[Niels]

Hi Selena, thanks for you thorough description and for your time. I will investigate (get help ;)) and get back to you asap!

[Niels]

Hi Morfy,

Thanks for asking! I understand the confusion – Reference layers can not be edited. You need to add a new layer on top and draw on that instead.

Imported images are bitmap/raster data. Animation Paper has a special line engine for your drawings, so they are technically not compatible. Try lassoing a part of your drawn lines and scale it up. When you stamp it down you’ll see no degradation or blurring of your lines. 🙂

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Tom, Yeah, I was going to tell you about Clear Drawing 🙂 I’m glad you found it 🙂 That’s the one. I always use it from the shortcut, which is *.

Additionally, there’s the O shortcut – which is turning your clone into an Original (ie. loosing its link). This is if you want to keep your drawing and only want to adjust a small part of it.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

I’m guessing 🙂 Might it be because you are backlighting imported frames?

Off the top of my head, I think reference layers are not shown with backlight.

Best, Niels

[Niels]

Yes, I agree.

I’m often reluctant about too much text, because of esthetics. 😉 But you are right, often a simple text sign is much easier to understand. 🙂

[Niels]

Thanks a lot for coming back to me Katherine! I see. I think, basically, this is really mostly about what you (and probably many others) expect. Which is super important. My goal is to try to make AP do what people expect, while still having it do what I consider to be good usable functionality.

I do still believe the slide mode as it is now, is very useful. You see, the point is that you first do your timing using very few key drawings with clones between them. Once you have your key drawings positioned as you want them, say in sync with dialogue or music, then you wound’t want to use Add Clones mode to adjust anything, because you would loose your timing later down the timeline. This is why Slide mode is valuable I believe. With Slide mode you simply slide (adjust) any key drawing to hit the right point in time according to your audio or timing. And nothing will be misaligned anywhere else.

But as I said, what you expect is super important. And some kind of swap/move mode is valuable as well. So I do believe we need to have all three modes. Somehow we just need to make it sort of self evident what will happen (what to expect) as you use any of the modes. – As a minimum super obvious what mode you are in.

More thinking is required! 😉

Thanks again!

[Niels]

On second thoughts – I do think slide mode has its value. Maybe we need the 3 modes afterall. But then we have to make it obvious which mode we are in at any given time…

[Niels]

Hi Katherine,

I’m looking into these requests of yours. About the slide-mode and swap-mode:

I am always trying to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible, so adding a third mode might not be the best solution. I am wondering if simply dropping slide mode would work for you? I mean, in stead of sliding your originals as you do in AP today, we could just change how it works a little, so you are still sliding, but sliding through the next originals (making them swap places).

Or am I committing the crime of dropping something that is super useful? What would work for you? Super interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Danny, thanks for mentioning this.

It is on our todolist and actually one of the things we are working on as we speak.

It will probably end up as a “New Layer with Clone Structure” menu item. Or something like that. There’s already a similar menuitem in the Paint menu (even though it is greyed out/disabled because it is not implemented yet).

To help you right now, remember, in a new layer, you can drag down a lot of clones to correspond to the length of your existing layer – and then go through it hitting your * key (“Clear Drawing”) each time you need an empty drawing.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Cool. I’m glad you appreciate it 😉 Thanks.

[Niels]

Hi Morfy, thanks a lot 🙂

Actually I can let you know, that it is exactly how we are making it already. 😉 I call the defined colors for “buckets”. 😉 This way you can adjust any (or all) bucket colors after you have painted some (or everything) – and see the colors update in all frames realtime.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Ivan,

First of all, I want to make sure you ACTUALLY want to use Plastic Animation Paper, which is an old predecessor to Animation Paper? Animation Paper is MUCH better and robust even though it is still under development. So sign up for the alpha pre-release of Animation Paper here: https://animationpaper.com/#HowMuch – it is free too. You will receive the download link right away.

PAP is 25 years old – last line of code was written over 15 years ago. So if it works on modern systems it is amazing and frankly pure luck. 😉 But about the problem you ask about: Did you check if the projects_path file is pointing correctly? Alternatively you can just install it again, to make it set up correctly automatically.

But again, just drop PAP and get AP! 😉

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Thank you very much 🙂

[Niels]

Hi Dylan, thanks a lot for your suggestions. Appreciated.

I know the vertical timeline is somewhat controversial – and I know most other software use a horizontal one. The reason it is vertical in Animation Paper is that is based on the traditional exposure sheet (X-Sheet). This has definite advantages.

I am not apposed to implementing a horizontal version of the X-sheet and make it the direction user optional. This is on our list of features for the future – but for now we have other functionality that must be prioritised, such as all the coloring features, etc.

The scroll wheel zooming is on our todolist for a release during this alpha stage. 🙂

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Yes, I know. Sorry Guillermo. We haven’t been able to locate the problem yet. More info in my post just above yours.