Hi Alex,
Thank you very much for testing Animation Paper and reporting all this. Much appreciated.
Yes, the stroke not appearing while you draw is a known bug. It should actually be fixed now and this fix is part of the next update (Alpha 8).
The lag you experience could potentially be caused by the same problem – the lasso usage. As talked about many times on this forum, using the lasso a lot will make data in a given drawing build up fast – making things slower and slower. Normally this wouldn’t affect drawing it self and flipping and playback and most other things. Only picking up and stamping down lassoed selections, undoing of that, etc. We do have a warning about this popping up if it starts going slow. Maybe you got that?
(And by the way, in our next release (Alpha 8), we will have a “Collapse” button, so the built up data can be collapsed easily. This will help people that like to use the lasso a lot.)
Normally it would be fine to work in higher than HD resolution, but of course it depends on the number of layers and not least your computer hardware. But generally AP should be working very well and fast compared to other drawing software.
One of the great things about Animation Paper, is that it allows you to work in one (lower) resolution (to have a super responsive interaction), but then change resolution to higher later when it is time to do some really detailed work or simply just export in higher resolution for the final finished look. Scaling up with Animation Paper is great – it doesn’t get blurry or degrade anything – it is all rerendered with fully crisp lines. It really feels like “magic”. 😉
About clones: Did you know there’s an option for locking clones for drawing. So you don’t accidentally draw on clones, ie update the original.
If you have done a copy (clone) you can always just hit O (Turn clone into Original) on it. This looses the link, so it becomes a new original and now you can draw or erase as much as you like without changing any other drawings.
Copy/paste selected area: That’s what the lasso is for. Just lasso the area you need, go to the frame you want it copied to and stamp it down there. Also, if you loose your lassoed floating selection (if you hit Escape to loose it or, say, switch to drawing) you can always get your selection back with Shift Escape (“Get latest Floating Selection back” in the menu).
To copy whole drawings, just use copy/paste on thumbnails in the X-Sheet, – but you know that one already. 😉
I’m not sure I get your last point? I am aware that the one thing that tells you what the current frame/drawing is, is the bold rectangle highlighting it. But AP will always make sure that it is visible after you drag the playhead in the timeline or when you flip your frames using the arrow key, etc. By “making it visible” I mean scroll the X-Sheet to show the current frame and current layer. So I am not sure why it becomes confusing? Please explain – I really want to make sure I fully understand. Thank you!
Thanks for all your kind words and for your points! Looking forward to your response to this. 😉
Best,
Niels