I have the camera set to pan across a still background image a few times in time with music, and when I hit ‘play’ in the program, it shows the highlight box of the camera moving correctly…but the main display panel of Pencil2D doesn’t stay centered on the camera, so it just shows the camera’s highlight box bouncing around the display panel like the old Windows screensaver. When I export it, it gives me the ‘camera-eye view’ just fine, but I want to be able to see it in the program so I can fine-tune its movement.
Did I just forget to check a box somewhere? Did I make a mistake in how I set up the camera movement? How do I get the display panel to stay centered on the camera as the camera moves around the background image?
Thanks in advance!
Do not keep your hopes high, I think that’s just how it works, I want that feature too :(
Unless someone actually says it’s a thing, I’ve been using it for a long time and I think it just is not a feature, sorry
This is baffling to me because the YouTube videos I’ve been watching have the window following the camera. They ARE from a few years ago and clearly an earlier version of the program, but I can’t imagine why there would’ve been a switch to this other way of displaying things.
There is currently no feature to follow the camera. As you’ve already discovered, doing a quick export is the best way to preview that aspect of your animation.
The camera layer was changed substantially in v0.7.0. To understand why will require a brief history lesson. Before, when the camera layer was active, the view transform and the camera transform were the same. So to modify a camera frame, you would pan, zoom, and rotate the view with the camera layer active. This meant that it did indeed appear to “follow” the camera. But that approach also had multiple serious drawbacks. For example, if the camera size was larger than your canvas you wouldn’t be able to see the full image, and zooming out wouldn’t help because it would zoom out the camera and not the view. It also caused a lot of confusion for novice users that unintentionally encountered this behavior by switching to the camera layer. These are some of the reasons why the camera system was overhauled.
The idea of a preview window has been brought up many times, and would be one solution to quickly see the animation from the camera’s view. It may also be possible to have some option to make the canvas view relative to a camera. Unfortunately, development is slow right now, so I would not expect such features anytime soon.