[Mark Mason]

Hi, just started to play around what promises to be a lovely new piece of software. I’ve been animating professionally since 1985 and I’m hoping Animation Paper will bring back some of the real pleasures of paper drawn animation combined with the time saving usefulness of digital.
It would be REALLY useful to have the ability to skew a lassoed or selected drawing. Rotate and rescale is good, but adding skew is very useful when roughing out animation.

[Niels]

Bringing back pleasures of traditional animation but in a modern digital way is one of the important reasons for Animation Paper. Happy you see it that way too.

I agree about the skew functionality. It’s on our todo-list already. 🙂

Thank you!

[Mark Mason]

Great, thanks.
More interactivity on the X-Sheet would be good too. I keep wanting to Right-Click on drawings and clones to quickly do things like copy, paste, clone, duplicate and other options like multiple drawing select (is that the usual click and shift click – selected drawings went black) to multiple set the length of exposures to 2s, 3s, 4s or even a custom length.
The X-Sheet – Active Layer – What to display beyond last drawing – Freeze last drawing and Show buttons doesn’t appear to work. (I’m on PC, Windows 10).
Can I also ask why it’s only possible to have one colour on each layer? When I’m roughing out animation I start with a light blue pencil (I stick with my old Col-erase animation pencil colours), work over with a dark blue, add match-lines with a red, and coloured character lines with an orange. When I clean up, I’d traditionally have used Black, red, dark blue and perhaps orange. A digital pack of coloured pencils which all work on a single layer would be lovely.

Thank you so much for developing this software,
Cheers,
Mark

http://www.markmasonanimation.co.uk

[Niels]

Thanks Mark!

Right click in the X-sheet for an easy access to menu points and functionality is coming soon!

Yes, to select multiple drawings in the x-sheet, you click the first and then shift click the last drawing in the selection you want. Then setting them all on 2’s or stuff like that is coming soon too.

In alpha 1 the “beyond” button is not visible at the end of the longest layer. It will show buttons at alle other (shorter) layers. If you try this with only one layer, that layer is “the longest” and therefore no button. But actually we just changed that, so a button is showing even in the longest layer (coming in alpha 2).

A layer has one color. That’s how it is in Animation Paper. This is to set the layers visually apart. And you can super easily change the whole layers color with a click of a button.

This is also to support your idea of first roughing out your animation in blue. Then work it over as a new pass on top (using say, black). You can then delete your rough blue and then turn your refined black layer to blue – to do another pass in black on top and so on.

The actual colors are not changeable in alpha 1, but they will be soon, so you can get your light blue and orange and whatever color you need.

[Mark Mason]

Thanks, Niels,
I suppose one of your challenges will be not to stuff the software with too many things, simplicity will be the success of your software. As simple as animating on paper.

[Niels]

Exactly! First of all it needs to stay simple and uncluttered – but at the same time have what you need as an animator. It is not easy but it can be done I’m sure.