Hello everyone,

I'm a huuuuuge noob in animation and in digital art. I'm starting with Krita and I try to do some animating.

For my idea, I'd like to draw circles that stay the same size and shape during the animation (well, they're gonna be atom parts, like electron orbits or nuclei part, like protons and neutrons).

I'd like to know if there's a way for me to copy/paste them from one frame to the other.

I tried several times already, but all it does is create a new layer and add a new circular shape at the beginning of my animation (at frame 0), which I don't want to happen. I only want to move them just a little bit, keeping the same size and shape, which is why I don't want to redraw the circles. (or if there's a way to know the dimensions of my circles, so that i can easily redraw them, well, I'd like to know that )

Thanks

From your post, it seems that you copied a Layer. The main purpose of the Layers is to hold different independently moving characters in the animation. (This is a simplification.) You need just one layer, which will hold all the frames of your animation. Layer-1 is the white background layer and layer-2 is the transparent layer that you should work in.

If you haven't already done so, I'd suggest that you use the standard Animation Workspace arrangement for dockers. There's a small icon at the top right of the Krita window that looks like a list with a small down-pointer on it. Click that icon to show a list of workspaces and then click the Animation one. This will give you a simple and suitable docker arrangement for animation work. Later on, you'll learn how to make your own docker/workspace arrangements and to store them as a named workspace in that list. Don't try that yet

Then, you can add the Brush Preset docker with Settings -> Dockers -> Brush Presets. This will let you choose a suitable painting tool (e.g. Basic_tip-default) to draw your initial circle on Layer 2. After that, you can close the Brush Preset docker (with the small 'x' at the top right) to give you more screen space for your image.

Click on Layer 2 to make sure that's where you're drawing and don't touch the layers after that. The timeline docker, with frame boxes, will be along the bottom of your screen with the Animation docker to the left above it.

For initial learning work, I'd suggest a frame rate of 12 and an end frame number of 24 to give two seconds of animation.

Click on the frame-0 box and draw a circle using the Ellipse tool. Then select the Move tool and move the circle to where you want it to start. The Move tool moves the entire canvas so you can have more than one shape making up the character and you don't have to worry about selecting them to move them all. (This is a simplification but it will do for now.) From now on, you don't need any other tool apart from the Move tool. You now have your initial frame, frame-0.

Right click the frame-1 box then click the Copy Frame option. (This option was made available because frame-1 was empty. If you try it again then you get the option to remove the frame.) This will copy the contents of frame-0 to frame-1. Now use the Move tool to move the circle slightly. Click on the small lightbulb icon to the left of frame-0 to turn on the 'Onion Skins'. This will show you the two previous frames in pale red and the two next frames in pale green (if they exist). This is useful for judging distances and inter-frame differences. The icon that looks like an onion is for the Onion Skin docker which is used to adjust the number, colour and opacity of the onion skins but you don't need to use that now because the initial state is fine for your task.

Right click the frame-2 box and Copy Frame to copy the (currently active) frame-1 image to frame-2. Then move the circle to the next position. Repeat this process until you get to frame 24. Press the Play button in the Animation docker and you will see the results of your work. You can click on any frame and use the Move tool to adjust its position, using the onion skin images to guide you (after you stop the animation player).

You can copy the contents of any frame to an empty frame by clicking on the frame box and then right clicking the empty destination frame box. You can also drag a frame box to move its content to another frame, overwriting any existing content.

If you like, you can Add a Paint Layer and draw another circle (or whatever) and work on this in the same way to give another independently moving object or set of objects. Make sure that the Move Tool option in the Tool Options docker has been set to 'Move Current Layer' if you want to do this.

Good Luck

Wow, thanks a lot for this

I'll try that. And with this much detail, I don't know how I can fail

Thanks again.

Well, I finished what I wanted to do, so here it is :

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/708040

Thanks for the advice

That's great! I can feel the energy being released

If you Render it as a GIF, you get a continuous looping animated .gif file. Here's an example:

https://imgur.com/a/wl59Q