[Niels]

Much appreciated – both of you Javi and Bert. Will give it some thought. Thanks!

[Niels]

Cool. Thanks Bert. We’ll test internally and see how it feels with the backwards thing. 😉

[Niels]

Hi Javi,

Paint and fill is, as you probably already are aware, coming fairly soon. My plan is to have paint layers, so you can have your line on top of your painted areas. Also, technically, the two kinds of layers are quite different, so there are many good reasons to let them stay separate. Of course when you fill, it will respect the boundaries of the lines in what ever layers you choose. We have plenty of ideas and plans for how it’s all going to work. And about half of the work have already been done.

But I would love to understand better what exactly it is you are asking. I mean, you want a fill tool, that fills behind the line in the same layer. Understood. But why? Let me know why this is important to you? I need to understand your thoughts and workflow, to decide if I need to change anything in my plans. 😉 Please explain. Thanks!

[Niels]

Hi Kale,

Yes, that is exactly what exporting as OCA is supposed to do. Keep the timing, with information about clones (held drawings and reused drawings) as well as information about layer structure, etc.

If this didn’t transfer over, then something clearly went wrong. I would like to get to the bottom of this.

Would you mind sending me (a link to) both your ap file and your exported OCA data? My email address is the one you got your activation key from. I want to know what went wrong in this process and then I can hopefully help you to get it correctly transferred.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Yes, I have already put it on our todo-list – including the option to turn it on/off. 😉

I’m thinking, since the Return Flip is actually flipping at the set FPS frame rate, we could have the sound play perfectly (without any stuttering) and even play the sound backwards, when the Return Flip goes backwards. What do you think of that idea?

[Niels]

It’s good you mention it Bert! Thank you.

We are deliberately not playing the sound, because I thought it would (at least in some circumstances) not be preferable while just flipping back and forth checking your drawings. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it would be a good idea to have sound playing on Return Flip – and that’s the way you do it if you want to hear the sound. Of course we could make hearing the audio an option.

For now, as you probably already know, you can scrub (while hearing the audio) by dragging the playhead back and forth.

Cheers,
Niels

[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