July 19, 2021 at 8:10 pm #3784
Niels Krogh MortensenNiels
Keymaster

Thanks a lot for this, Kaye! If the software crashes, it is definitely a bug somewhere. I will try and see if I can replicate it. If you don’t mind, it would be great help for me if you sent me your .ap file, so I can follow your steps and hopefully get the same bug here. Then we have optimal conditions to find the problem. My email address is the one that sent your activation key.

About 32/64 bit: I don’t believe this would be causing the problem in your situation, but of course you should always choose 64bit (if it matches your computer) so it runs the fastest. We are offering both, but if you just clicked the big Windows download button it was the 64bit version you got.

About the warning you probably encountered. It is about how Animation Paper is built internally. Technically our drawing engine is part vector / part bitmap, and therefore we are able to offer some really cool functionality, like speed, clever line stabilization, bucket fill without destroying antialiasing or “eating” part of your line. It’s a matter of quality. Also you are able to draw, and stamp down selections, partly or fully outside the frame – and get it picked up and moved back in later. And maybe most importantly: all lines can be rotated and scaled indefinitely without any degradation or blurring. Try it! It’s almost magical 🙂

The drawback is you can not just keep lassoing parts of drawings infinitely. Data builds up if you do that, which ultimately means that a particular drawing/frame will take way too long to render. Especially it can take several seconds to pick up a lasso area one more time. The large amount of data for the particular drawing can be copied to other drawings through more lassoing and this can make the problem bigger and your file size explode. Animation Paper is designed with traditional hand drawn animation in mind – thus rough sketching as a first pass, then refining passes to clean up is encouraged – until final inked frames. Using the lasso is great to adjust here and there, but over-using it is not recommended. I hope the reason is clearer now.

To help in your current situation with your scene, do a new empty layer, trace or refine all your drawings onto the new layer and then delete your old layer. When saving you will see your file size be reduced to a fraction of its previous size and you can safely use the lasso again 😉 (without going crazy! 😉 How much “crazy” means, depends on the specs of your computer/memory/etc).

I hope this helps. Let me know if my explanations makes any sense or not 😉

Best,
Niels