[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.

[Niels]

Hi Lou, thanks for your point. I understand.

In your specific situation I think I would just finish it in TVP.

Next time, if you have animation partially done from elsewhere, I suggest you import at a rough state, so you can use Animation Paper to do additional timing and clean up.

Making new animation from scratch using Animation Paper is of course best, if you like the simplicity and focus it offers. As you seem to agree with. Uncluttered and unbloated.

The technical reason you can’t just alter your imported png’s or jpg’s is because they are bitmap/raster images. Animation Paper internally holds more sophisticated data for each drawing – which gives you various advantages. Like better color fills (coming soon), scalable drawings without degradation and more advanced features coming in future releases.

I hope I made sense. 😉

[Niels]

Thanks Pascal!

I’m not sure how, or if, Lazy Nezumi Pro could work as a plugin. Doesn’t it just work “on top” of the drawing software? What exactly happens when you try it with Animation Paper?

[Niels]

Hi Daniel, yeah, this is something we will look into soon. But in the meantime, did you try installing Wintab drivers?

[Niels]

Good to know Randall! Great! And no problem with the response – thanks a lot!

[Niels]

Thanks for mentioning it, Wilfred! We are aware of this problem, but good to know about it from more sources. We need to make it work properly soon. On our todo list. 🙂

[Niels]

Bryan, OK thanks for clearing that up. 🙂 But still I’m a bit confused 🙂 Sorry. 🙂 Did you try importing an image (a png file – also works with a sequence of png’s)? They show up as a reference layer. And you can turn it on/off with the eye-icon.

You probably did this and now you are asking if there’s a way to have this image separate – not as a layer in the x-sheet? There’s not a feature that does that now. But of course we could make that. But then I need to understand, why you don’t think it works having it as a layer in the x-sheet? Just want to learn, so I can make Animation Paper as good as possible and still keep it simple and uncluttered.

[Niels]

Thanks John! 🙂

[Niels]

Hi John,

You are right, you can’t. This is just a function that hasn’t been implemented yet. It will be very soon.

If you check out the menus, you can see some of the planned features that aren’t enabled yet (they are greyed out) – including Merge Visible Layers.

[Niels]

Hi John – Actually it is possible already in the current version! Just import a sequence of numbered png’s (shift-select all of them).