Few Wishes (Undo frame deleting & Layer rotation)

[marcello257]

Great update Matt!

Thanks for all your hard dedicated work!
It's much appreciated!!!

Here are a few wishes i have to make pencil a fine animation tool:

1. When the animator by accident delete an key drawing, it’s nog possible to redo this and bring the animationdrawing back!

2. When an animator wants to rotate 1 layer key in one Bitmap it’s not posible because Pencil rotates more layer keys(when this makes one picture) in more Bitmaps at the same time!

Can this be solved in a future update?

That would be very nice!

[mikshaw]

Fully agree with undo. It's easy to accidentally delete something, and it should always be possible to undo something like that.

I don't fully understand how rotation works in Pencil2D...i think you should be able to precisely key a rotation and camera movement (rotate one way, insert keyframe and rotate/move the opposite way) but it seems as though Pencil gets told to do a single rotation/movement and sticks with that. I haven't tried rotation/movement in a few weeks, though...things might have changed, and as i said i don't really understand how it works so i might have a mistaken idea of how it's supposed to be used. In any case, i don't think this is the same issue you're having. Rotation, as far as i understand it, is handled by the camera layer, which means that every layer is going to be rotated...you're rotating your view of the scene and not individual parts of the scene. Rotating individual layers is currently just a way to get different drawing angles, and isn't permanent. For the moment even this seems to be a little iffy...if the screen is redrawn, rotation gets reset whether you intended it or not, but in some cases it seems like it doesn't fully realign the drawing until you manually reset zoom/rotate.
Currently i guess we can select and move parts of a layer....i'm hoping eventually we'll be able to scale and rotate them as well.

[Jose-Moreno]

@marcello257 @mikshaw Hey guys. It's been a while indeed. If you would be so kind to try out the most recent nightly build here: http://pencil2d.org/download#nightlybuild

In most recent versions for 2018 you can now undo and redo keyframe deletion; layer deletion is still in the works, but please test it out.

For the second point I don't understand what you mean with the bitmap rotation, but there are currently three types of "rotation" that are possible in Pencil2D:

1. View Rotation, invoked when a drawing layer (bitmap or vector) is active. Shortcut => CTRL + ALT + RMB or MMB
2. Camera Rotation, invoked when the camera layer is active (is keyframable). Shortcut => CTRL + ALT + RMB or MMB note: you still have to reset the zoom / rotation as there is no view snapping yet.
3. Selection Rotation, This one can be done in either bitmap or vector layers. It permanently modifies the selected content orientation (is undoable) Shortcut => CTRL + LMB (Drag) inside the selection area.

If any of those are what you meant, please consider closing this issue as all of them seem to have been introduced.

However If by "layer" rotation you meant to actually rotate the WHOLE layer with contents (similar to toonboom harmony where you have a layer object or surface that can be rotated, and the strokes can be rotated independently of the layer), that won't be possible because the layer paradigms are different, so you have to select all the layer contents and rotate them to achieve a similar effect.

[Jose-Moreno]

[2020] After thinking some time about this, i'm going to leave this issue to treat only the Layer rotation request. As mentioned in a previous comment this would probably be the ability of manipulating the actual layer object and as such have it transform the layer contents.

I'm not sure if we can actually do this as I understand the layer is considered an object but perhaps by itself it does not have an actual representation on the canvas.

I mean it would have to be a visual container of sorts, so we could later manipulate it while effecting the layer contents. Think of it like a Flash symbol where the container has an embedded timeline, or if we're talking about parenting it would be something akin to having the layer have it's own coordinate system relevant to the canvas, and in turn the keyframe contents would have their own coordinate system relevant to the layer.

This idea of "global" layer transforms would also help greatly for a future layer interpolation implementation that has been requested at various times over the course of Pencil2D's lifetime.