A lot of great feedback and discussion so far, I’ve learned a bit and been tweaking my expectations and ideas. Thanks everyone!
Artists can* not. That’s not their job. That’s not even their field.
One of the jobs of devs is to assess how much work a suggestion or idea takes to develop. They do this pretty well, as far as I can tell. I mean I would hope so. The problem is after that. The next step is to take the assessed ‘difficulty’, and compare it to the assessed ‘need’, and come up with a conclusion on whether it is worth the effort, and where it belongs in the upcoming versions.
This is where I honestly think the entire process falls apart. Devs routinely undervalue what artists want, and they decline or put off ideas because they are ‘too much work’ for the perceived ‘need’.
Someone in the previous thread suggested a great idea- a voting board, easily accessible to artists, where you are able to suggest and vote up on ideas you as an artist would like added or looked at. As far as I can tell the only way Devs know right now if something is desired or not is either by guessing or counting on their fingers or searching how many times they’ve been asked.
Yeah, once a program gets too big it starts to suffer the same problems as open source software, because like OSS they realize they don’t have to listen to what their users want.
This is kind of what I’d hoped, adding a ““vector”” layer that allows regular brushes, but stores their underlying stroke data as vectors would help with frame by frame animation more than you can know. And I know because it was the most glaring issue after moving from CSP.
This is a good example of tool creep. It’s like feature creep, but what Krita is currently doing and what I just ranted about.
Krita in general lacks convenient coloring tools. Forget animation. Animators do not need a ‘super smart multi-frame color fill tool’, we just need a working fill tool in general. Fix the fill tool we already have. Make it viable for anything other than aliased fully enclosed all black untextured linework. It’s probably absolute bare minimum in terms of features right now. (I wouldn’t even have a single use for it if it wasn’t for the color reference layer option)
Guess what, once you make the basic fill tool lightning fast, make it completely fill the area, give it gap handling and fill-to-center for linework, you don’t need a super duper niche animator-only colorize tool. Now you’ve solved several problems at once and made not only animators happy, but literally nearly everyone who uses the program. You’ve gotten so wrapped up on whether you could you forgot if you should.
To properly answer this I’d have to come up with a core feature set for each possible specialized art type, and I’m not about to do that. What I mean by this is that different artists have different workflows of producing artwork.
Some people paint from scratch, they use big brushes to block in large areas of color and then slowly work their way more and more detailed.
Some people do a character concept art approach, starting with a sketch layer and then inking in over top of it. Comic artists follow a similar workflow.
Animators have specific scenes where they work their way down from keys to extremes, all the way down to however many inbetweens they’d like.
There are dozens more workflows that Krita is used for that I’m not going to list. Krita provides tools and the ability to do all of these.
But it has no tools to actually make any of these faster or more streamlined in any viable way. It is hostile to people who perfect these workflows, unless they accept compromise. This is why I say in the OP that Krita is primarily hobbyists, most people who spend enough time in the program to earn a living through it alone realize its limitations, try to improve it with their suggestions, then give up and move elsewhere when met with hostility.
I am not a master at every workflow Krita has, far from it, so I can only make suggestions in the areas I have hit a wall. To many that probably looks like me just whining that my specific ideas aren’t implemented, which is why I’m trying not to make any actual suggestions in this thread. But I’ve spoken to many artists who’ve moved away from Krita for various reasons, many with completely different styles or workflow, and they all seem to hit that wall too. I believe it’s a systemic issue.
Note: These next few are not about the animation patch, but recent ‘features’ in general.
This kind of backwards dev-always-right thinking is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re wording this entire rebuttal as if the build is already set in stone. What if artists had a problem with it? What if they had a better idea to handle something in a way that fit better into a workflow? What if something in an update was what drove artists away to begin with? Obviously animation sound isn’t going to be one of these times, but if you think this way about it I can easily see it used in other times.
It’s like we’re spoon fed updates whether we like it or not with barely any chance of a discussion on the matter. (Save for the updates that explicitly did that here, where the devs are actively communicating with artists and gathering feedback)
For a forum that puts so much emphasis on ‘explaining how a new feature will fit into your workflow’, you sure don’t seem to care about ‘fitting into a workflow’ then pushing updates yourselves. How did the update fit into your animation workflow when you tested it?
A massive, overwhelming burden of proof is on us for making a suggestion. If we so much as say ‘this way would make my life easier’ we better have an essay and a infographic and 10k hours of practice backing it. This is a dev-first environment.
Considering most of the things I’ve seen wiggle into new updates, I just kind of assumed most things around here didn’t. Unless it was one of those specific threads like for the assistants.
Not wrong, but those, like many other aspects of Krita, need a solid, featureful, and very firm, end goal.
Let’s take animation for example because it’s what I’m most familiar with.
Animation software? It’s simple. We used to do it on paper. Frame by frame animators (what Krita has said they are targeting), don’t need a lot. We need very few things, with very few features, and most of them are already down pat and working great in the current version of Krita. Personally I think that Krita should ‘finish’ animation, and work elsewhere until it garners a larger animation following.
In order to ‘finish’ animation, I think it still misses some very major features. How it doesn’t have them is beyond me, is ‘Hey, sometimes things move between frames but aren’t redrawn’ a feature?
This is also a good example of ‘specialization’ from earlier. An animator would look at that and say ‘yeah, that’s practically 30% of my entire animation work’. Yet it’s not in Krita. Either the devs don’t know how important it is to frame by frame work, or they don’t care enough. This leaves an entire workflow hostile. Animating in Krita anything more than a loop is hostile, and it is difficult to use Krita for animation because of this lack of specialization.This is just one example on one ‘specialization’, but nearly every aspect of Krita runs into something like this when you really get into a professional workflow.