I’m glad to see this software is being work on again. I have been using pencil for a while here and there doing rough’s. But would love to see it move forward with a few thing’s.
Set document size. (this is a Must)
cleaner bitmap drawing tool’s
A swatch library export and import.
4.Image export for blender.
auto svg gap closer.
There’s a lot of hard work going into this I know. I’ll keep testing and trying every version that come’s out. If there is anything I help with I’ll be glad to. I want this to get much support like blender and gimp cause I think this is an important software for us animator’s out. If you need to raise money let me know.
I am super excited as well! I had used Pencil on my old Mac with OSX 10.4 for years. I just got a new Mac and was sad to see that there were some bugs on 0.4.4b. Well, the only one I could notice was the key frames not showing up but that is a big thing! I just downloaded Pencil2D and things seem to be working great!
But on the topic of wishlist, the only thing I have ever wanted to see added to this program was a sort of bulk frame edit. Or an overview of all the frames so that I could quickly delete a set of 10 or so. Or re-arrange them.
I haven’t had the chance to play around with the vector tools in Pencil2D yet. But I remember the 0.4.4b pen tool to be… alright. Vector animation is an awesome addition period, so I’m not complaining. I’m sure it’s on the list to get bezier handles added at some point. (We can talk about really advanced vector tools another time)
I really wish I could do something to help on the programming side of things. HTML and CSS are as advanced as I get when it comes to writing code. But I do have a lot of experience with Illustrator and Photoshop (SoftimageXSI and Blender as well). I do a lot of vector illustration and am happy to give feedback as much as possible.
I am really happy to see the Pencil is finding new life. I haven’t been animating very long, just as an intermitant hobby, and most has been with Blender, but I have started using Synfig and Plastic Animation Paper (PAP). I have to say that I haven’t downloaded this new version of Pencil yet, I’ll do that tonight, but I have 4.4b for Windows and never felt very warm to it. I’m hoping this new version and direction will change that. I’ve been using PAP which has a cutout feature that I really, really like. Cutting out a selection from a stack of images and pasting it to create a walk cycle, or whatever you want to repeat, is a great method to save work. It would work great for lipsyncing also. It also maintains the hand-drawn control of the animator, but speeds up the process. Having the ability to cut and paste (and save for other projects) sections of a frame stack would be a great addition.
Thank you everyone for commenting and having faith in this project, i’m not a Dev but i am equally fond of this program and i would like it to become really great and useful for us animators, @admin if you don’t mind me suggesting about it Gordie, i think this thread should get stickied, so new people can give us a features wishlist for pencil in a simple manner, then we can format it and upload it to the GitHub / BitBucket so it can be assigned to the Developers of the project. Let us know what you think.
As for the rest of you @bird, @ben_bailey, @jeremy-burnett thanks once more for your great suggestions and welcome to the forums! hopefully you guys can show us your works with pencil and by all means if you find any error, bug or you have an interesting idea in how to further the project let us know!
@chchwy For a suggestion of my own alongside with Bird’s lypsync idea, we could perhaps inquire the old open sourcepapagayoplugin for lypsync which was developed to be used with Lost Marble’s (Now smithmicro’s) Anime Studio, the good thing about this plugin is that it IS open source, so we can download it here and tinker with it, it would sure help to preview the lipsync or even better stuff!.
The only downside i can see is that it is coded in python but to my knowledge it is an easier to grasp language and c++ conversion is doable, so think about it for a moment, if we manage to integrate and refine it, pencil can have it’s own lypsync system! in any case this is an idea, hope it helps too.
Here’s a brief description of Papagayo’s:
Papagayo is a lip-syncing program designed to help you line up phonemes (mouth shapes) with the actual recorded sound of actors speaking. Papagayo makes it easy to lip sync animated characters by making the process very simple - just type in the words being spoken (or copy/paste them from the animation's script), then drag the words on top of the sound's waveform until they line up with the proper sounds.
Anyway have fun everyone, and to the new users, let us know which feature you think should be integrated over time in the new Pencil! take care!
I think the suggestions of @jeremy-burnett are great. Having clear options about document size / handling canvas (& the passe-partout) is important.
@ben_bailey was talking about bulk-editing frames, which is, I think, very useful too. It's like the "Edit Multiple Frames" in Flash : works exactly like the Onion Skin except that the previous/next frames are shown at 100% opacity and that you can edit them (rotate, erase, ...) at the same time.
@bird : I don't know if anyone feels it like me but I'm not sure Pencil2D should focus on cut-out animation. There is a lot of software already doing that, I think Pencil should (at least, first) differentiate itself through raster animation / sketching.
Same thought about Papagayo : let's keep Pencil2D light & clean. Debug it, make it stable, enjoyable, responsible and pratical. Then we'll see if it's useful to add such features.
If I could add my dream feature (but I already talked about it), it would be a powerfull onion skin. See this topic...
@morr : sticking this topic is a great idea, but I would rather suggest to have one topic per feature request. So we can discuss each feature individually and Matt (or future developpers) will not have to dig into each topic to find which ideas are goods or not. I was also thinking of installing (or programming) a plugin to rate topics, so the most loved ideas could be the first developers would check, but it will be for later as i'm leaving for 2 weeks now.
Globally, I recommend having one single idea/suggestion/bug report/... per topic. It will be easier to read, moderate, and take into account.
Anyway, a lot of great ideas in here… Keep thinking !
I agree with you about the hand drawn focus. This type of cutout can be a single raster image or a sequence of raster images which you can toggle through and “stamp” the one you want. You can then move to the next frame, toggle and stamp, and repeat this until you are done with the cutout. You can then go back and do whatever image edits you want to the stamped images. While stamping, you can scale, rotate, mirror, and skew the cutout. This isn’t anything about rotate layers, bones, or IK.
Also, as far as onion skinning, PAP has the functionality you reference. Play around with it and see. (Not trying to sell PAP)
