[Georg]

Hi Niels, first, thank you very much for this amazingly clear and simple program! Not only super-practical but even beautifully done. I have a question that is not actually focused on animation. I would like to use the program to create a whiteboard-style explainer video for teaching purposes. I have drawn up on paper a type of poster full of text and images, and I can insert it easily as a layer. What I want to do now is trace the drawing, bit by bit, on new layers. Do you have any recommendation how to do this best? There are probably a number of ways to approach this. On way would be, I suppose, to do only a few strokes and then safe that as a new layer; then copy all and insert on the next layer; and so forth. Another way would be to simply record continuously all the strokes one after the other – if there is such a function, or you plan it. Or is there yet another way? I understand that this is probably not something you had in mind when you designed the program, but it seems to me that you may greatly expand its scope to this application with possibly a very small tweaking. Curious to hear what you think. Thank you!

[Niels]

Hi Georg, thanks for this.

So, to make sure I understand, you want to have a way of “recording” your strokes as you draw? So it can be played back again so viewers watch your drawings being drawn stroke for stroke, right?

That is not something we have in Animation Paper now. However, it would be fairly easy to do (as you mentioned). We have discussed this before internally, so I will put it on the list and then I’ll see if we can find a good and nonintrusive way to make it work UX-wise.

Cheers,
Niels

[Georg]

Hello Niels,

thank you for the very quick reply! And yes, you are right. The benefit for the viewers is that they see the drawing develop on an empty canvas. Conversely, if the onion skin reference would be visible to them up front it would make watching the drawing very boring.

I am so glad you are considering this. It would allow for a hybrid animation / whiteboard technique which would be simply fantastic to communicate complex concepts/ideas – even when all the elements must been seen at the same time on the same screen – all the while making it more creative, artful, and fun with the possibility to add real animation.

Researchers and scientists, who are more and more on the look-out for better tools to communicate visually, would be very intrigued by this, I believe.

To my knowledge, a similar feature only exists in the 2D “grease pen” functionality of Blender. Drawing programs, like Procreate or Tayasui (which is much like Animationpaper in its minimalistic elegance) either do not have a good play-back function, or they do not allow for the removal of the reference layer; so the effect can only be achieved in post with a chromakey / green screen video editing program.

None of this is nearly as user-friendly or fun as Animationpaper would make it. So I really keep my fingers crossed that you find a good way to make it work.

Cheers,
Georg

[Niels]

Thanks George. Appreciated.

[john kanzler]

My not be elegant, but you could draw it entirely on frame one, then copy/paste while erasing a little more in each frame. When compiling frames into a movie, reverse the order…?

[Georg]

Hello John & thanks much for the suggestion. That could work too! Will give it a try. Cheers, G

[S.L. Kjhsdgf]

For what it’s worth, I also use AP for a similar purpose in note-taking and proof delivery for my lab. Georg is not alone!

[Georg]

Hello KJHSDGF,

Thanks. That sounds both encouraging and intriguing. Can you offer a bit more detail of your workflow in the lab?

Cheers, Georg

[S.L. Kjhsdgf]

Georg,

I more or less use frames as slides and blank space to present over MS Teams (screen sharing software).
When someone in the audience has a question, I’ll copy what they’re asking about with the lasso into a new layer and make the previous layer invisible. So, by the end of a session, the resulting x-sheet will look like:

[ slide 1 ]
[ slide 2 ] –question!–> [ slide 2.1 ] –> [ slide 2.2 ]
[ slide 3 ]
. . .
[ slide n ]

At the end of the session, I can export the frames on each layer and use pdfmergy (an online pdf conversion app) to reorganize them into a single pdf file that I share with attendees.