Notes from my drawing/animation sessions

Installing Pencil2D / How to
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Hello!

As often as I can I make notes of things I’d like in Pencil2D while drawing because after a drawing session I tend to forget what improvement I was thinking of, so I post my notes from my last 2 weeks with the new Pencil version 0.6.0 ( Also tried the nightly)
I didn’t want to put this in ideas because some of it may already have been taken into account and maybe even being worked on. So here’s my list, please note these are of course just friendly suggestions, no demands :slight_smile: and I’m perfectly happy with what you’ve done so far. So thanks again for that !

#1 Select range when exporting frames
It would be very nice if you had the option to only export the frames that you need.

#2 Make all tools settings stick.
For now stabilizer for the pencil tool is always set to none if you set it and close/start Pencil2D again.

#3 Undo buttons on screen
Usually i use the shortcut keys for this but could there be room for them somwhere? I think it sometimes would be nice to have them visible.

#4 Lasso tool
A lasso select tool would be great, maybe the select tool could alter behaviour when ctrl is pressed or another key?

#5 Drag frame to next layer
I sometimes have many layers when animating, if it would be possible to drag a frame to the over/under -lying layer then it would be more convenient to not have to use copy paste. This could also maybe be blocked as default because you can create a mess with dragging/dropping but maybe if you pressed the CTRL+SHIFT key while dragging it would allow you to drag it over to other layers? Just an idea.

#6 Copy/paste in same frame
Maybe I’m doing something wrong but copy pasting actually work more as cut and paste if you do it on the same frame. If I paste in the same frame it puts it in the exact same position where it was when i copied it and that is ok but when I drag the selected element to either side there’s nothing beneath it, therefore it acts as if i took cut/paste instead.

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Thanks for taking the time to post these. I think I can address some of the points…

#1 is already implemented for movies (including in 0.6.0), but we should definitely add it for image sequences, too. Probably not all that difficult, too.

#2 is already implemented for most options (see #306), the stabiliser seems to be the only feature that doesn’t save its value yet, so here we go: #908

#3 sounds very useful to me, especially when using a tablet, so you might want to file a request on our bug tracker for it.

#4 has been on our issue tracker since 2013, and apparently it’s currently on the roadmap for 0.7. See #18 and #118.

#5 also makes a lot of sense, but it is unlikely to happen before our timeline rewrite (#533). I suppose there’s a chance of this happening anyway as soon as drag’n’drop becomes part of the rewrite, but you still might want to file a request on the bug tracker or leave a comment on the rewrite.

#6 I can confirm that. My impression is that it’s not so much a bug as it is unintuitive (and likely unintentional) behaviour, because the selection tool integrates with the copy mechanism but not with the paste mechanism. In other words, after making a selection, only the selected part of the image will be copied, but after pasting something, the information from the clipboard will simply be written directly to the frame without ever being selected on its own. That said, I don’t know a single thing about the implementation details there, so maybe some of the other @developers can chime in there.