Stumped, please help!

[boucha]

Gidday, I'm a newbie in 2D anime, so if ya see me comin, try to be kind! Firstly, I am using Anime Studio Pro, I use Corel Painter IX.5 and have most adobe products for creating/editing images.
My first query is how to make a charactor or shape independant or separate from it's canvas so that it can be exported/imported into Anime studio and manipulated like the sample charactors included in the tutorials? eg: Lenny. Can this be acheived in any way or am I overlooking something? I can import images no worries, I have tried many ways and it's starting to accelerate my male pattern baldness!
Enlighten me please.

Going numb,

Boucha

[Terro]

Fastes way would be to use photoshop. Create a new layer make the image on the empty layer. Then click the Eye icon on the default background layer , this will hide it. You should now be left with your image no background (Should see transparent checkbox pattern behind it instead of white. Now just save the file as a transparent PNG file and import it in your program of choice. You could use GIF's also , but PNG files have a alpha transparency.

[boucha]

I had attemted something simular in corel though it dosent convert to PNG which is Anime studios prefered format. So thankyou, that gives me a direction to go in, most the time information overload clouds the obvious. By the way I found your Quicktime tutorial just as entertaining as it is educational, your a funny bloke! It must have been hard to do on the fly.

Many thanks,
Boucha.