As I said previously I'm working on animation support in Krita now. So I've written animator docker plugin for Krita.

I make it very compatible with existing documents and with Krita: it doesn't require any change in Krita to work and does not hurt non-animation image. The save format is not changed, so you can edit animation files without plugin.

Current features are very basic:

• Creating new animated layers
• Creating frames (paint or shape layers)
• Frame switching
• Onion skin
• Frame export (limited)

Some actions can be done manually by using layer box.

Nearly planned features:

• Advanced export
• Player
• Full set of actions on layers in docker, to make it independent from layer box
• Normal user interface

It is also planned to make extrapolation (especially for shape layers), but I don't think it will come soon.

How to install.
Currently I haven't work much on making it easy to build. I develop it in krita/plugins/extensions/dockers/animatorplugin in git. So I created patch which can be easily applied to calligra git tree. You can load it here (or see here).

Screenshot:


The code is not very good, unfortunately. But I have no previous real Qt coding experience.

Wooooa! Awesome extension!!!

I'm looking forward your progress.. From what I see, the most important thing missing is a "player" to display
the animation at some precise frame-rate (6/12/24 frames/second are most commonly used for traditional animation).
Something very cool would be to can play the animation directly on-canvas, that is very convenient to check movement between two strokes. I mean, a separate docker to display the animation could work (GimpAnimationPlugin style), but that's not as convenient as on canvas (TVPaint animation style).

Keep up the good work

Hello Torio,

Many thanks for your wonderful plugin!

I am 100% sure it will be extremely useful for many users

Keep your updates coming

I'm happy to hear you like it

About player. It is really next planned big feature and I'm starting to work on it now . For me it is much easier to implement playing on canvas, but it can be slow on big images at high framerate.

Also if you have any ideas about useful features (except for any kind of extrapolation -- I will work on it later), please write here.

Some useful feature I see already:
-a more advanced Light-table
-Import sound: display sound curve aligned with frames + playback when playing animation (a link to an external file can do it, doesn't absolutely need to be embed in .kra)
-a way to adjust frames exposure.

Toriro,

Thankyou, thankyou THANKYOU for working on this! This is exactly something that I have wanted for a long time but didn't dare to ask for (and with onion skinning, too! YES!)

I'd just like to second Animtim's request to be able to sync with sound and maybe to adjust the underlying frame rate (even if just with 12,24,29.97 and 60fps)

I hope that the guys over at the Morevena project see this. From memory they were using Krita for some of their previs animatics before putting them into Synfig. I'm sure this would help them out a lot!

Awesome extension! I think the most important is the preview and the frame rate, the sound can be added in other aplication like kdenlive.

I really like this initiative -- but I'm not sure where to put it to make sure users can access it. If we add it to Krita itself, it'll be easily packaged, of course. But the question is: won't we go outside our focus area, outside the vision we have for Krita as a painting application? If we want to do animation, we have to it completely.

On the other hand, there's the krita extensions repository. But that doesn't get packaged a lot, as far as I'm aware.

Personally, what I would love to see for this kind of thing is to have the extensions available via GHNS / Opendesktop.org. That way, they're browsed / installed from within Krita, yet authors can update them any time. We're already doing this with brushes, presets etc...

Well, the problem here is that putting binary stuff up at GHNS is difficult. So many platforms... Cyrille has been thinking about ways of making it possible though, for instance by integrating Krita with the krita extensions repository.

Sorry for no updates so long. I have no connection for some time, but still have some work done. Now there is a player, support for operations with frame layers and extended light table (optional).

Source code is here: http://ompldr.org/vOG9saA. It works with 2.3 and git versions of Krita: put it to krita/plugins/extensions/dockers/ folder and add to krita/plugins/extensions/dockers/CMakeLists.txt the following line:

add_subdirectory(animatordocker)

Cool, just when I started building the plugin during some downtime at LGM. Animtim says he wants this in the main release of Krita, so I think we need to really discuss that seriously now.

Hi Torio,

I've tried the plugin but couldn't quite get it to work -- might be my own ignorance! What I wanted to propose is to get you a KDE git committed account. Then you can develop the animation plugin in a branch in the calligra git repository, and that would make it much easier for us to check out and to try it! Have you already joined the kimageshop mailing list?

@Torio Mlshi: That sounds great! Too bad I don't have the time right now to try it, I hope I'll find a moment to look at it very soon…

@boud: Thanks for taking my advice in account about this.

Hi Boudewijn!

I have joined kimageshop list and I would be very happy to develop plugin in Krita git. What should I do for that? Is it just to register on identity.kde.org?

And about how to work with plugin. You need to manually set number of frames for newly created animation. This is probably the most non-obvious step, so it should be fixed later. After setting frames number you need just to create new animation layer and then adding individual frames can be done from context menu at appropriate position.