[Niels]

Thank you so much for your nice words and for your list!

 

I can tell you that some of it is already there. I’ll comment on your points below…

– The pen tools do have close-to-each other shortcuts too! The erasers are 1,2 and 3 and the pencil/marker/brush are 4, 5 and 6.

– Hovering the curser over the tool will actually show the “tool tip” – ie the name and the shortcut. Maybe you didn’t wait long enough for the first tool tip to appear? The next ones are instant, so you can “browse” around.

– Buttons in the X-Sheet are on our todo list. Coming soon! But already you can right click and get everything as a context sensitive drop down menu. Be aware, that the menu changes depending on what you are hovering over (1 – thumbnail (aka drawing), 2 – column (layer) or 3 – other area inside the X-Sheet.)

– I don’t remember hearing from others that the grid is hard to see. I suspect it depends on your monitor settings of course. It might be a good idea to include some kind of opacity adjustment though. Noted! Thanks!

– Ruler, lines. Sure! It’s on our list!

 

Looking forward to being able to release updates including these things – to make life just a little bit easier for you and others! 😉

Thanks again!
Niels

[Niels]

OK, thanks a lot Alan.

I will have a deeper look into this. I see the need. To create this functionality can seem simple on the surface, but it can have all kinds of implications. So it is a matter of doing it right. It have to be straight forward for the user. I like this challenge 😉

It is all noted and added to our todolist. Thanks again Alan!

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

OK, I see. Are you using the layers (colours) for different parts of a drawing, like torso, head and arms of a character?

[Niels]

Hi Dave,

So the “proper” way to do the next drawing is to start with a blank and use the lighttable – and trace the part you need to reuse. This way you do not multiply the data – and you won’t have any problems. Of course the lasso works as well as long as you don’t keep lassoing, stamping, lassoing, stamping, and so on many times in the same drawing.

I do appreciate that some people like to use the lasso a lot – especially of course if you are using your mouse. This is why we have now made an option for the user to drop the built up vector data. This will completely take care of your problems in your situation. You will not be able to transform and scale without some degradation/blurring (normally you can scale all you want and all lines keeps crisp and clear), but at least you will not have this locked up situation.

This will be part of our next release (alpha 8) coming soon.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Yes, others have asked for that too. It’s on our list. Thanks for mentioning it though! Important for me to get a feeling for how many people miss something. Thank you!

[Niels]

I believe this has changed at some point (window type). Anyway you are right. I’ll put it on our todo. Thanks for noticing these small things! Those are actually just as important to get right.

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

OK, thanks!

[Niels]

Thanks a lot for this Bert. Yes, the cursor is supposed to go back to the tool you had before, so there must be an issue here. What OS are you on?

[Niels]

Thanks a lot Bert. Appreciated!

[Niels]

And by the way! When you scale up stuff in Animation Paper, it doesn’t degrade or gets blurry. It will rerender all your drawings at full crisp resolution. When you experiment with it, you will see it is sort of magical! 😉 You can try it with the lasso as well. Pick up something, and scale it up, then stamp it down and you’ll see. Maybe you already did that. 😉

[Niels]

Thanks a lot, Bert!

It depends on what you mean. You can take your entire scene and resize it, so if you are working in 2K, you can go to 4K or vise versa. To or from any odd resolution you want. You can choose to crop or resize proportionally, etc. This is all done by going to File -> Scene Settings…

We are also working on doing floating selection (lasso) transformations on multiple or all drawings in a layer. Maybe that is what you are seeking. This is planned to be implemented in one of the next releases.

As a workaround for now, if you want to say, scale an animation up, but keep it in the same scene resolution (I mean, your drawings will fill the frame more), you can do it like this: Using “Scene Settings” I talked about above, scale your animation up, by choosing a custom resolution that fits your wanted scale (like 150% or what ever). When done, then you can go back to Scene Settings and choose your original resolution, and select the option “crop/center” to crop off the excess room at the edges. I hope this helps and makes sense!

Let me know how it goes!

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Ruth,

Thanks for asking about it.

You are right, you can not resize, draw or use the lasso tool on any reference. We are actually going to do a resizing mechanism, so in one of the next alpha releases you will be able to do exactly that.

For now, I suggest you fix your reference image elsewhere (photoshop or other image software you might have). So make it fill the HD frame as you want it, then save it as png and import it again into Animation Paper.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Simon,

Yeah, these are not implemented yet. I chose to show them greyed out in the menu, to show what is coming. Sorry, I know it is kind of confusing – I think I will drop them in the menu (next alpha release), until they are actually there. 😉

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Haha, that’s a great jaw drop! Very funny. Thanks for showing it and getting the gif-thing to work.

[Niels]

Hi Alain,

Not in the current version. I mean, AP runs very well on the M1 – but it is not specifically written for it.

We will support M1 directly very soon though. Probably in a few months.

Best,
Niels