Layered animation export/import

[Fazekas László]

Hello to all Krita developers!

I'm Laszlo Fazekas from Hungary, I'm in the animation decades ago, and 
even writing my own software, Firka. I'm very excited about the 
animation support in your new Krita 3.0 beta version.

Actually it has many similarities to TVPaint, maybe you heard about that 
program already.

I'm following the development of Blender 3D a few years ago and I'm also 
an addon developer for them. Now I have a new addon to import the CSV 
export format of TVPaint. It's a layered format, for exporting the 
animation into other programs.

My goal is to composite traditional, pixel-based animation in Blender, 
with the full toolset of 3D camera movements, with the 3D stage, 
effects, blurs etc. To make this possible, my addon imports the pictures 
into individual textured plane objects, and animates their visibility on 
the timeline. It's actually better playable in the 3D editor than the 
usual image sequence textures.

Perhaps this could be interesting for you too, so here are some details:

CSV is actually a spreadsheet format, you can open it with Excel or 
LibreOffice. It's a simple text file, the elements are separated with 
commas (csv= comma separated values). In TVPaint's solution, the CSV 
contains the exposure sheet, the frames are the rows and the layers are 
the columns. TVPaint saves all the pictures of the scene into a folder 
as PNG files. The folder has a similar name to the csv file. It saves 
each picture only once, but these files can be referenced multiple times 
in the exposure sheet.

I think Krita should have something similar. Maybe better to create an 
own format. If it happens, there will be a support for Blender in no 
time, and I'm quite sure it will be possible to use it even with TVPaint 
too - its George language is usable to write such import/export scripts. 
I can also promise a solution for Firka too, however that software is 
very outdated now.

Another possible usage of such a format is, to export the animation from 
Krita, modify the pictures with other programs or shell scripts, and 
import the whole thing back into Krita as layered animation.

The project page for the Blender addon now:
https://developer.blender.org/T47462

Bests,
Fazek