A bunch of questions from an absolute newbie

@BeardWix As for your particular questions:

  1. You can change the hotkeys for zoom in/out (ctrl+up / ctrl+down) and rotate CW /CCW (R / Z) but the “gestures” are not changeable right now. I’ll take note of this to see if it’s possible that developers can allow the user to customize them

  2. You can click on the new layer button on the timeline and you’ll be able to add any type of layer you want.
    image

  • Bitmap layers are used for pixel / raster based drawings. This will be used mostly for roughing animation and pre-production art, but will be made flexible enough to go through a full pipeline of animation for a more painterly look. Think of TVPaint or Krita.
  • Vector layers are used for “vector” drawings, which are mathematically calculated and thus more “lightweight”, right now they are a WIP in Pencil2D so we are not recommending them for work until dvelopers fix the vector engine. This will be used mostly for Inking and Coloring stages in a pipeline of animation production, but Pencil2D will make them flexible enough to allow you to go through a full pipeline with only that layer. Think of Flash or Toonboom Harmony style of drawings.
  • Camera layers are best to be thought of as real cameras. Zooming in/out the camera will simulate the camera getting closer / farther from the subject it films. You can PAN, ZOOM or ROTATE cameras and you can also animate these transformations.
  • Sound Layers are made to import sounds. You can currently only import WAV files (losless quality) and MP3 (lossy quality), note: Do NOT bring mp3’s created with soundforge. They simply don’t work. Use Audacity to convert them into WAV’s if that’s the case.
  1. Yes a “lasso” / freehand tool has been already proposed and hopefully it will be considered for a future version relatively soon.