One of the coolest things in the software is the bones tool. You can add bones to your object and select an area for them to control. If you have never worked with bones before, they can be a little odd to work with. OK, very odd to work with. It's sort of like the bones in your body and they are linked together as children of a parent bone. If you move your hand, the bones in your forearm, upper arm and shoulder follow along as well as the muscles and skin. Your hand just doesn't move off by it's self into thin air, rather it takes the rest of you with it. In animation, if bones aren’t utilized and set up right, you can move your hand and it will go off by itself, leaving the rest of your body behind. (It might also pull some of your skin along with it.) So you use the bones and the bone strength to make it all behave in a more realistic manner. I have been working with bones and all they entail in Lightwave for years and I still have trouble with them. Believe me the way Anime studio pro uses bones is one of the easiest and most elegant ways I have used. When I did the animated short in After Effects it was very time consuming to set up and animate, as AE has no bones. You had to make your animation work by cutting out every part and rotating it at its pivot point. ASP is so much easier.
Once you have your bones in your character, you have to animate them. ASP has a timeline that works much like After Effects and Lightwave does. You create your character (or bring them in) and pose them at frame 0, then start animating from there. You can animate by dragging the red vertical time line to a different point in time and then moving something. In my example, I moved the timeline pointer to frame 60 and then moved the bones in the selected right ear. The IK (inverse kinematics) of the bones is set up automatically for you and works extremely well. It's fun to just select a bone and start moving it around to see the whole ear or arm or whatever move as it should. As well as animating bones, you can also animate the individual points in your vector objects as well as the layers themselves, which would allow for movement of hair and clothing and other items.
