[Niels]

Great to hear this workaround worked for you! And thank you very much for your kind words! All the best

[Niels]

Hi Potato Queen! Thanks for your question.

I understand 🙂 There’s not a direct way of doing that in the current release unfortunately. We are working on it – and we’ll have a great feature for this in a future release.

However, to help you now, if you need to just shrink everything towards the center of the frame, you can do it this way:

1) Go to the menu File > Scene Settings… And change your resolution as follows…

2) If you want to make more room around your drawings, say 120% (aka 20% extra), then you multiply your resolution by 1,2. I don’t know your current resolution, but as an example, if it is HD 1920 x 1080, you type in 2304 x 1296 (i.e. 1920 x 1.2 and 1080 x 1.2). Make sure to choose the option “Crop/Center” and click OK. All your frames and layers will now have the extra space around it.

3) You can now scale it all back to your original resolution, by going to Scene Settings again and select (or type) your original resolution (like HD 1920×1080). This time make sure to use “Keep Aspect” and click OK. Voila! 🙂

Remember, in Animation Paper, you can change resolution, scale and rescale all you want, without any degradation or blur happening to your lines. No worries 😉

Let me know how it goes and if your have further questions!

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

OK, we’ll make it 3x as the default. We might add the options in Settings later. I tend to prefer not to have too many options (just have it set right from the start 😀 I know that is not always possible because things depends). I just want to keep stuff as simple as possible – otherwise it quickly gets cluttered and can be a bit confusing with too many options. I’m of course talking generally here. We begin with the one new feature on Z and then we’ll see… Thanks again Bahadir!

[Niels]

I agree with you. If you are not particular interested in the hold functionality, then having press/press is better. Then we don’t run into problems with stuff you can’t do while zoomed in.

Actually it would make sense to have this on the z key then. It makes sense because we are zooming – and I like the position of the z key on the keyboard better than the + key (thinking of fast workflow and minimum hand movement). I know we already have zoom (if you hold z) assigned to z, but it could work quite well to do this fast jump zoom in 4x, if you just tap your z key quickly. Say, press it for shorter than 250 ms or something. So a quick tap on the z key will jump into your drawing at 4 times the zoom level and tapping z again will jump back. Holding z, will show the large zoom symbol and let you zoom smoothly by dragging as it works now.

I like that! 🙂

[Niels]

Yes, we have kept Ctrl on PC, which will always correspond to Cmd on Mac in our setup. Likewise will Alt on PC correspond to Option on Mac.

Yes, I was thinking holding the key pressed, while you can do other things like drawing. However, you wouldn’t be able to press other keys of course, which makes this feature a strictly temporary thing: Drawing… hold +… drawing detail… release +.

I was thinking the opposite would be handy, if you where drawing the details (not a temporary detail as above, but a bigger part of the drawing needing to have a zoomed in view) – so you would just be zoomed in normally. Then you wanted to check the bigger picture – see how the details look in the full frame – so you press and hold [-] for a few seconds and release the key again.

Two options? I think that is exactly what I am thinking. + and – keys. But maybe I’m not understanding what you mean by two options? Please elaborate. (If you have the time of course. You are probably busy. Appreciated!)

[Niels]

I see that they use Shift Z for this in Toon Boom. Shift Z to zoom in – and Shift Z again to go back out. I guess that you would prefer it different? I mean, one key only and using hold/release.

So a logical key could be the + key. Holding it will make the current zoom level go up x4. When you release the + key, it will pop the zoom back to where we came from.

Would that work for you Bahadir?

… Just came to think of a similar (but opposite) feature: Hold the – key to zoom out (to reveal the whole canvas), and when – key is released, pop back into the zoom level we came from.

[Niels]

I understand. Holding one key is better. And having all the different options for something people use so much are great. I’ll note this suggestion of yours! Thanks a lot!

Yeah, holding Ctrl can lead to undesired stuff. Was it you who mentioned using undo (Ctrl Z) a lot while drawing? This (also) led to accidentally changing pen size/opacity. So actually, in the current internal version, we are now using Alt to hold for changing pen settings. Works much better! This is part of next release (the beta).

[Niels]

Interesting. Do you mean that you hold a key to zoom and when done, you release the key?

Because otherwise, it might be quite close to using the Ctrl 2 (or Ctrl 3 or Ctrl 4) keys as they work in AP now. They zoom in on the point you are at (at 200%, 400% or 800% respectively).

 

[Niels]

I totally understand 🙂 No problem at all – I’m so glad you wrote about it.

[Niels]

Thanks for your comment Dillon!

Actually the command called “Delete Drawing” is on Ctrl Delete. And that does exactly what you expect it to – delete the one you are currently viewing.

In some situations using “Back-delete Drawing” comes in handy, and that is the one that deletes the previous drawing and has Ctrl Backspace as the shortcut.

For any Mac users reading this, the corresponding shortcuts are Cmd Delete and Cmd Backspace respectively.

We did make it like this deliberately – I hope it makes sense to you too, Dillon 🙂

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks for posting this S.L.! I’m happy you found a solution and you got your activation key.

I am suspecting some glitches/problems that we are experiencing with this webserver being the reason for what you got (thanks for the screenshot by the way). Just tested everything – and at least it works right now. However, it is so frustrating that these glitches occur. We are in the process of changing provider and setting up a new and much better server and website, that can handle all the users we have now and will get in the future.

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

We want to do custom keyboard shortcuts, it’s on our list, – but a lot of other features have been prioritized higher. So that is the only reason we haven’t done it yet. 🙂 It will eventually come.

[Niels]

Yes, I see. Could be a way forward. Thank you.

[Niels]

Your input is super appreciated! Thank you both of you – and thanks Ridvan for your good explanation. I do understand.

There’s no explanation for why it is as it is, other than I thought it would be great like that :). The only technical “issue” is that actual HUE shift requires a color to shift from, therefore black can not physically be hue shifted. But that of course doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do some other feature that allows colored backlight frames.

As a thought experiment, let’s wipe the slate clean and think about what would be the absolutely best way of doing it.

It wouldn’t be a problem making the frames green in one direction and red in the other. But I’m also thinking of how to do this in such a way that the interface is super simple, fast and easy. Not that a green/red solution would necessarily be complex or anything. I’m just saying: What is the best solution? And how can we make it efficient and simple? Please tell me your dreams!

I’m all ears! 😉

[Niels]

I’ll give it a shot and see how it looks. Thanks!