[Niels]

I just remembered that we do actually have an alternative shortcut working. It’s not exactly the same as you are suggesting, but maybe it will work for you?

If you while inside the drawing area pane hold your Ctrl key (or Cmd key on Mac), you can drag left/right to change the size of your pen – or drag vertically, to adjust the opacity.

I hope this will help you! Please let me know. 😉

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi again Rusty, we got an idea on maybe what could cause this. We will do a test version later today – could I ask you to try it out to see if it solves anything? I would need your email address so I can send you the test version. Please write it here or email it to me (my email address is the one you got your activation key from).

Thanks!
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Rusty!

Wow! Thank you SO much for this. Another user just reported the same problem, but your thorough test and explanation is super valuable. Now it should be fairly simple for us to reproduce and fix this! If all goes well, we will have this fixed for the next release (Alpha 8).

Very helpful! Much appreciated!
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Loki, thanks for this!

Actually we do have some unfinished areas of AP regarding the frame number turning red. It was supposed to turn red if it can’t keep up the frame rate when playing. However it does not work correctly – also when it is no problem at all to keep up. So it is just not reliable right now. 😉

But of course, if you are experiencing things running slow, then this is interesting and something I want to investigate.

First of all, previously reported slowness is usually always about overusing the lasso. Do you use the lasso? Using the lasso a lot will make picking up a lasso slow on that specific drawing. Also undo’ing it will be slow.

We actually just finished a new feature that can “collapse” the build up data – solving the problem. But that doesn’t help you now. It would be interesting for me to examine your .ap file – would you mind emailing it to me? (or a link to it – I’m guessing it is quite large)? This will help me figuring out where the problem is – so we can solve it. My email address is the one you got your activation key from (because of spam-bots I will rather not write my address publicly here).

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Thank you very much! But I worry that AP is unusable for you until we do the custom shortcuts.

Let me know if you find a solution. Because if you don’t, I hope I can think of something to help you.

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Maria,

Thanks for making the video! It helps a lot.

It seems like you maybe are accidentally holding down your Ctrl key? (Cmd key on Mac) At least with normal behaviour, you can hold that key down and get easy access to quickly adjust pen size by dragging left/right and opacity by dragging up/down.

While this feature has been a request of several people – it might not be good for everybody. My guess is you are using undo (Ctrl Z) a lot and therefore maybe you are unconsciously keeping your Ctrl key pressed sometimes – even though you are in the middle of drawing lines.

At some point fairly soon we will make the keyboard shortcuts customisable – and then it will be easy to just get rid of this shortcut if it doesn’t fit your way of working.

Let me know if I am guessing correctly 😉

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Haha, that’s great work Kale! Thanks for showing it. Yes, it’s so good to experiment with stuff like frame rate. I hope you learned something 🙂

In professional productions you most often have to follow a certain fixed frame rate. So then it’s all about using the clones right to get the perfect timing.

Good luck with your next animation!

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

OK, I’m glad we talked this through then 🙂 Thanks a lot.

[Niels]

2) But if you drag from a thumbnail it will produce clones. You are changing the timing. I don’t see why you would want to do that and have the audio sounding at the same time. Maybe I am misunderstanding? Also regarding limiting the adding of clones to the set FPS is not a good idea in my mind – you will want to have the fastest response time possible of the software.

4) The annotations have to follow the size of the thumbs, to not get out of sync with the corresponding drawings. If you don’t know, you can link your annotations column to the drawings of a layer – which means, if you add or remove drawings in the layer, i.e. change your timing, your annotations will still follow along and correspond to the correct drawings/frames. If you mean, you need more space horizontally, we could make the annotations field wider generally. However, it is a dilemma how wide it should be ideally, because you don’t want it too wide, if you need this column to be positioned between layer columns and still be able to glance at it all without having to scroll (left/right).

