Several times I felt the need to have some kind of guide lines that should be non-pixelated.
Either with aim to do a quick sketch of overall form or just put the guides for the shapes on the image (e.g. where terminator should be).
These lines should render independently of pixel grid and have antialiasing to be able to draw smooth curves.
Existing Aseprite drawing tools (pencil, lines, shapes) can be used to draw them. User should be able to define line thickness and color (no need for advanced brush behavior).
Overall - would be awesome to have a layer that acts as a really basic image editor.
More difficult to have alignment between the image and the reference. E.g. I created a sketch → I did some drawing in Aseprite → I want to add new guides to the sketch. Now I have to somehow combine drawing from Aseprite and original sketch. It’s a lot of hustle.
In my specific situation I encountered following. I was drawing animation and after having overall shape and colors wanted to add some guides for shading. So I would need to export the frame → import into raster editor → draw guides → export guides → import in Aseprite. And if something changes I need to do it again. And for each frame. It’s not very user friendly design.
If I want to make adjustment - I need to use another program again.
Last point.
When I was starting this topic - I noticed several similar already posted.
So the feature does seem to be requested.
Those are good points, but remember that Aseprite is a pixel art editor, so it wouldn’t make much sense to program in a whole new drawing program just for better guide layers
vector guide layers would be the best option here, but it would still take a lot of effort to make a 2nd graphic engine for specific layers, just for guides, i would recommedn you just sketch phisically for now
reference are basically projected canvases that you cant edit, aseprite doesnt handle well big canvases due to its nature, so regarless we would need a adjencent “graphics engine” to handle bigger resolutions properly, without compromising the current engine.