[sythgara]

I found this software by sheer chance after few years. I’m pretty sure I tried backing you guys up on kickstarter couple years back, so I’m glad this is still coming along.

I took it for a spin and over last 3 afternoons came up with this little expression excercise – https://twitter.com/Sythgara/status/1453083029338050565

Overall, I am loving it so far, especially for an alpha stage. It did not give me any issues or bugs. It’s intuitive enough to start animating from the get go.

 

Now, some things that did slow my process down and what I would like to see:

-I struggled with the finesse of the pen strokes. I lack the same accuracy with all pen options in the software compared to using a good pencil brush in clip studio paint. The pressure and opacity settings feel a little bit rough

-lasso tool was giving me something odd. When i picked the jaw selection to adjust it in one layer without having to redraw, the jaw would copy itself in that position into other layers? Not sure what that’s about.

-It would be nice to see more of those tools in toolbar.

-I started the animation in default widescreen mode and when I decided I wanted to resize it, I could not resize the entire animation. Just individual frames. If there was a way to adjust layers in bulk that would be very handy.

– A way to zoom with mouse wheel or similar

-scroll bars

-I haven’t had a chance to check audio, but if you can hear it as you switch between the frames like flash did/does that’s great. It was great for making sure every frame was in synch to the dot.

-Easily accesible color wheel

-Very soft brush option later on

-Maybe a way to group your shots, although I’m not sure how well the software is optimised for longer sequences or does it work better with few shots you then edit in a video software

 

I’ll keep playing with it and return if i remember anything else!

 

Thanks

 

[Niels]

Thanks a lot Sythgara! Your expression animation looks great! Thanks for sharing it. I will retweet it. But first I’ll better answer your questions/comments…

Yeah, the pen options are very basic on purpose. We haven’t done a real brush system, because we have focused on nice but simple lines and the line engine under the hood. That enables you to do a lot of really cool stuff in later releases. But check out scaling up your lines/drawings – it’s like magic right? 😉 Anyway, we plan on evolving the pen options more in the next major release.

Lasso selection copying itself to other layers: I am not sure what that is about either 😉 I don’t understand what you are describing? What do you mean by “jaw”? Could you have changed to another layer while having your floating selection up? This way you can easily paste drawings on other frames or other layers. But it shouldn’t just happen of course. If this is a bug – are you able to replicate this?

More tools in Tool Bar: Your Speed Dials and Tool Bar will be configurable, so you can choose which and how many tools will populate them. If all goes well, this will be part of the next alpha release already (Alpha 5).

Resize entire animation: To have your entire animation in another format (resolution/aspect ratio) you just go to File -> Scene Settings – where you can go up or down in resolution and/or change to a more or less wide format, etc. You can have it stretch your drawings, keep aspect or crop/center.

Zoom with mouse wheel: On our list – Coming up soon.

Scroll bars: Do you mean in the main drawing area view? Aren’t those just annoying? Hold H (or Space) for the hand tool. Let me know, why you think scroll bars are important.

Audio: You will hear the audio while you “scrub” your frames (dragging the playhead back and forth), so you can get exact sync. We didn’t put audio on flipping with the cursor keys (or Q/W) on purpose.

Color Wheel: Coming soon – and very easily accessible. 😉

Soft brush: Sure – when we do our line engine upgrade.

Group Shots: Yeah, my thought has always been to animate shot for shot and then edit them together in any editing software later on. I believe that would work best – but let me know if you believe otherwise?

Anyway, thanks a lot for your thoughts! Let me know if you stumble across more!

Best,
Niels

[sythgara]

Thank you! By jaw I just meant transforming the part of image to move the character’s jaw up or down. I was switching between frames to see how much to adjust it but i think you might be right, I did not deselect it hence it might have been showing in other frames that way.

I did remember one thing as far as coloring goes. Clip studio paint has this downloadable fill tool, which works like this. You mark your lineart layer as reference layer. And as long as there are no gaps (some level of adjustment is available) you use a lasso fill tool to quickly color areas in just by drawing around them, and when you let go it fills it in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgVWO8qieYs Here’s a video of what it looks like

[Niels]

Thanks Sythgara – we are doing and testing this and a couple of other similar fill tool methods. So I think you will like it, when we finally have it ready. Looking forward to it! 🙂