@stickimation Hey. Thank you for taking the time to submit your feedback.
It is certainly unfortunate that we can’t produce more features regularly, but we are just volunteer maintainers. That means we are not the creators of the app, but rather a gathering of people that didn’t want this to die off so we tried to give it a piggyback instead of letting it drown in the mud.
Right now we don’t have the human resources to accomplish most development tasks in the time that would be expected for commercial software, so even if a million people beg for a feature to be added, it won’t happen immediately or ever depending on how complex it is.
To answer your suggested points:
Object drawing… If you mean having drawing shapes. Yeah it’s been asked. It will take time to get to the priority list, but it will happen. If you mean having an object drawing mode like Flash, that’s quite frankly not possible with raster drawing surfaces unless you are drawing with vectors and rasterizing on the fly. This basically means having to remake the software from scratch, so it might not happen.
I’d like to have a similar feature too, however due to the architecture of the software it might take a while since there’s a lot of pre-requisite stuff that needs to be done before that. But to be honest the current team might never be able to tackle that completely because it’s really complex labor. It might take literal years for us to get there, but we’ll see, I don’t want to give out just yet, just know it’s not like snapping our fingers will make it happen faster.
This is getting added soon for individual layers, but at some point I agree I’d be nice to get a way to globally offset all the frames in all layers quickly. Perhaps when multiple layer / frame selection is implemented this kind of behavior will come to be naturally. the latter It’s sort of on the roadmap too so we might see this one way or another.
Either way thank you for your suggestions.
Thinking about your requirements meanwhile Pencil2D gets there, I want to provide you with a personal recommendation if you’re looking to animate faster. While Pencil2D is great for roughing in animation it might not be as effective for other parts of the pipeline.
Since you seem to have used Adobe Flash, you could also try OpenToonz instead.
I recommend looking into it because:
You can draw shapes and freehand in both raster & vector
You can select raster & vector drawings easily with lasso & object selection tools
There’s a symbol-like feature called sub-xsheets which work like after effects pre-comps as well as graphic symbols in the sense of having an embedded timeline.
It has motion tweening (function editor) and limited shape tweening capabilities (you can interpolate lines)
There’s a way to add multiple frames over multiple layers (called columns, even in the timeline mode)
Has a camera that works with Z-Depth.
And much more. Anyway, thanks again. Good luck with your work
hehe, I haven’t worked with flash, but I heard of all the cool features. I watch alan becker a lot on YouTube. I haven’t downloaded flash for two reasons:
I have a school laptop, and we aren’t aloud to download apps from the internet. I only works if it is a portable file.
Flash costs money, and I don’t have enough as a 15 year old kid.
It is just that I find pencil 2d a really good app. I just don’t want to leave it.
I will look if I can download OpenToonz. But Thanks for your help!