Anyway… 😉 I’m just trying to explain my thoughts and reasons to make it like it is. Please come back to me, if you need me to understand better! 😉 Thanks 🙂

[Niels]

Hi Loki,

I’m always super interested, when people do lists like this one. Much to learn for me! So thank you very much Loki.

I’ll comment on each point, to make sure I understand fully. Maybe your issues are already covered somehow.

1) “Loading bar”/”progress bar”: This is of course good to have in places where you have to wait for some process to complete. We already have it in several places. But we’ll check for additional places it might make sense – including what you suggest when deleting many frames. Thanks!

2) Audio scrubbing in X-Sheet? I don’t understand. You do already have audio scrubbing – what do you mean “in X-sheet”?

3) I am aware of this limitation and it is going to be fixed. Scrolling the x-sheet when dragging down outside the edge of the x-sheet is on our todo-list. And yes, Ctrl Down is good for adding blank drawings, but if you need clones you can use ‘ (apostrophe).

4) If you want to make your X-Sheet thumbnails (layers), including your annotations field, bigger: Go to the menu X-Sheet -> Thumbnail Size.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks for these details Loki! So it works now, after you restarted it? Cool, but I will have to keep an eye on this issue then.

[Niels]

Thanks a lot for your thoughts Loki. I wanted to create a piece of software that made sense in every way. Including having one version for everybody – the complete version. Keeping it simple.

The current alpha version, does not include paint/coloring yet. This will come pretty soon though.

Thanks again Loki. Your opinions have been duly noted.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks Loki!

I just checked and I do not have any problems here. Can you let me know what exactly you are doing, step by step, to get this problem? Also, can I ask what computer hardware and OS you are using?

And by the way, changing frame rate should be handled by AP without problems. It is not supposed to require re-import. Also with this issue, are you able to reproduce this issue – let me know if you can do a step by step here. Sorry, for the trouble. Thanks for the help!

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Loki,

Thanks for asking 😉

All pre-releases (all alpha and beta releases) will always be free. When we do release the finished version, however, after a while the pre-releases will at some point stop working.

You can then chose to download the finished version (Animation Paper v5.0) which will work as a free trial (for 14 days). If you decide to buy a license (our introductory offer will be $79 usd one time fee), you will own this lifetime license – not a subscription – including free point-updates (5.1, 5.2, etc).

Do you think this is all fair?

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks Joshua. Actually closing and re-opening the program should not change anything. The problem is all the internal vector data that is building up, especially when using the lasso multiple times on the same drawing. Flipping the frames, drawing lines, etc, is working at top speed all the time, it is only “overuse” of the lasso that remains a problem.

This has been an important issue for me to do something about for a long time – and as a matter of fact, we are right now making our finishing touches on exactly that! So, it is actually kind of what you are asking for. We call the function “Collapse”. When a drawing builds up with a lot of data, you will get the option to collapse it – meaning, all the internal vector strokes of the problematic drawing will be collapsed down to an internal bitmap (raster) layer. And actually this is held in memory in double resolution, which means you can still lasso/rotate/scale with virtually no degradation in the quality of the line.

As you may, or may not, be aware, the line engine in AP is quite sophisticated. And this is why you will normally be able to scale any part (or all) of any drawing as much as you want to. All lines will stay perfectly crisp as they are re-rendered even if you scale it way up. If you haven’t tried it, you should! It almost feels magical 😉 Also, with the next alpha release, you will easily be able to export in higher resolution that the one you have worked in, with perfectly crisp lines as the exported result.

After collapsing as described above, however, the drawback is that you lose the data that allows for all the perfect scaling, but only for the lines you have drawn so far and for that particular drawing in question. Everything else is still kept as internal vector data including all the new lines you will draw, and therefore they are fully scaleable. And to be clear, all this is not something you, as the user, need to think too much about. It is all handled underneath the hood anyway. 😉

So I think you will be happy with the next update. It is all included in Alpha 8, that will be released as soon as we can.

Best,
Niels