Looping Background

Ideas
1

Hi! It’s been a while since I’ve been on this forum.

I thought up at least one idea.

Perhaps a scrolling background and/or a looping background like in The Flintstones?

Idea: Suppose I were to draw a character walking or running and want to have them walk. There is at least one way to go about this;

Make project file A, draw the character walking in place and export the drawings/frames individually into a folder; rename it “character”. Next, make project file B and import a wide/long background you have drawn in a different program, like GIMP, or draw a wide/long, background within Pencil 2D. Next, add a keyframe at whatever frame you choose in the camera layer to end the shot. In frame 1, move camera to the left or right side of the background, depending on which path the character is going. Then, for the end of the shot where you have added the second and last keyframe, say frame 120, move the camera to the opposite side of the background. After previewing the “animation” that you’ve made, export the drawings/frames individually into a folder; rename it “background”. Then make project C and import the frames into separate layers. Make sure the character frames have transparency (the background in the exported frames erased), so the background and characters can “relate to one another”.

Drawbacks to this method: you won’t be able to make any looping backgrounds because the current version of Pencil2D doesn’t allow this. To attempt “looping”, might look choppy. Not to mention, you won’t be able to start or stop the scrolling very effectively either.

I dream that one day that a scrolling background feature could be added in future versions of this wonderful software.

Hope you see value in this idea.

2

Your suggestion is a little confusing. I’m not sure if you’re saying this is how it works now or this is how you’d like it to work. The way I understand this software works as it relates to backgrounds is that you draw the background in the bitmap layer with as much detail as you wish, Then you animate it frame by frame scrolling across in the camera layers Then you import the frames of the character walking, either directly or with copy/paste. Also, if you want an uninterupted background than simply make a copy of your background and flip the copy horrizontally so the end of the original is the beginning of the copy. think I even remember noticing that in Flintstones once

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