I spent some time doodling with Krita animation, and what keeps me from using it is the fact there is no distinction between drawings and frames. Traditionally, drawings are numbered, and assigned to frames in an exposure sheet aka dope sheet, which makes it possible to use drawings more than once, for instance to create a cycle. Also, the exposure sheet has text for remarks, dialogue, etc. Adding this to Krita would make it a lot more useful, so I would appreciate if this could be picked up as a feature request?

Hello, i thinks it's already the case (but i may have misunderstood the question) : you have distinctions between layers (drawing) and keyframes (in the timeline). for exemple to make a loop, you just have to copy/paste the keyframes... and you have the possibility to have multiple timelines by using different layers : one for background, another one for the action/characters, one for the dialogues...

You can copy/paste any frame of any animated timeline to any other frame of any animated timeline and also copy/paste a range of frames across and between animated timelines. What you can't do is copy/paste between a non-animated layer and a frame of an animated layer, they are in separate domains/spaces/whatever.

If you have a 'collection' of drawings then you can't assign them an identifier and put them into an animated frame by reference.

If you want a collection of drawings to choose from, you can put them on a timeline and go through them, choose them and copy/paste them to any target location you like, then turn off the 'collection layer' while playing or rendering. The disadvantage of this is that you can only see them by manually going through the frames. The advantage is that they are all on one layer so can all be turned on/off at once. In a sense, every animated layer is a collection of drawings.

If you want to have your collection on individual layers so that you can see them all in the layers docker, you can do that but you'd need a high layer docker and you'd need to make each one an animated single frame animation so that you could select the layer and copy/paste them as needed from their frame-0 to the target layer frame-n. You could group them so you could turn them all off at once while playing or rendering.

I suggest that you try both techniques (or develop your own) to see what works best for you.

> What you can't do is copy/paste between a non-animated layer and a frame of an animated layer, they are in separate domains/spaces/whatever.

You can just the same way as you can copy and paste a part of a frame between frames, it just requires some additional manual work to be done (in the case above: creating a new frame on the pasted layer, then another empty one, then merging with the animated layer).

Clones and cycles are in development, but I think it's a bit on hold right now. We do have specific plans on that though.

Also regarding the distinction, when there is an empty space on the timeline, the drawing from the last keyframe is used - but when let's say rendering the frames as image sequence, there will be repeated drawings as new frames. So some kind of cloning already exists, it's just very limited.

> it just requires some additional manual work to be done

That manual work is the conversion of a non-animated layer to an animated layer, which is not difficult of course. You can also perfom a simple manual task to go in the other direction, from animated to non-animated content.

Krita doesn't have various facilities and tools that are provided in specific/specialised animation applications but it is very good and from what you say, it sounds like it will get even better in the future.

Yes, you can copy/paste frames, but this results in unrelated copies of the same frame: edit one copy, and the others remain unchanged. This is exactly why the distinction between frames and drawings is essential, as you can plan, say, a rough walk cycle, where drawings are reused extensively, the animation can be tested, and the rough drawings can be gradually refined, without manually copying and pasting them again. Somewhere the manual claims that the Krita timeline is like an exposure sheet, which is really a joke for whoever worked with exposure sheets.

tymond wrote:Clones and cycles are in development, but I think it's a bit on hold right now. We do have specific plans on that though.

They're not on hold, but admittedly the progress has been slow. Both features already work and in the development branch of the feature, but there are still some issues to iron out before they're ready for production.

eezacque wrote:Yes, you can copy/paste frames, but this results in unrelated copies of the same frame: edit one copy, and the others remain unchanged.

Clone frames (or frame instances, or whatever name we end up using) will allow this kind of re-use. They are essentially keyframes which share the underlying content. Similarly, cycles will allow ranges of frames to be re-used and looped without making separate copies.