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Shoot Review: Bauhaus Mirage StudioPro

Dec 1, 2006 12:01 PM, Reviewer: S.D. Katz

Software combines 2D animation with compositing tools.

Sometimes it takes time for software to find its identity. Bauhaus Software's Mirage began life at French-based TecSoft as an Amiga paint and compositing program first called TVPaint, and then was re-branded by NewTek as Aura. A few years ago, Bauhaus bought the software, and it has redefined Mirage as a 2D-animation tool that also happens to be a very capable compositing and image editing application.

Artists don't lack choice in compositing products, so Mirage has shrewdly targeted an area where Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, Autodesk Combustion, and Corel Painter don't compete: traditional 2D animation. You would have to look to Toon Boom or some other dedicated cel application to find an equivalent workflow. Mirage, like Hash Animation Master, is a program that quietly puts out a terrific and affordable product that allows artists to make great work. In Mirage StudioPro's area of specialty and price point, there is little competition. The Pro version includes separate Bauhaus programs; the Animator's Toolbar and Boardomatic 2 have been added to the Mirage base product. The addition of Toolbar turns Mirage into a 2D-animation powerhouse.

At a time when vectors are all the rage in Adobe Flash and other products capable of animation, Mirage is based on bitmaps, like Photoshop, which is preferable for painterly, hand-drawn animation. Brush-stroke effects are possible in vectors, but they quickly lose their efficiency as the number of strokes increases. Some things are best created with bitmap technology, and the excellent gallery at Mirage's website has plenty of examples.

Mirage is a paperless system. You can certainly scan hand-drawn frames, and the Animator's Toolbar has a way to align peg holes or registration marks, but the software is really set up for direct input via (most probably) a Wacom tablet. You have to be ready to work this way to fully benefit from the software, although you can certainly use a hybrid approach: pencil/scan/trace digitally. Using a stylus takes some getting used to, and it is ultimately an artistic choice. If that's your input of choice, read on.

The UI

Mirage's interface is strictly utilitarian — although the same thing could be said of After Effects until the most recent makeover. Tools are presented as text-and-entry field combinations with arrows for dragging parameter settings, while brushes and masks are icon-based. There are separate palettes for just about every tool or task category, and these can be placed anywhere on the screen. There is no docking or Adobe-style tab stacking. This is basic, but functional. As it turns out, cel animation is more focused on labor-intensive repetition than most compositing projects, so you will only need a few palettes at a time.

The main project window has video controls, magnification, scroll bars, and a few other tools, but it is not resizable. You can magnify the image within the screen but not the canvas itself. You can, however, open several project windows at a time, allowing you to have simultaneous views of the same project with different magnifications or view options.

When you open the program for the first time, you find a menu bar at the top of the screen with the usual file, edit, project, layer, image, effects, plug-ins, view, windows, and help categories. If you know Photoshop or After Effects, this will all seem familiar. Below the menu bar is the Toolbar. This is an icon-based series of buttons that toggle options or additional panels such as a gradient panel or the navigation panel. Most of these tools are toggled off by default. The main panel (with tool modes), Color Picker, and brush panels are stacked vertically on the right side of the screen.

The Color Picker is not recognizable as any Adobe or Apple standard, but that didn't especially bother me. You have several options, including slider selection of color in RGB or HSL systems, and a bin with color chip palettes in five default arrays including grayscale. You can modify color palettes and save them as custom palettes. There is also a picker, which is a single hue blended from white to black. Mirage also provides an interesting color picker tool called Mixer, a color window where you can interactively mix colors. Mixer comes with several pre-made palettes, including clouds, inks, skin, and storm clouds, a novel concept that emulates traditional materials.

My only complaint is that the color chips and Mixer are small and not resizable. Selecting tiny color chips may slow down your Wacom gestures — it did to mine. At least you can tear the palette out of the stack and put it anywhere on the canvas for quick access right next to the main window.

You are also limited to just one palette at a time. This is a bit of a drawback because you have to exit the picker to jump to the Bin to add colors, making it hard to compare selections. I would like to see a big color palette permitting large paint chips and brush types to be clicked quickly. This would make the painting workflow more natural. To be fair, neither Photoshop nor Autodesk SketchBook Pro do this either.

Brushes

Mirage brushes provide serviceable emulation of natural media with a few nice tricks but no breakthroughs. The brush palette has 10 selections, including Airbrush, Pen, Mechanical Pencil, Oil Brush, Pencil, Wet Brush, Warp Brush, Smear Brush, and Custom. Select a brush and you have slider options for Size, Power, Opacity, Aspect, and Step (repeats). You control the fall-off of soft edges by describing a brush profile using spline, linear, or polynormal curves, giving you lots of control. You can also create image brushes based on JPEGs, so you can copy actual natural media “strokes” or photos. These can also be Anim brushes that lay down QT movies that change as you paint. With a little work, this could easily be set up to have changing strokes copied from traditional paint materials, but there are many other “rubber stamp”-style uses as well. Essentially, Anim brushes allow you to paint video streams as brush strokes. The program doesn't come with many presets, but brush presets created by users are available at the Mirage site for registered users. Lastly, all the brushes can be connected to an input device such as a Wacom tablet, and additional parameters for pressure, orientation, fade, azimuth, and other dynamic attributes can be controlled by the stylus action.

One of the cooler brush options is Drying. If you don't check the Drying box, you can layer strokes additively without painting “on top” of previous strokes. Because you can control transparency, this creates the semblance of mixed colors. The Smear Brush is also useful to soften hard-edged strokes akin to softly rubbing a pastel drawing to blend areas of color.

