sold for $50, then thought “hrurh, unawailable software, haz sum rarity value… sell fer £70!” I doubt they get many sales. But occasionally a sealed copy pops up at far less than the $40 that Smith Micro currently charge. The software never goes to a discount at the Smith Micro store these days, even on Black Friday.
Anyway, my sealed DVD of v.1.0 arrived and its in-box serial-number was accepted at Smith Micro. The download of the latest free 1.3 update was then 150Mb. The only problem was that the download from Fastspring was extremely slow, and is probably best done overnight. Fastspring live up to their name by offering a nice fast checkout, without need for membership sign-up… but a fast download it is not.
I’m not especially interested in making actual motion-comics with MotionArtist, partly because they can and do induce motion-sickness. But…
* the ‘infinite canvas’ idea seems interesting [find it via: Director View, click-drag Magnifying Glass/Pan], perhaps useful simply for flexible planning of comics pages and devising comics page-layouts;
* it can produce another kind of toon render from Poser, and even tries to do automated hatch shading on 3D (though not very well);
* it looks like it can do “the Ken Burns effect” (slow pans and zooms) and in HTML5, as an alternative to Slideshow Studio and YouTube. While adding a cool parallax depth-effect too. But can the output for that retain the quality needed for 1920px viewing of vintage photography, while also providing a reasonable final file-size?
* it can do interactivity. Regrettably I don’t think MotionArtist has any basic and-or-if ‘game logic’ built in, and thus can’t be made into a sophisticated point-and-click 2.5D game with inventory, crafting, fiendish puzzles etc. However the HTML5 export can have clickable hotspots and labels leading to a new scene or frame, which is something. What you can’t seem to do is export to a single interactive magazine-like flipbook file, other than by taking the HTML5 to an .EXE with other software, which is not ideal.
This feature suggests that a small “choose your own story” walking adventure-story could be possible, with careful planning of the loops and arcs. Something along the lines of the simple Zork “you are standing at a crossroads, which of three roads do you choose?” type. Or a Japanese-style ‘visual novel’ where the game element is all in the story-choices. Though there would be no “save game” feature other than browser bookmarking. Still, a bit of third-party javascript on each chapter-start page might do that in a style fitted to the game.
All of which definitely makes it worth the £10, in my view.
David, can you show off how good (or bad) that cross hatch shading on 3d objects is (in a future post?) I’ve been looking for some way to have computer-generated crosshatching on my Poser figures… just wondering if MotionStudio could do at least some of the work, even if it’s not able to do something that looks 100% hand-drawn.
Hi Tom, it’s not really worth having just for that. It’s ‘an attempt’, and a worthy one and it conforms to the figure – but not one that regular comics readers won’t cringe at. Your better option is Poser’s Sketch Designer, biting into shadows in the Smooth Shaded display mode. See the last picture in my post here and I have another post which shows something similar being done with the G’MIC filters. These filters can work in Krita, GIMP, Paint.NET etc. One would use the result as a layer in one of these or Photoshop, PhotoLine etc. First knock out white, reduce opacity a bit, and erase the unwanted bits with a big soft eraser. No good for animation, tedious for comics, but feasible for children’s storybooks and illustrations. Theoretically, a single-light render from Poser could be used as a mask to erase the unwanted bits of shading. Let’s say you rendered just a rim-light from Poser, with everything else dark, then used it in Photoshop as a soft-edged mask to lay the hatching onto the edges of the figure… that sort of thing.
Anyway, that said, yes… I’ll hope to put up some demo pictures here when I have more time to look into it.
Hi David, sadly I don’t think Krita or Paint.NET work on my older WinXP system (I’d upgrade my very old computer, but let’s just say that cash is not exactly flowing to me right now… perhaps next year when this epidemic goes away).
I’ll have to look into the G’MIC filters… hopefully they work on 32-bit systems.
They’re both free, so it should be easy enough to test them under Windows XP. Paint.NET has been around a while and is quite lightweight in terms of system usage. G’MIC has long been available in both 32-bit and 64-bit too. Krita is more debatable on Windows – when crafting my £500 Windows 7 workstation I had to fall back to an earlier version of Krita to get it to run.