Help plese

Hello,

I am new to Pencil, and I recently made a couple animations, but I can’t seem to expotr the file to a viewable format only to PLC or SVG, witch I can’t view with any program (+I use windows 8). If someone could help me I would really apreciate it.

Thank you :slight_smile:

@bloo5390 Hi bloo, first let me explain that the pencil (PCL) file is NOT an image or video file. Think of it just as a box where you store the drawings and stuff, but you don’t want to use the whole box to make a video, just the drawings. So you don’t have to save as, but rather you have to export the file.

For example, If you want to make a video to upload to youtube you have to create that video from a sequence of images (i.e jpg’s, png’s, etc) which after due process will become linked together and will be output as the proper format.

That is to say that you have to export images. Every version of Pencil allows you to do that. Please visit our tutorial page here http://www.pencil2d.org/tutorials#tutorial to learn how to export an image sequence and then use other free software to create the movie. I recommend you to follow the Blender & Pencil2D tutorial, it’s the easiest one.

If after trying that, you still can’t export other stuff, then please let us know what version of Pencil2D you are using.

If you don’t know how to install Blender there’s plenty of tutorials on the web, but they even have a portable ZIP container at their download site, so you don’t have to do any sort of complicated stuff.

In the future we will have our own video export but for now please try out exporting images form Pencil2D and making the video with Blender.

Please let us know later if you managed to create your videos, and hopefully you can show us your animation works :slight_smile:

@Jose Moreno thank you for your help, I did as the tutorial instructed and got the video, I only had one problem,… I forgot to change the background color, and when I tried to change it, with the Paint Bucket Tool, I couldn’t (I made a new bitmap layer and tried to color it). If you could help me I would really appreciate it, and I hope I didn’t cause you too much truble. Thank you for your help so far :slight_smile:

@bloo5390 Don’t worry, it’s no trouble at all. We’re here to try and help as much as possible :).

Note that the “white” background you see in Pencil2D is just for pre-visualization pruposes since it is actually a transparent background. To reveal this you can go to:

Edit > Preferences > General > Background > Click the First Radial Button (o) with the checkered square.

That will help you to see what exactly you’ve colored. To go back to the white pre-visualization just follow the same procedure.

Now regarding the color change for the background… hmm well that version has a strange way of making the bucket tool work, if you didn’t make a closed shape. Let me explain.

If you create a “closed” outline with the pen or pencil tool. You’l be able to fill out that shape without problem, and the bucket tool will change the color of the fill.

However if you attempt to color the whole background it becomes rather difficult because the canvas is almost infinite so the tool doesn’t know how to colour infinitely. Then you have to colour in a certain way as described in this early video. It’s not exactly a tutorial, but the first part shows the procedure. When you get to create the “contained” rectangle fill, you can click over it with a new colour to change it.

Hope this helps.

@Jose<span style=“color: #444444; font-family: ‘Open Sans’, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 20.5714px;”> Moreno thank you for all your help regarding this problems, I managed to get my video and it works perfectly :)</span>

@bloo5390 I’m glad it helped, if you have any other question don’t hesitate to ask. Also you can tag me by using my username instead of my display name. My username is @morr

Have fun!