So I’ve been learning a lot of animation techniques, digital and traditional, and while I believe that it’s important to understand a number of tools, I keep falling back on Krita for its excellent features for detailing and how much time it saves me. (I know that animation is a relatively recent feature.) Recently, I also learned how to use Grease Pencil in Blender, and have learning OpenToonz on my to-do-list.
When I was rendering from Blender, I thought of something. File Layers let you depend only on a path to a file, but give you the option to add transform masks and use it as a control layer. In theory, I could render my line art in Blender and have its excellent edit mode tools to speed up clean-up, but after rendering, I could import these frames into Krita for post work.
That would work fine, but if I made a structural change and had to re-render from Blender, I would have to re-import all of the frames again, and it probably isn’t the most RAM-friendly thing in the world anyway. So it’s exciting—using Blender’s compositor to render multiple render modes to different folders, importing them into Krita, and applying each to a layer or mask that controlled my final output—but, there’s room for improvement!
If I could import animation frames, but have it import each frame as a file layer instead of an actual raster, this whole issue would dissolve, and I could use Krita and Blender on the same animation, at the same time. Is this possible, or do I need to do a feature request?
I don’t have an answer to your question, as I know little more about Krita’s animation capabilities than that they exist.
But I could imagine that, given your problem description, one of these Krita and Blender connecting plugins could possibly be supportive and helpful for you.
Thank you, those are pretty cool; but they’re a little to the side of what I’m actually trying to do here.
The thing is, if I’m using Blender with its compositor tool, I can output multiple renderings of my scene; such as if I want a mask. It’s capable of rendering frame-by-frame images in a manner that makes them easy to import into Krita, too; so I can also animate those masks. Once the initial layer processing is done, Blender composition happens, and the files are output.
Now, importing frames into Krita is easy, and I can do that on multiple layers. Each layer can have a different use—one might hard light, one might be multiply, etc. So this part works fine.
The concern is that if I did something 2D in Blender, using grease pencil, and I want to redo it, I’ll need to export the changed frames as images. In the current edition of Krita, to the extent of my knowledge, I’ll have to paste those frames into memory as rasters, over their position in my animation, in order to reprocess them.
However, if I could have them simply be file layers, in theory they would update immediately and I could use both programs at once, combining them into some kind of god-like super-digital-studio with the best of both.
Thanks for your explanation, now I have a better idea of how you want to achieve your goal. I hope a user with better knowledge of animation will come along and hopefully have answers that will point you in the right direction.
I guess the general request would be importing video as file layers, being a sequence of images one of the possibilities, like in video editing software.
I figured it might not be implemented; but I have to say, as recently as Krita got animation support, it’s super-handy for that. I suppose I’ll need to make a feature request for video file layers, inclusive of frame sequences, then? It actually would work pretty well for what I’ve got in mind.
Just imagine being able to use Blender’s grease pencil, armature, and compositing tools for your basic frames; then export an early animation, import it into Krita, and be capable of using Krita layers for touch-ups and 2D compositions. Blender is inherently a vector program, it’s not likely to keep up with Krita’s expansive raster capabilities any time soon. Both together would make for an absolutely mean open-source animation studio.
If you want to kickstart the thoughts and ideas then yes
Frame sequences stored in a folder should be easier to do than an .mp4 video file as the external referred source.
