scrolling backdrop

Ideas
1

At some point in time, everyone creates scenes in which a character is driving, walking, flying, and the background is scrolling by. I’m thinking it would be quite handy to have the ability to simply roll your backdrop over the course of the timeline, without needing to copy the frame, move it a little, copy, move, copy, etc…

An example of a way this might be presented: You have a background layer with a long image on it. In the first keyframe the image is all the way to the right of the canvas. Last keyframe the image is all the way to the left. The layer has a “tween” property applied to it, which automatically moves the image from right to left between the two keyframes during playback/export. Or maybe a script/function that caculates where the image would be at a given frame, and automatically builds a series of frames for you, in the event that drawing the frames at runtime might be too heavy.

2

Well, the best thing (to me) would be to be able to animate the layer.
Your drawing stay the same but you have, for example, X=10 at frame 0 and X=210 at frame 25, for the layer position.
See this topic : http://www.pencil2d.org/forums/topic/feature-request-basic-layer-properties/

3

that sounds a lot like what i was thinking, but you’ve taken it further with animating a variety of properties beyond just position. Your version seems to be the preferred method among animation/video programs

4

@mikshaw, background scrolling could be easily done by Camera Layer.

Let me show you how to do it:

5

@chchwy Yes, that definitely does scroll the background, but it also scrolls everything else on every other layer. If you have multiple layers of objects in front of the backdrop that are supposed to appear to be tracked by the camera, it would make even more work than manually animating the backdrop scroll behind them.

In any case, it’s just something on the wishlist for some day =o)

Also, i guess a situation like that can be easily handled by combining two animations in a video editor.

6

…but it could work if a layer could have a position property.

Like in After Effects, having the ability to define a Z position for a layer would allow to create a parallax effect !