Animation: merging layers is dangerous

[hulmanen]

I brought this up over a year ago, and EyeOdin provided a kind of fix with a plugin, but since this behaviour is still the default, I think it deserves a little more thought:

Dealing with layers in animation /storyboards

Say I have multiple frames of an animation and I want to do some tweaks to one frame. Usually my workflow is to minimize the number of layers I have, so I’ll create a new layer, do my edits, and merge it down to the “main” layer. Is there some easy way to do this when dealing with animation? When merging a layer down, the contents seem to get applied to all frames, unless I go and add empty frames to every other frame than the one I want to edit. How can I simplify this?

So basically, if you are not very careful with layers, you will end up destroying your work without noticing. This happens because when using the animation timeline, any new layers you add do not have keyframes assigned to them by default. Furthermore, if a layer does not have a keyframe, when merging down, Krita will treat it as if it had a keyframe on every frame.

So, if you create a new layer in animation mode, paint over it, then merge it down (which I do a lot), you will overwrite whatever was on the layer you merged to in every frame in the project. There’s no warning, you may not notice this until much later.

IMO the default should be for a new layer to start with a single blank keyframe, so you’re only editing a specific frame and avoid this destructive problem. If the user needs to have a layer’s contents propagate over multiple frames, they can go and change those settings. It’s more cumbersome for those use cases, but it’s much safer.