[Niels]

Yeah, it will be exciting to see the Linux version running! Thanks Ben.

[Niels]

That’s great! Thanks for letting me know.

[Niels]

OK, I think I get it. Maybe the main issue for you is that you need to be able to easily move your reference image around? Maybe within the Animation Paper window and/or even as a separate window so it can be positioned next to the AP window or on a second monitor? Do you use the reference to just look at when drawing or do you need to trace directly over it? (both maybe?). This is interesting. Please let me know more. 🙂

[Niels]

Fantastic Bryan! Sounds very good 🙂

[Niels]

OK, thanks a lot for letting me know! Noted.

[Niels]

Hi there,

At present, we do not have a .pap or .lap importer in Animation Paper. This will come at some point. However, it will not be much different than importing the layers one by one as sequences of png’s (after exporting the png’s from PAP). This is how you can do it now in alpha 2.

Internally, drawings are structurally completely different in AP compared to PAP. This gives us a lot of advantages, but it is also the reason why we can not just load old PAP files.

About the “stack of selections” – we do not have a way to bake or clear this. We might think of a way in a future release.

The floating selection is fundamentally different in AP compared to cutouts in PAP. In AP the floating selection sits in its place. So when you pick it up from one frame, you can just leave it there and stamp it in the exact same position in another frame.

If you need to move and place your selection very precisely after all, you can zoom in and move it with your pen or mouse easily on a very detailed level.

If you still feel the need for a nudging feature, please let me know. Then we’ll consider it.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Acel! Thanks for this extensive feedback. Appreciated!

I’ll answer your questions/comments one by one below…

Animation Paper
-When doing small curves quickly, it breaks the line. Drawing slowly will give you the intended results. Personally it is not a deal breaker for me as the only time you would do it that quickly would be during a shading process.

That’s odd. Not supposed to happen. Maybe try running with a lower resolution and see if that helps? If you need the high resolution for your output, you can always change it to the higher res before you export (your drawings will update to be fully crisp, without any loss og degradation).

-Delete Layer (cmd-shift-del) not working despite the other command combinations working.

Weird. Maybe something else (other software, like Astropad?) is blocking this key combination? It works just fine in all our test environments.

-Rubber Eraser doesn’t look any different than the Vinyl Eraser despite the tutorial video stating it should give a soft edge. Even zooming in I didn’t see any noticeable difference. Could be due the Astropad’s pen pressure.

You are right, it is VERY subtle. You need to basically regard the Rubber Eraser as the thin version of the bold Vinyl Eraser.

-On the view tools with the Apple pencil: -The Pan works fine -Zoom tool sometimes work, like around 80% as it is kind of fidgety in various strokes -Rotate works fine, but I am not entirely sure without knowing the pivot point to know if I am rotating based on the Apple Pencil’s point of origin.

Could the 20% not working be because you are dragging diagonally bottom/left to top/right? The zoom reacts to up/down or left/right. Doing “both” will cancel it out.

When you rotate it is always rotating around the center of the view.

-Comment on the Light Table intensity adjustment: I would like a more in-depth information for this to know the difference in regards to using Setting A & B, as I find myself using setting B for the in-betweens.

A and B is just like two different presets. Often it is nice to have two different settings (like for rough and for clean up purposes or something else). This way you can keep two different settings and easily switch between the two.

-For Speed dial it works after I tapped it with my Apple Pencil. I would imagine it would work extremely well with the Apple Pencil 2’s tap function once you’re able to map it.

Cool.

-Clone drawing by dragging with Apple Pencil works.

Nice.

– Astropad

Thanks for all your remarks. Good to know. As for the zooming/rotating using touch/gestures. This has not been implemented yet – will come soon.

– Personal Thoughts
Thanks a lot! Glad you like the proper traditional X-Sheet way of doing it. 😉

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Craig,

Sad to hear this. 1.5 gigs?! That’s crazy.

We have done some optimisation that comes out in Alpha 3 which will help. But in general Animation Paper is not made to do an extensive amount of lasso/stamping. We have important data being copied with the lasso and these data will multiply and become crazy 🙂 if you keep copying extensively. The data is giving you big advantages like scaling drawings without any loss/degradation/blurring, better coloring, etc.

[Niels]

Sure. It is a good point. Maybe we do need to adjust this, so when undoing the counter is decreased accordingly. Added to our todolist. Thanks!

[Niels]

Hi Pierre, I am not sure what the problem is you’re experiencing. To help me understand, let me first of all ask you this: Have you successfully downloaded, installed and input your activation key, so you can now run Animation Paper on your computer?

[Niels]

Hi Rachel! Yes I did. Sorry if you didn’t get my email about it.

There was one layer that did it all. The issue kept being copied over from one drawing to the next, ending up making the memory usage of that particular layer go crazy.

No matter what we do, your file will keep having this issue, until you do a new layer and do clean up (tracing) of the problematic layer. Then you can delete the bad layer and your file (when you save it) will be back down to normal size. 🙂

Because of your situation we have identified a few things we had to fix (this is now done and will be available in the next release, alpha3) and some things will still have to be worked on for further optimisation.

Thanks a lot for your help!

[Niels]

Hi Hevonen,

You are right, every time you create a new layer in Animation Paper it just names it with the next number – regardless if any layers have been deleted and therefore “freed up a number”.

This is, I think, the preferred behaviour. My thought was that you could potentially get confused with a new layer named the same as one you had earlier. Of course you risk having “holes” in your layer number sequence, but if we start filling a “hole” you will end up adding layers with numbering out of sequence. So there are pros and cons.

I do believe it is not that important either way (as you suggest yourself) – because I think you should call your layers something more descriptive anyway. But of course that doesn’t mean the automatic naming shouldn’t be optimal. Let me know if you feel strongly about your point and feel free to give me more reasons why we should change it.

Thanks a lot!

[Niels]

Hi Colum, it seems to me this is a matter of the relative resolution setting for your second monitor. Try adjusting it to maybe 120%, or 150%, so the icons and other graphic features becomes smaller. I think the reason why the Animation Paper window can’t be resized smaller is because it is already at its minimum size. Also its UI must be quite large with your setup. Adjusting the size in your Windows setup will help with this issue as well.

Let me know how it goes?

[Niels]

That is correct. My thought is that you would normally want to do camera work (panning and zooming) in compositing anyway.

However, we do have zooming and panning at the top of our consider-list for future functionality. Camera features are something that are obvious additions for one of the next major releases. If we can do them right (I think we can ;)).

[Niels]

Hi Jorge – excited that Animation Paper made you want to go back into animation after such a long break! That’s great. And thanks for your nice words!

It is possible to import for rotoscoping – but in alpha 2 it only takes png files. So you have to have your video as a sequence of png files to make it work.

Later in this alpha period we will add support for movie formats, like mp4.