Timeline layers

[blurymind]

Layers that contain different drawings/keyframes, ability to turn on and off onion skinning on a per layer basis, to add and remove layers, hide layers, layer opacity, etc. Here is a crude mockup

btw the krita developer working on animation features this year made a timeline design mockup: http://kritaanimation.blogspot.com/2015/05/hitting-ground-running.html

Maybe you would find it interesting :) Not saying its the solution here, just a source of ideas. He obviously ripped off the onion skin editor from tvpaint :D

Other features that can be added to a layer system:

• Layer pivot point- ability to assign a pivot point for a layer and TRANSFORM (rotate and scale the layer) by that pivot point. Ability to also animate the movement of the pivot point. Note that layer transformation keyframes/tweening is independent from the morphing that vpaint does.
• Ability to organize them in parent-child relationships. That way a child can be affected by the transformation of it's parent layer. See how this is done in toonboom. :)
• Ability to move a layer globally without affecting its animation (layer origin values)
• Layer compositing - multiply and other compositing modes
• Layer clipping masks
• layer effects generated by the software (such as drop shadow for example, or blur)
• Sound layers, imported image sequence layers, pencil sketch layers - different type layers

[Xananax]

I vote for this. I just came from the forums where I argued for the same feature.

Layers are very useful for all the reasons stated above by blurymind, but one reason that wasn't mentioned, one chief concern for me, is the impossibility to actually sketch something before inking it.

I find this to be a big drawback in adopting VPaint as a professional animation tool, or even for idle animation doodling.

Any animation begins with a crude sketch and gets refined as time goes by. The current VPaint only allows for clean, one-layer drawings, which holds back any potential to do proper character animation, where you have to construct the volumes, and where limbs are traditionally animated on different layers.

As I explained in the forum post, I'd be content with a hard-coded "sketch layer", if proper layers are hard to implement.

I know VPaint is a labor of research and love, and I know it doesn't have a specific audience in mind; maybe for its current audience, layers are not the most important thing. But from my point of view as a traditional character animator, I'd argue it is.

[Xananax]

Actually, I just watched the duck sneak video (which is pretty cool by the way), and it seems you have a sketch underneath? How did you achieve that?

[dalboris]

Hi @Xananax! Yes, layers are so obviously necessary that it is one of the features which I can guarantee with 99% of confidence that I will implement in less than two years, hopefully before. The 1% is in case I die or something. According to the roadmap I've written a few months ago, it's supposed to come in May 2017 ;-)

For the duck, I have used background images, which you can import. They haven't been drawn within VPaint.

[dalboris]

(By the way, my long-term target audience are actually traditional animators. Though in the short term, for several reasons, some technical, some marketing, I may implement features which are more useful for other audiences than trad animators.)

[Xananax]

Having an image underneath is a workable solution, at least for movements without too much overlap. I'm gonna try that. Thanks for all the hard work!

[dalboris]

Hey guys! Just a quick update: I'm actually currently working on adding a simple layer functionality in VPaint, to make it a bit more usable while you're waiting for http://vgc.io to be finished. It won't be as good as the Krita mockup posted by @blurymind : it's only going to be a Photoshop-style Layers panel, that is, not integrated in the timeline, and you won't be able to simultaneously see the keyframes of all layers. This is because doing so would require too much work and I prefer to focus on VGC as much as possible; but VGC will have something more like the Krita mockup.

Related commits so far: 2d988e5bf48cabd795e5877f54ff1d8141538511 411625adebc195e334e49213a0634d29738eff9f 32da90908e1f12000b5842454cf2dc103df6f35a cc50f81148507dfd1501a578aa27379f42754569

The UI is pretty much complete (see below), I have to implement the backend now.

[dalboris]

Interesting design decision: should onion skins be visible for the active layer only, or for all layers? My gut feeling is that it's better to only show skins for the active layer. This is the default in ToonBoom, but is configurable:

https://docs.toonboom.com/help/animate/Content/HAR/Stage/005_Traditional_Animation/271_H3_Enabling_the_Onion_Skin_in_Other_Layers.html

Let's see if I have time to make it a user option.

[algorev]

I'd say active layer; configurable too.

Sent from ProtonMail mobile

-------- Original Message -------- On Nov 1, 2018, 22:18, Boris Dalstein wrote:

Interesting design decision: should onion skins be visible for the active layer only, or for all layers? My gut feeling is that it's better to only show skins for the active layer. This is the default in ToonBoom, but is configurable:

https://docs.toonboom.com/help/animate/Content/HAR/Stage/005_Traditional_Animation/271_H3_Enabling_the_Onion_Skin_in_Other_Layers.html

Let's see if I have time to make it a user option.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.