I’m not sure how you would go about doing this, but one thing I would LOVE to see is a layer that doesn’t change the pixels, but would adjust the position of the pixels. I know that this isn’t exactly traditional pixel-art technique, but it would save SO MUCH time.
Example: I have a BIG BOSS. I move his torso every few frames, but I only animate the arms/legs/secondary animation layers. I get to the end of the animation, realize I forgot to add a belt-buckle to the torso. Even though the torso is the same in every frame (position has just been changed) I have to go back and add the buckle to EVERY frame. It would be nice to paint the buckle on one frame and it automatically add it to all the others with updated positions.
You’d probably have to create some sort of special layer, similar to a smart object in Photoshop or a composition in After Effects. Again, this is just a suggestion. I figure it may be a bit advanced. I use puppetting in After Effects a lot, so it’s nice to have a layer with transforms that I can go back later and edit the innards.
I remember implementing this some time ago, when I was programming the linked cels. There were some issues with the onion skin, something tricky. E.g. You are editing a linked cel in one frame and the onion skin in the previous frame has the same cel but in other xy position, so if an area of the cel is modified, we have to redraw the same area but in the other position to update the onion skin.
Anyway, I’m not sure if this should be part of scenes (which I’m not sure if it will be in 1.x series), or just a new option for linked cels to avoid sharing xy coordinates.
Scenes would be amazing. It would speed up production SO MUCH. Especially if you could add scaling and rotation (although, pixels might start looking weird, so may not be worth scaling and rotation :-/), but position transformation would be incredible. Having a looping animation that you can just move around (like a flying fairy with a Zeldaish character). I’m doing a huge gun transformation right now, but it’s a huge animation, so I have to do it in a different file and then copy and paste the frames into the character’s file to move them around. Would be so much better if I could just maintain all of that in a scene and do the positions separately.
I was frustrated just today by the lack of this feature. It’d be incredibly useful for populating a game world when it comes to reusing common animations(such as breathing animations made by moving individual body parts up and down).
Reporting in 2019, still want something like this. Frame parenting to group layers or something. I want to be able to make the puppetting type animations like After Effects. It would be great to be able to set an anchor for a layer or piece and it stays where I set it.
I would still love this as well, but I see you working on tiles, so lets get that in first!!! Maybe you can use this to create animated tiles as an object and then we can reuse that for transforming objects in character animations
I want to change an area of a 20 frame gif from green to yellow without having to go to each frame. Has there been any ideas how to do this? Any other tool I can use? Thanks!
hi, wyattbiker. you can use replace color: pick the color you want to change, select the area, go to edit > replace color. don’t forget to switch selected to all.
Has this feature been implemented yet? It would be similar to symbols that were used in Adobe Flash. I think that Open Toonz and Toon Squid have this feature.
It’s something like the Smart Object on Photoshop.
You have a file with your Boss body separated from the animation file.
When you change the body you change the whole animation.
I think After Effects and the old friend Flash have this feature too!
