Future of the animation feature

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Saturday 20 December 2014 Dec 20:14:00 Jouni Pentikäinen wrote:

> This is where we disagree on the design. Unless I misunderstand your 
> description, this easily leads to a very long list of layers in the 
> Krita layer stack. Which means either a frustrating experience with the 
> stack docker or abandoning it altogether for animation.

Ah, no. I don't want to show all layers that are used in all frames in krita's layerstack. That's Photoshop's approach, where you have all possible 'cells' as a layer in the image's layerstack and then for every frame have to hide or show them to get the configuration you want.

That's no good. The power of krita is in editing and rendering an image that consists of layers.

> Instead, what I would prefer is the workflow seen in most animation 
> software to my knowledge. The user creates a number of layers and in 
> each layer they draw a number of frames as they work trough the 
> animating. Each frame may be rendered in the final animation one or 
> several times, depending on its timing.

Well, the terminology is obscure here. What is a cell, a frame, a layer?

* A krita node is an instance of a layer or mask object.

* A cell has a Krita node (layer or mask) which can be shown in any number of frames. Any number of cells can refer to same node.

* A layer is a row where for each frame you can put a cell, or not. A cell points to a Krita node

* A frame is a column where for each layer, there can be a cell in any of the rows of that column, or not.

* Any layer/frame coordinate can empty or filled with a cell, and if filled, visible or hidden.

The structure of the column of layers is defined in Krita's layerbox, i.e., as KisImage.

Moving between frames in a clip is like moving between 'virtual' KisImages.

I think that this allows for maximum flexibility, and will also make caching, onion skinning and rendering easy.

But basically, I don't want to limit thinking by assuming a single KisImage needs to contain everything.


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org