Having used many, many different animation programs (Flash/Animate, ToonBoom Harmony, Clip Studio Paint and TVPaint) I want to congratulate the Krita team on making perhaps the most user-friendly animation program of the whole lot of them. With how far it's come I'm proud to have helped kickstart the animation feature and others during their most recent campaign for Krita 3.0, and will gladly do so again!

That said, there are always some things that could be improved upon or added to and I'd like to share my thoughts as far as that goes.

1. Freehand vector drawing

I'm sure this has been asked a lot already. Just like Adobe Animate and ToonBoom uses, vectors are an extremely lightweight, scalable format perfect for animation and apparently can even have textures applied to them these days, making them quite similar to raster brushes.

2. Color Swapping

This is something ToonBoom Harmony does, being able to change an existing color on the canvas to a different one with a click is very, very useful. I don't know if this is possible with raster graphics so I guess you could just consider this a supplement request to the previous one!

3. "Paste in Place" Same Layer/Frame

For reasons I guess I can't really articulate right now, it would be extremely useful to be able to copy and paste selected individual elements directly into both the same layer and frame rather than having a new one created (Same as Photoshop's "Paste in Place" feature"), as far as I know when animating you can't really copy and paste anything other than the entirety of a frame's contents by duplicating a frame.

4. Copy/Paste Frames

I know you can copy frames by clicking and dragging and that's often fine, but that becomes less ideal when you're attempting to drag the frames off of the current visible area in the timeline, and depending on what you're doing and how many frames from the origin it is this can become quite time consuming! Being able to select a group of frames, cut or copy them and paste them directly into the timeline would be great.

5. Frame landmark highlights

Not a big deal but in most of the default themes it's kind of hard to tell where frames (especially those with multiple digits) end and begin. A little strip of a high contrast color at the beginning of the frame would make it easy to make out at a glance instantly. These already actually exist but they're so faint as to be basically imperceptible in pretty much all themes except "Krita Bright" (which has its own set of problems)

6. Frame Thumbnails

A feature TVPaint, ToonBoom Storyboard Pro and Photoshop have, shows you a small thumbnail of what's drawn on a particular frame from the timeline itself, might make a good optional feature for Krita, someday.

Anyway those are just some suggestions; even as it is Krita is far superior for animation than many of its peers. Whether it's the clever feature of frames being exposed by default, the ease in which frames are manipulated in the timeline or just the ability to change the frame's color to highlight ways in which they might need to stand out from those around them, I'm in love with it. I just hope it comes to be as stable as some of its enterprise competitors someday soon, it's not perfect in that regard just yet but it seems to be well on its way!

Vector animation would be a very useful feature. The ability to copy vectors from one frame to the next and then move their points would be great way of creating quick animation results.

anthonydoelz wrote:3. "Paste in Place" Same Layer/Frame

For reasons I guess I can't really articulate right now, it would be extremely useful to be able to copy and paste selected individual elements directly into both the same layer and frame rather than having a new one created (Same as Photoshop's "Paste in Place" feature"), as far as I know when animating you can't really copy and paste anything other than the entirety of a frame's contents by duplicating a frame.

4. Copy/Paste Frames

I know you can copy frames by clicking and dragging and that's often fine, but that becomes less ideal when you're attempting to drag the frames off of the current visible area in the timeline, and depending on what you're doing and how many frames from the origin it is this can become quite time consuming! Being able to select a group of frames, cut or copy them and paste them directly into the timeline would be great.

I agree, Krita is a very great app and I'm very grateful that it has animation capabilities, it has the potential to be a truly amazing software for the industry. Said that, I think that it really needs to have those 2 points that anthonydoelz explained before. Having a way to copy paste in place some parts of a drawing on a different frame is a must have for any animation program.

Thank you again for making Krita an excellent app!!

re. 4. Copy/Paste Frames

In Krita 4.1.0 you can copy/paste a frame range within a layer and between layers. Make the layers visible in the timeline and click on the first frame in the range. Shift-Click-Drag to select a range of frames, which will be highlighted in orange. Then right-click the selected range and copy to clipboard. Then click in the destination layer on the start of the intended destination range, then right-click and Paste From Clipboard.

At the top of the animation layer stack (above the lightbulb icons) is a small left-right arrow icon. Click-drag this left or right to have the timeline zoom in or out to show more/fewer frames. This can be useful for copying a large number of frames. If you have more than about 200 frames then you'll still have to drag the timeline to get to a distant Paste destination.

3. "Paste in Place" Same Layer/Frame

For reasons I guess I can't really articulate right now, it would be extremely useful to be able to copy and paste selected individual elements directly into both the same layer and frame rather than having a new one created (Same as Photoshop's "Paste in Place" feature"), as far as I know when animating you can't really copy and paste anything other than the entirety of a frame's contents by duplicating a frame.

Yes, Please! I am working on some animation right now and that would be so useful. P.S. Krita is such a great program If I was rich I would definitely be sending more money for its development