You guys fixed LOADS of bugs!

[jmand (dom)]

I am on the latest nightly build and very impressed as you have resolved a huge amount of the bugs I was quite bluntly complaining about previously…

Great work!

Some that I have noticed still remain mostly that new frames are invisible until you select one then all appear on the timeline…

But the additions to the new nightly are superb.

Some tweaks of the GUI would be great as when I my e pen on my tablet its really hard to select certain things, like the dots to change the opacity of the different tracks in relation to each other.

I can almost use my laptop in tablet most the entire time I animate now, but for selecting multiple clips on the timeline to copy paste or move them along I have to go back to laptop mode to use the shift key.

On feature that I really miss and makes me reach for open toonz again is some basic tweening of a layer/track… So I could make a walk cycle and then move it across the a background for example. I would prioritise this over adding more camera features but its not my call. Isnt it easier to implement than a more complex camera engine?

I love your software it is so hands on and easy to use it puts most things to shame and has nearly everything I could want from animation software.

Be nice to have a simple font tool for inputting writing too…

Anyway its a joy to use and I have had a lot of fun and its so use friendly but within this has a hidden depth.

I tried synfig and was not impressed also didnt like krita. But pencil 2d keeps me coming back, even for a simple idea sketching facility.

Keep up the good work!

[JoseMoreno]

@jmand Hey. Thanks for taking the time to test the nightly builds. It helps lots.

To be honest, we’re not having a great time since most of the developers in the team are super busy and have not been able to continue fixing bugs.

And as unfortunate as it sounds, fixing or implement other stuff has gotten more bugs

I agree and have seen most of the things you’ve mentioned. The timeline keyframe creation has some sort of visual glitch that hides frames.

The tablet events that regulate selection of UI features went bonkers so selecting stuff is double difficult than it is to do with a mouse (particularly dragging the frames across the timeline…that makes me go crazy )

I also reported one recently related to audio frames playback which crashed the app easily.

For example the copy / pasting got botched somehow and now it does not paste on the same place like before, which infuriates me because 95% of the time you only need to paste in the same place, not somewhere else, but this is a bug that got in accidentally like 1 year ago and I could only report it recently.

As for the layer tweening, yes I’ve asked that for years. Haven’t happened since there seems to be various prerequisites to make it work properly, which also depend on bug fixes and more implementation of base features that are missing (stuff you won’t see but that’s rather fundamental in the source code).

The camera thing was because someone wanted to do just that, and we weren’t going to say no. Sadly beggars can’t be choosers in the open-source world

Also the camera was not actually complex because it wasn’t made from scratch, it’s piggy backing on the existing camera layer files and it had basic tweening capabilities since before we got here.

It just needed tweaking and we took advantage to improve on the UI and add extra features and whatnot, but if it was actually harder I assure you it probably wouldn’t have been implemented, ever.

As far as I understand, and while I’m probably missing something or could be mistaken, it’s not easy to propagate the changes from one layer type (camera) to the others since they are literally different structures that don’t have exactly the same properties. It’s like having 3 vehicles. They both have similar properties, but you can’t use a helicopter engine on a bike, it needs it’s own kind of engine, even if on the surface it’s considered the same thing.

For now you can try this: Animate your walk cycle centered in a different file. Then use the Camera motion tween features to move the walk cycle. Then export the animation as a PNG sequence and reimport it into a master Pencil2D file and keep working on the main file. That’s what I do when I work with After Effects and other apps that do allow file link referencing.

As for the font tool. We know ppl want it. It’s been asked for years (not kidding) But it seems implementing such thing is super hard for this particular app (again as far as I understand since I’m not a dev).

So, until someone sits down to learn how it can be tackled, or gets interested enough to do it. I don’t see it happening soon and to be honest I’d rather prefer having lasso selections first

For now as a workaround what you can do is (and I know this works), have Pencil2D open at the same time as another app that does have a text tool. Something like Paint.Net or whatever.

Make sure you create the font over a transparent background and then copy and paste on a new bitmap layer in Pencil2D for quick work.

It will work easy as long as it’s bitmap text. Although vector shapes can also be copied and will become rasterized too

[jmand (dom)]

hey thanks a lot for the reply and work around ideas… yes I guess with the font thing its very easy to simply use different software so low priority… I will try the image sequence idea for tweening it makes sense…

Funny I did not have any issue with copy pasting it all worked very well for my needs so far.

As soon as there is a new nightly I will download and try it out and report what happens for me.

A part from some well known issues like undo not working in certain situations and the graphical glitch of new frames being invisible… One more thing I remember is sometimes weirdly if I accidentally double tap with my e pen then it makes a new blank frame next to the one I am trying to select…

But honestly I have been using pencil 2d a lot because the new nightly is so good, all the direct access to undo, copy paste and other UI tweaks, plus the removal of loads of bugs… made it great…

[JoseMoreno]

@jmand The undo / redo is expected to improve soon(ish) since one of the devs had basically a functional better version with undo history, however after time passed and more stuff was implemented it needs to be updated (that is learn how to undo/redo the new stuff) and it’s a long process, I’m told.

The copy /paste issue is only annoying if you don’t need it at first, but I always paste in place in other software because I use the C/P for animating holds. It’s just something that needs to be fixed for sure since I know other pro animators will ask for it later (since Flash and Harmony have it).

The blank frame thing, is because of the tablet events I mentioned. Basically if you try to do the same you can only create a new frame by double clicking with the mouse. And it works fine with it.

But since the tablet input events have been weird for a long time (and we’ve tried to fix them without success ) it makes any “gesture” or quick access feature that was implemented for the timeline, nearly useless.

Just dragging the timeline cursor is a PITA and trust me I’m the first person that is seriously annoyed when it happens, particularly because I try to test the app while working for paid projects. I use it as a review tool for animation scenes.

There’s another issue when you import videos, foe example, where a color cannot be replaced with alpha on images created from a video (for some reason) so the trick when using the Fill tool > Replace mode with color that has 0% alpha doesn’t work with those.

Now some might be wondering, Why would I even need that? because sometimes you want to test a character animation that comes with a contrasting or white BG over a different color or image, and I use it in case I want to redraw stuff without needing to take into account the video background

Anyway, I can tell you a lot more issues, but I’d be typing here all afternoon and I got work to do. I can assure you we know stuff is failing, and it’s not necessarily a lack of will, but rather a lack of resources compound with difficult issues that depend on each other to be fixed properly.

So for now we will keep patching the foundational things that will open a path for more complex stuff, while implementing features that were incomplete or don’t need a blood sacrifice to work. I think that at least can happen

[jmand (dom)]

hey its cool as I said its improved massively since earlier this year! This nightly is great I am using it with nearly no issues … with my laptop in tablet mode and e pen… Thanks for the explanations, I will def be following this software and always have the lates nightly installed its just very fun software to use… No nonsense! And everything is right in front of me with the nightly, no menu diving… and actually now its not very buggy at all, I found both synfig and krait has surprisingly annoying bugs when using my stylus so I just uninstalled everything except for this and open toonz… thanks for all the hard work I will update with any new bug… As I said my only other criticism is some features that would be very useful and maybe the sizes of some of the handles or buttons in the gui, are very small so hard to grab but … thats it… really its become very very usable specially for getting something from an idea into a basic animation… Then I might move into a more sophisticated software for the more advanced stuff…

Thanks for the fast and interesting replies too… :-)