[Suzie Heilo]

I don’t know if this is a bug or an end user problem. I am copying drawings, stamping them on a blank drawing page, cutting them out with the cuter tool, and enlarging them to create a zoom in camera effect. The larger the drawing gets the harder time AP has with it. I get a warning message, which says “Warning This Drawing Uses a Lot of Resources!” “Trace drawing on a new blank drawing and it will run at full speed again.” How do you take a drawing from the animation and trace it?

[Niels]

Hi Suzie,

It is actually not a matter of your drawing being large. Animation Paper handles enlarging drawings very well, because the drawings will not degrade or blur in any way when scaled up. That’s one of the magic things about Animation Paper.

The problem is that copying using lasso will multiply the amount of data in a frame (drawing), so if you keep doing this over and over you risk having your data for a particular drawing increase exponentially. This is what the warning is about. Also the filesize of your scene can “suddenly” be very large because of this.

So, it is better practise to not use the lasso extensively. Try to just draw your frames from scratch using the lighttable for reference. Or copy drawings using copy/paste in the X-Sheet – meaning you copy whole drawings (frames).

I hope this makes sense. I know it seems like a weird problem. But it reflects how the Animation Paper drawing engine is built. There’s plenty of positive reasons why we did it this way, but the drawback is that you can not rely too much on the lasso and therefore multiplying data in a single drawing.

We are closely following how many people have these problems you are experiencing, so we might end up doing two modes or something, so it is up to the user to decide how things should work internally. The bottom line is we want to keep things simple and easy to use. So we’ll see.

So for now you can trace your problem-drawings to reset them to not fill up memory and require too much CPU-power. You asked about “tracing”? I just mean tracing, as in adding a new layer and drawing on top of the old layer. You are probably doing this anyway, when you do passes refining your drawings, cleaning them up or inking them. Once you have your new “clean” layer, you can get rid of the old one, and you will see a huge drop in memory usage and filesize (and performance when lassoing).

I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you need me to elaborate or if you have further questions.

Thanks a lot,
Niels

By the way: I know this is technical and annoying: But if you, instead of stamping and lassoing again, reuse the same lassoed drawing it will not get as bad. 😉 I mean, if you are simply “zooming” into something you are maybe using the same drawing anyway? You can get your latest floating selection back using Shift Esc on your keyboard. Or you can stamp, while holding Shift, to not loose (keep) your floating selection in the first place.

[Suzie Heilo]

Wow, thanks for the information. I don’t think you need to change the program at all. I just needed to know how it works. Again, I am brand new to animation. I can really work around the very helpful information you gave me. I was relying heavily on the cut and lasso tool because I am drawing by mouse. One day I will have a tablet . . . But, really, I too prefer the idea of keeping the software simple and clean.

[Niels]

Thanks a lot Suzie!

[Katherine Leiter]

Wanted to leave a remark with finding this thread that I’d definitely appreciate the option of two different modes! I’m not incredibly focused on the detail or quality of sketches when doing rough animatic work, and there are many times I want to just slightly tweak the size of a sketch, or subtlely rotate an arm, rather than redrawing it completely. So it’d be nice to be able to reliably do so without bumping up to large amounts of slowdown if it’d be at the expense of some image quality, especially when the transformation tools themselves are so slick to work with!

 

Even in trying to make a quick duplicate of a frame that was causing me lag due to the amount of small tweaks I’d done, the program was stuck not responding for a few minutes before I had a chance to save my project and keep going. Never knew about the retained lasso feature for my last selection though, so I’ll try to make use of that more going forward!

[Niels]

Yeah, this lasso problem can go bananas quickly if you are not careful. 🙂 It’s just how things are made internally – great possibilities because of it, but drawbacks as well.