-
First off I gotta point out that this is probably the most interested I’ve been in an animation program upon first glance, being able to just jump in and start animating without a clutter of confusing UI made this one of the most exciting programs I’ve had the chance to check out since TVPaint. Kudos!
I spent an hour and a half making a quick straight ahead animation loop and overall things went incredibly smoothly although there were some parts of the program that left me wanting:
– I’d really like to see the onion skin options compressed so it doesn’t clutter up my window as much when left open. There’s a lot of blank space there that could be compressed or used to expand the amount of configuration I have within my onion skin settings (eg; onion skinning only the 7th frame ahead and the second frame behind, toggling different frames on and off individually, TV Paint and the latest Toon Boom version have great UI examples for this kind of onion skin)
– Continuing with onion skin, it’d be a massive boon to get master opacity control for my onion skin settings. I like to keep onion skin almost invisible when animating until I need to quickly crank it up for a tight inbetween, much like working with semi-translucent animation paper and a lighttable. Having two preset light table settings is a great idea though, and in the meantime will be my immediate fix!
– I like the simplified bars when it comes to the pencil/eraser settings (very sketchbook pro, nice!) but when it comes to the onion skin, I’m not sure why, it feels rather awkward to use. One possibility is that because of the layout of the onion skin controls as they are right now, it doesn’t look immediately configurable but rather an explanation of two preset onion skin options. Could be just me though.
– Speaking of the pencil/eraser settings, I imagine saving multiple tool settings will come in future versions but in the meantime being able to see and set exact values would be great for when I’m messing around and forgot what my grail pencil was!
– The only issue that’s made me grumble as I dealt with would be the x-sheet. As I was timing out my animation the x-sheet’s scroll bar updated with every single adjustment forcing me to double check where the next drawings have ended up before I continued. This completely took me out of the zone and was a pain to deal with, doubling or tripling the time it took me to set my timing.
– When it comes to the scrub bar and x-sheet I’ve got a couple suggestions that would make my life a lot easier. An indication on the scrub bar of where the current frame being viewed is in relation to the rest of the timeline would be great. Ableton Live has a great example of what I’m looking for, where you can adjust the current view of what is and isn’t within view while still having an idea of where you are (example here, the black line inside the box is where the audio is paused https://i.imgur.com/cLlTLCF.png ). I can see this being simply a yellow line on the frame range indicating the current frame
– And along those lines, a stronger contrast of the current selected frame on the timeline would also be great! Red color maybe?
– Also an indication of where my keys are in the timeline (maybe within the scrub or playback range bar) so that I can get a birds eye view of my general timing, like looking at a physical x-sheet
– Finally, a way of marking drawings in multiple ways outside of just keys would be super helpful for organization, and adding flipping options to those as well would be a cherry on top!
Overall I’m incredibly pleased with this so far and can’t wait to see how it evolves. Looking forward to getting audio playback and export options! I’ll post what I made in the gallery forum 🙂
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.