Papers are also available in the Toolbar. These are grayscale, bitmapped images. Drawing on Paper is a bit like doing a rubbing on a gravestone and bringing out the texture underneath. You can import any texture as a Paper, and there are lots of additional textures available online at various asset sites. Overall, the brushes and paint selection tools provide a very usable painting and drawing environment.

Animation

The basic process for setting keyframes, making in-betweens, and managing layers will be easy for anyone with basic experience in animation to understand.After Effects users will be right at home because the timeline, layer metaphor, and layout are similar. The Light Table for onion skinning is extremely easy to use, and it takes a couple of hour-long sessions to get into the flow of drawing frames. I imagine that in a week, you could be coordinating moving backgrounds with foreground animation essentially covering all fundamental aspects of cel animation. A simple tutorial on Mirage provides a bare-bones introduction to the cel animation workflow at www.bauhaussoftware.com/training_tutorials_html_temp_bb.php.

Mirage has several drawing aides — such as grids, adjustable guidelines, spline tools, and line tools — and various shapes and selection tools including a Magic Wand for isolating colors. As with After Effects, it has all the necessary transform tools for layers — such as scale, move, and pan — although the tools' behavior is not exactly the same as AE. As you might expect, there are transfer modes for any layer or brush stroke.

Mirage also has a complete ink and paint engine. Fill tools operate in a straightforward manner, and you have several ways to clean up jaggies when filling areas outlined with rough brush strokes. I found this to work cleanly. If, for some reason, you are using imported media and combining photo sources with digital art created in Mirage, it has a keyer that can help isolate areas that you will fill with color or alter with a filter effect.

Before making a quick survey of compositing tools, there is one area that Mirage lacks: a 2.5D workspace with a camera. Since the introduction of a camera into After Effects, complex multiplane effects are now common in television commercials and motion graphics in general. Toon Boom and Cambridge Animation have had cameras for some time making an otherwise difficult task extremely easy. It may even be that the absence of this feature in Mirage may restore more sophisticated cinematic language to animation, but multiplane effects are undoubtedly a common requirement in animation and a lot of work to plan and execute without a camera. This is the only real drawback to Mirage's animation workflow.

MiniX

Mirage does not have a traditional dope sheet or x-sheet. Instead it has the MiniX. This turns out to be a single text field where you enter a string of frames with repeats, cycles, and holds. My experience using x-sheets is limited and far in the past, so I am unable to gauge the reaction that this might have with traditionalists. Generally speaking, I doubt this goes over well with anyone working in a large traditional environment. Mirage seems to be popular with boutiques and individual artists brought up in the post-paper world and who may be more open-minded. In any case, Mirage claims this is easier to use and understand than an x-sheet.

Compositing

It is really not a criticism of Mirage StudioPro to write that there are better compositing tools on the market. Mirage is capable as a compositing tool, but After Effects and Autodesk Combustion are more sophisticated solutions for motion graphics and visual effects, as well as industry-standard tools. However, Mirage has by far the most advanced and varied tools for compositing in a 2D-animation product. One drawback is that Mirage has limited compatibility with Photoshop plug-ins. Mirage will only accept Photoshop 5.5 filters for the PC; newer filters written for the later Photoshop spec won't work. Mirage has its own plug-ins, including Keyer, Color Factory (a way to apply arithmetic operations to color channels), Particle Generator, and Calculator. Mirage also has its own programming language, Elements, but I did not take the time to learn this feature. For animators with a programming background, this may be of considerable interest.

The compositing tools cover the bases, allowing you to rotoscope, pull keys, perform rig removal, and animate hundreds of layers in an effects shot if necessary. This is a program with more than 10 years of development on the NewTek side, and it has considerable depth to the compositing tools. On the motion graphics side, Mirage only has bitmap text, which cannot be edited after it has been created. This seems a bit clunky, but many traditional animators are so disciplined that the need to go back and edit things dozens of times is not necessary. However, if you are working with clients who expect lots of changes, vector-based text is the way to to go.

Conclusion

Bauhaus is a responsive software company with an informative site and reasonably good documentation. Basic tutorials are included with the software, but there are no third-party manuals as of yet.

Mirage StudioPro supports QuickTime and Numbered File Sequence for import and export. It also supports still formats: 32-bit Targa, TIFF, SGI, and PSD. Adobe Flash files can be imported with their layers intact.

Mirage is a very powerful program and a rare example of a software application earning a second chance by reinventing itself for a new audience of 2D animators. Mirage arrives at the end of the 3D scare of a few years ago, when Disney and DreamWorks seemed to be backing away from 2D movies. Fortunately, the majority of animation on television is 2D, and this shows no signs of giving way to 3D work. Mirage is coming into its own at what I hope is a mini renaissance in the cel world. I'd like to see fewer clicks for painting and a 2.5D camera added to the program, but if I get any time off this year, I will definitely dust off a few neglected storyboards that were intended for 2D and jump into Mirage. That's my best recommendation. Mirage inspires.

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bottomline

Company: Bauhaus Software
San Antonio, Texas; (210) 212-7530
www.bauhaussoftware.com

Product: Mirage StudioPro

Assets: Powerful 2D animation, affordable, advanced compositing tools for animation production.

Caveats: No 2.5D camera, could use fewer clicks for painting.

Demographic: 2D animators.

PRICE: $549

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S.D. Katz is a New York-based writer/director and author of the best-selling books Shot by Shot and Cinematic Motion.

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