Thank you for the reply!
Just to clarify, the fan wouldn’t be center up and down as you wrote, but would be from the left or right corner of the paper, depending what the user sets as their drawing hand. ie. Right-hander would be from the upper left corner. To simulate a real drawing desk.
Here’s my dream 🙂
From the top corners, one finger dragged towards the center of the screen could be previewing the very 1 sheet underneath,
2 fingers would skip the previous drawing entirely and display the 2nd previous drawing. So forth for 5 fingers.
If you watch animators (I know you do) they often *open* if you will, not flip, to a specific previous drawing to look as reference. It assists with keeping characters on model, maintaining size etc.
When you release your finger, you bounce back to your active frame.
What would be the creme de la creme, but I’m not sure if Cintiqs are capable of having fingers and pen tips at the same time, is the ability to hold your finger down and draw on the drawing your looking at when you want to make minor fast tweaks to a previous drawing, without leaving the active frame. Release your finger and you again bounce back to the active drawing.
Onion skin is nice, but often rough animators don’t even use the light, they prefer rolling/fanning and removing from the desk and flipping. Onion skin can be very messy and tiring to look at. Breakdown artists also follow this, but inbetweeners and clean-up artists use the lightbox/onion skin. Every other animation software has onionskin, so if you really want your software to stand out from the crowd, I recommend placing an emphasis on gestures. That would make “Animation Paper” really animation paper! 🙂
Cutting, pasting, zooming…. great! But imagine trying to sell the software to the most stubborn of animators who refuse to give up pencil and paper. ie. Mark Henn and Eric Goldberg (I think are the only exclusive 2D animators left at Disney), Glen Keane, Andreas Deja etc. Sell “the experience”.