[feature request] instantiate frames

Hi guys ! Another idea I had once (but I think I never did talk about it here) was to be able to instantiate frames.

The idea here is to have a “special” copy/paste option for frames, which would instantiate them. That means that if you have several instances of a frame (eg. you’ve made a walk cycle that comes back several times in your animations), editing an instance of a frame would make that edit occurs in every instance.

Eg.

  • walk cycle is from frame 19 -> 25
  • I select those frames and make an instance copy
  • "original" frames have their color changed (=instanciated)
  • when the frames are pasted (48->54), they got that same color too
  • Editing frame 48 would edit frame 19 (and other instances) at the same time
  • + : option to "break" an instance (and get the frame color back)
  • + highligh all its instances when selecting a frame in the timeline
Wouldn't be nice ? While reading the documentation (keyboard shortcuts), I see that there is a "Insert Duplicate Frames" (Ctrl+U) shortcut and a "Duplicate Frame" (F6) shortcut. I don't know if that has something to do with my idea; which make me think we should put a description next to a command in the documentation.

What do you think about that ?

Very good idea!

This feature shouldn’t be difficult to implement and should be very helpful!

It should go with the ability to copy paste several frames, as well as pasting in reverse order.

All this will have to be implemented for the timeline to be very professional.

The more I know the code, the more I want to implement cool features like that. It’s like a drug! :wink: haha

At the moment, time permits me to work on Pencil. I don’t really know how long so it is why I try to do the most I can for this beautiful app now.

Hopefully, we will be able to get a large comunity of users with time and Pencil will be able to get to crowd funded devs like Krita. It deserves it.

posted on Github too.