Hi hi hi. I downloaded Krtia yesterday and have made a really basic beat-board animatic which I am delighted with. I feel like I don’t have any control of Playback in the Animation view.
Sometimes it plays back from the beginning. Other times it seems to have selected a certain amount of frames to playback and loop from. That’s normal to be ABLE to do certainly (am migrating here from Flash/Toonboom/AfterEffects) but it feels like it has a mind of its own, and it’s only by chance that it plays back the way I wish.
I managed to wrangle it but only accidentally and have no idea how to wield it purposefully. I’d love to also get some custom keyboard shortcut keys for play/pause.
Do any of you have any pointers to get the hang of it - are there any tips/tricks or a clear resource etc. Would be very grateful.
Can you explain a little about your workflow? Like, what kind of features you use and how big/long the animation is? I haven’t experienced what you describe, but maybe whenever I animated with Krita, it’s just too short to cause this.
I have no specific workflow figured out just yet. Simply i’m pressing play and it plays from somewhere else vs. I am in the trackhead. Nor does it play from the beginning. It has - unknowingly to me - selected a weird other bit of the animation and i find it hard to unselect that. I must be accidentally selecting portions of the track without realising it - so if there is anything that can explain it, it would really help. I’m only on about 400 frames.
I can’t seem to zoom in and out on the track either if I want to view the entire timeline or view a short bit in detail, so i have to scroll back and forth laboriously. Do you know if zooming in and out on the track possible?
I’ve marked the three important bits: blue is the current frame (the orange column), red is the selection, and green is the cached frames (it’s the light grey row underneath the frame numbers).
So the cached frames are there to allow smooth playback, and usually my suspect for what you describe is that the frames have not been cached yet, or are waiting to cache, but cached frames should work automatically (like, showing/hiding a layer will cause all cached frames to be invalidated, and will show a little pop-up window to wait until the frames are cached), so if they don’t work there’s a bug.
EDIT: I’ve never gotten to 400 frames, whenever I animated I tend to cut scenes quite small to keep it focused, so it might be related to that (which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed). Hopefully however, its just a selection that had been made.
This diagram is very helpful generally thank you. But the caching thing isn’t really the issue, it’s the playback selecting those orange frames seemingly at random. I’m certainly hitting something by mistake without realising, I can’t replicate the issue - it just keeps happening, so if there’s any shortcut keys or things not to touch etc that would create those kinds of selections it would really help. It has messed playback up basically constantly.
Also re. 400 frames. I just downloaded Krita yesterday, all I have plonked down is a 16 panel storyboard each running for 1 second each. So only 16 keyframes. No transitions, nothing. Just really super basic. But even if I did fully animate for 16 seconds, that isn’t that long a time. Is Krita going to struggle a lot with 16 seconds?
I suppose then this is a supplementary question to the above - are there any tips I should know about to optimise Krita’s caching here, because I’m going to want to go for longer than 16s. I’ve previously done in AfterEffects etc 3-5 min animatics which although basic still had many frames on 1s & 2s, had audio and lots of transitions etc. It seems like I should be able to do that on Krita but I hope caching won’t be too much of an issue?
oooooo that zoom out button for the timeline is very useful - i had NOT spotted that before, thank you. The only issue is that it really doesn’t zoom out very much at all, it manages to zoom out to only 10 seconds on my 4k 27" screen, can’t zoom out any further so I can’t get the full 16 seconds onto the timeline. Is that changeable?
No clue, I’m not a professional animator, when I animate with Krita it is usually very small stuff, or in the context of me being one of the developers, and the latter I try to make big projects to find bugs (it looks like my largest file was 60~ frames at 3200x1600 with maybe 8 layers). I’m however not the main animation developer, so I’ll cc @emmetpdx for the questions that are a little bit more feature-request like
Thank you for being so responsive and linking to these bits. Would love to get Emmetpdx’s input too. I’m very isolated out here in Istanbul. My producer is in London, and I don’t have a studio or community around me who are doing animation so this immediately feels very supportive and lovely to have joined the Krita world.
Working in the animation timeline myself, I’ve run into all the same issues you’re describing. Really it comes down to sitting down and learning when/why Krita decides to do what it does because it’s not immediately intuitive. It could definitely use a bit of a UX polish though with the generalized feedback of animators. Maybe a poll or survey or something.
Personally, my biggest issue is with the inability to know what exactly you’re drawing on without making a conscious effort to squint at the timeline. When animating, I’d say half the time I’m drawing on the wrong layer on accident which adds hours to my workflow.
The layer(s) you have selected and the keyframe(s) you have selected are completely separate.
For instance, which layer would I draw on if drew on the canvas right now? Can you tell at first glance?
Hint: The last thing I clicked on the timeline was the top layer on frame 14
