[Marcin Sus]

Hi.
I’m new user of AP and I’m new to animation so my feedback may not reflect typical animation workflow.
Great software and I love approach to have maximum productivity with easy modification of tools, marquee menus for quick actions, and very decent drawing capabilities (but I’m not and expert).

First thing I was missing is lack of key customization. Of course, all built-in shortcuts are quite good but I think it would be more ergonomic to have time related functionality also on the left side of the keyboard. Flipping back and forth (which I assume is super often action) for instance could have X and C and V for play toggle and V holde for reverse playback (samem as Enter key).
Of course best solution is to have ability to define own bindings, but even some predefined more compressed layouts would be great.

Second thing was lack of showing onion skin between any 2 drawings.
Example scenario:
– add drawing to frame 1
– add 10 blank frames
– add another drawing in frame 12
– breakdown in frame 6 – with this selection I would nice to see backlight of frame 1 and frame 12
– if you swith to add some breakdown in frame 9 it should show only previous and next drawing backlight frame 6 and 12
– etc.

In other workds light table should show backlight of first previous frame with pixel data and first next frame with pixel data.

I know you can emulate this marking specific frame as Key Drawing but I think I need to toggle back and forth pair of frames to have behavior I described in my scenario.

But maybe this is not something handy or common to use.

Possibility to color things would be awesome but I assume it’s core feature under develeopment.

I’ve notice some performane issue with onion skinnig which forced me to restart the software. If I find any repro for this I will let you know. My drawing suck so I need to use multiple undo/erase/re-draw actions so maybe I put to the test some underlying systems. Next time I’ll check memory consumption, and maybe grab dump and log files (if they exist).

Cheers,
Marcin

[Niels]

Hi Marcin,

Thanks for your comments!

1) Actually you DO have flipping keys on the left of your keyboard: Q and W. Please check out the keyboard shortcuts here: https://animationpaper.com/animation-paper-keyboard-shortcuts-for-pc/

I am fully aware that many people want to do their own shortcut key bindings. That ability will come soon in one of the following alpha releases.

2) The blanks you are putting in between your drawings are considered originals too – meaning they are shown in the light table (only there’s no lines to show in your example). You would want to use “clone drawings” to have between your drawings instead. Much easier this way. You just drag down (or up again) on any original drawing to repeat it. That’s how you do timing in Animation Paper. Or you can use the Add Clone Drawing button instead of using the Add Blank Drawing button. When you do it like this – the lightable behaves just as you expected.

3) Yes, coloring features are still to come (soon in an alpha update).

4) If you draw, erase using erasers and draw again over and over and over – or if you use the lasso tool a lot, data builds up and things will ultimately get slow. The trick is to erase the whole paper using Clear Drawing instead. Draw roughly to get your animation right, then clean it up on a layer on top. You can repeat that many times if you want to do refining in several passes – no problem. But don’t be fudging your drawing too much. 🙂 (I’m not sure if that’s a term in actual english? I hope you get what I’m saying) 😉

Let me know if you have further comments!

Cheers,
Niels

[Marcin Sus]

Hey Niels,
Thank you for your reply.
I watched all tutorials so I assumed arrow keys are the only way. I definitely should check help and see all the options before any comment.
If I start using AP more so I’m sure I will add more comments.

Toggling between draw and erase is nice but period is far from left hand – maybe temporary enable erase when you hold ctrl key – blender’s grease pencil has this feature.

Also I’ve notice some comments about smoothing. I know this feature is not needed when you are professional artist with super precise steady hand, but it looks like this is a standard in any 2d or 3d software now – some kind of lazy mouse or smoothing postprocess. In my opinion lazy mouse would be sufficient, to have ability to clean the lines (and it’s easier to implement).

It looks like cut and lasso is memory hog, few cuts and memory usage jumped from 80MB to 1GB – I’m curious what is the issue. I hope you will find better data represention for you scene objects.

Cheers,
Marcin

[Niels]

Smoothing is actually standard in Animation Paper too. 🙂 We have no settings for it – because it just works quite cleverly and subtly. You would definitely notice it if it wasn’t there. At some point we might present a couple of parameters for the user to be able to adjust it.

The issue with the lasso is that the data in one drawing will build up exponentially. So after 15 – 20 copies on top of it self, number of lines have doubled for every copy, and then memory and CPU usage explodes. We put in a warning with some recommendations. It pops up when picking up takes more than 2 seconds. Hopefully you got that too?

It’s a complex problem. Not just a matter of collapsing something. 🙂 Animation Paper wasn’t designed with extensive lassoing in mind. The positive sides of how this works are the ability to draw and lasso beyond the frame borders, unlimited resolution, so when scaling/rotating you get no degradation or blurring of your lines. Also coloring will take great advantage of this line engine of ours. As well as the ability to work in lower resolution for speed and exporting in higher resolution for quality.

[Marcin Sus]

Oh man, I’m the worst possible user. First didn’t check help for keyboard shortcuts, and now not able to see smoothing algorithm. I guess it’s some kind of Kuleshov effect – didn’t see the smoothing option, so wasn’t able to see smooth lines. 🙂 Sorry for that.
Copy/cut/move/scale/paste is quite common operation in 2d software so maybe there should be some ‘workaround option’ to convert lines to just pixel data and wipe all underlying data related to redraw lines. I think most people are ok with scaling up and lost quality – this is what every non-vector drawing software teach you over the years.
Yes I did see the warning, and it’s better than crash, but it looks like big issues to not able to freely transform/copy data.
But maybe just ignore me 🙂 – I’m new user, I’m not an artist and curiosity was dictated by fact I’m programmer.
Still animation related features are very very nice. I tried animate in sketchbook but in terms of animation is rather basic, but in general they have similar approach to AP to keep things simple and intuitive.
Looking forward to see next releases.

[Niels]

No problem at all Marcin! It is best if people could just launch it and start working without ever reading anything or watching any tutorials. That might not be totally realistic, but as a developer you can strive for it, right? So, good feedback from you definitely. Thanks a lot!

I know people are used to working with traditional bitmap software and therefore expect certain things. But I wanted to escape that and show things could work better. There’s a flipside though. I truly believe I’m on the right path, I just need to think even harder. 😉

Anyway, thanks again! 🙂