[Herbert van der Wegen]

Oops. direct links only works from my own IP. Here goes:
https://gofile.io/?c=7NfGft

It might popup a question about whether you have a VPN service. Just tell it you already have one.

[Herbert van der Wegen]

Are you sure? It’s actually a 3-screen setup. I’ll see if I can take a photo of my actual desk later, but here is a screenshot of my OpenToonz setup. Not my own work, I am afraid – can’t show it here, sorry. Just an old demo file.

But it demonstrates the usefulness of a screen pivoted in portrait mode for the X-Sheet. The Wacom is focused on the center screen, and I use the mouse with my left hand to control the rest. OpenToonz also features a horizontal timeline which I snapped at the bottom, but it is hidden by a double-click of the title bar in OpenToonz. Handy, since often a horizontal timeline is easier to work with, and I can do so with my Wacom for quick blocking and sketching instead of having to work with the X-Sheet.

So I always like my animation and drawing software to support multiple screens. Animation Paper’s current rigid GUI won’t let me use my screen space efficiently. I have noticed a lot of applications nowadays adopting a GUI like that, which is a shame: many creatives work on multiple screen setups. Makes no sense to me to limit the GUI in that regard.

I am planning on purchasing a new 32″ retina screen, because of 4K work, and then pivot one of the 27″ Samsungs instead. Even more screen estate! 🙂

Linkie: https://srv-file8.gofile.io/download/7NfGft/opentoonzsetup.jpg

[Herbert van der Wegen]

Wow, my bad and wrong assumptions due to what I thought was bitmap drawing – I just tested various strokes at varying stroke thickness at 1920×1080, and when I switched to 4K and 8K, those strokes actually reflected the details that weren’t apparent in the lower resolution.

What a nice surprise! Brilliant. I stand corrected.

That means you are keeping track of some sort of vector strokes – and that means perhaps even an option later to convert to editable strokes, perhaps?

Still, when drawing I’d like to see those details, of course, rather than upscaling to a higher rez later. The performance at 4K on my machine is still worrying. But I am sure that you will figure out ways to optimize the performance. At 8K it is unworkable, while I work with higher resolutions than that in Krita and Clip Studio.

Are you already using a multi-threaded drawing engine?

And an important question: is AP meant for the initial blocking out phase only? Or will it be possible to do the full animation, including advanced colouring and clean-up for final delivery as well? As I see it now, I would have to import the frames in OpenToonz, clean-up/vector conversion of inks (or even do the inks in OpenToonz), colour, and composite the sequences and scenes for release.

Is AP’s goal to be a companion app, or a full end-to-end delivery animation app? As it stands, it feels more like the first (which is not necessarily a bad thing if it becomes REALLY good, btw).

Other things I would like to see:
– single key undo
– settings to control the responsiveness for zooming and panning. It feels too slow to me. I’d like to be able to zoom in and out in one motion, and that is not possible in AP.
– it would be great if the mouse scroll wheel could be used to zoom in and out. And the middle mouse button to pan the view. Might be strange workflow, but I often keep the mouse in my left hand to quickly control the viewport, and draw with my right hand on the Wacom. It’s more efficient and faster than holding down keys on the keyboard.
– while a simple interface is great to have, I do hope at least AP will be multi-screen compatible. That X-Sheet is just screaming to be placed on my portrait pivoted screen.

Thanks! Looking forward to all the improvements.