[Niels]

Thanks a lot for the details.

And yes! We have created a similar, but very flexible, system where you can choose to have certain (or all) colors in “buckets”, so you can later change/adjust each color instantly while looking at the colored frame or whole animation. Perfect for getting all colours just right. Or even for changing the lighting environment drastically, going from say day to night.

Here’s how we see the interface look so far (this will probably change 117 times before we finish it) 😉

 

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Beautiful work Bert! Thanks for showing it.

And I am very pleased that your OCA export/import seemed to work without any hiccups. I haven’t had too much feedback on that tbh. Was it a good and easy transfer (Animation Paper to Tahoma2D)?

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Well done Ruby! Looks great! Learning from the master! 😉

[Niels]

OK, I see. We will have to do something about this then. I’m sure there are others in the same situation as you.

But I’m glad you can use this solution for now. Thanks for letting me know!

[Niels]

Oh! I think I know what this is about. Are you on Windows? Maybe you have your scale set quite high – which make AP think it is on a high resolution display – making the tool icons large and the window large as well. When you try to make the window smaller it quickly reaches its minimum size and will not go any smaller.

To fix this, you need to adjust this setting in Windows to a lower percentage. It is probably at 150% or 200%, so try with 100%, like this:

Let me know if this helped or not?

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Ruby! Very kind words and music to my ears 😉 Thank you!

Yes, colouring is coming as a free update first thing after our main release. We already worked quite a lot on it – and it is going to be great.

As you want to learn, I encourage you to focus on the actual animation. I mean, do rough key drawings as you get your timing and basic movement working. Then do breakdowns and then refine doing a tie down pass on a new layer – and so on. All this is the most important for training your animation skills.

If you want to color your work at some point, we have made Animation Paper so it is easy to export to other software. There’s plenty of options. And when it comes to choice of colouring software, pretty much anything goes. Photoshop and Krita would both be excellent choices (until AP is ready for colouring of course! ;)).

For Photoshop you can export your frames as numbered drawings and layers. This way, if you have drawings that are reused, you only color one of the copies. After colouring you can assemble the complete animation. For Krita I would export as OCA (Open Cell Animation) format. Krita will import this format directly and thus keep track of your held or reused drawings (clones) as well as layers. You’ll find out. And if something turns out to be confusing, let me know. 😉

I wish you the best of luck with you learning to animate! You will need a little patience to do animation, but it is sooo exciting to watch your work come to life!

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks Pamela. Please explain more – do you need this because you are using a mouse and not a pressure sensitive tablet/pen?

[Niels]

Hi Aarav,

I have tried fixing your file, by using the new feature “collapse” that will be released in Alpha 8. It works, but unfortunately the file I save is not backwards compatible with your version (Alpha 7).

I see only 2 solutions for you right now…

1) You try to free up some memory, so you can load your file. Then you can fix the most data consuming  drawings (those towards the end is worse) by tracing them one by one on to a new blank drawing and then deleting the old ones (no lassoing!). This will clear it all up and give you a small file size when you save, so you can load it anytime.

2) You wait for Alpha 8, and use the new collapse feature. It will probably be released in a few weeks if all goes well.

I hope this helps you after all.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi again Aarav,

Thanks for emailing me your file. What I mediately notice, is that the file is quite large (over 200mb), even though the animation is virtually only one layer and not super long. Nice animation though! 😉 It loads fine here on my Mac.

My guess is that you might not have that much memory in your computer? How much do you have?

Anyway, we need to have your animation (the data) cleaned up. We recently did a new feature, where you are able to “collapse” your drawings, so all the built up data is removed. This would help you in your situation. But that feature is coming in our next release (Alpha 8).

For now, the best thing is to get rid of the problematic drawings. You can trace them to new drawings before you delete them.This will clean them up. Only thing is that you can’t open the file! 😀

I’ll see if I can help with the cleaning later today. I’ll get back to you here…

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

OK, interesting. Would you mind emailing me your problematic ap file? My email address is the one you got your activation key from.

I might be able to figure out what the problem is having this file.

Thanks a lot fro your help!

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

That’s great! Thanks forgetting me know.

[Niels]

Thank you very much Derik. Kind words.

[Niels]

Thanks, Derik!

“One button push”? I’m not sure I fully understand. Isn’t it possible to configure your pad, so when hitting one button, it sends the shortcut for Add Blank (which is Ctrl ArrowDown on Windows and Cmd ArrowDown on Mac)?

Please let me know, so I can better help.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your computer. Have you tried updating the Wacom driver to the latest?

[Niels]

Hi Auogx,

Thanks for asking! That sounds strange. AP is supposed to be fully compatible with Wacom. It works on everything we’ve tested.

Does your Wacom work with other software?

Best,
Niels