Hi!

I started to dabble a bit with Krita today. Specifically I'm looking into it for animation. And. First off. It is quite a capable package. I will say that. But as always there are a few things I think is missing before I make the jump fully.

1- This one is simple. When rendering animations as image sequences it's just a waste of resources to render all 50 frames if I only drew on 10 of them for example. Yes, I understand the necessity for it for going straight to rendering video and just inputting that frame stream into ffmpeg. But what about all those other situations where we aren't done with the animation when we export from Krita? Why not simply have a checkbox at render to "ignore duplicate frames"? That way Krita could look at the timeline and determine, is this a new frame compared with the previous one? If not, then simply ignore it and see if the next one is different. And I would end up with only the 10 frames I actually need. While still being able to preview the timings in Krita.

2- The next one is a bit involved. And it's basically to somehow group layers for export-layers. This way I can draw my animation in layer groups (group 1 containing 3 layers, group 2 containing 2 layers, for example) and during render Krita would go through and flatten the layer groups while minding the opacity checkboxes and guide-layers.
Ignoring rough animations and only rendering the cleanups for each group. Maybe adding a checkbox for the layer called "include this layer in render" or something? (Maybe the guide-layer feature is already there though), but at least the grouping of layers to animation export layers would be downright awesome as a timesaver.

The exported frames would then be called AnimationName_LayerGroupName_Framenumber.png

Take this for example. I do an animation of a guy sitting at a desk talking while tapping the desk with his finger. In this scenario I would draw the base of his image. I would maybe animate his hands loop on 2s (12 fps) and draw a loop of talking animation frames for the face to be played at anywhere from 1fps to 24 fps and I might not even know yet what he'll be saying. And the base body layer is a still image until halfway through when he turns around and it starts animating the full body on threes.

This may sound like a convoluted way of doing things. But if the two features were implemented I would end up with three streams of animation frames with say, 6 drawings for the hand loop, 4 for the face-loop, and 4 for the body still and turnaround. These can then easily be imported, layered and timed and looped according to the sound file in the NLE (non-linear editor) and finally composited inside After Effects or something like that before returning to the NLE for final time-editing and youtube-render. And I can also reuse these frames much more effectively for future shots.

Instead, right now I can only export this animation in full 24fps in one flattened layer at 50 frames, and it's much much less useable later on in the process, I cannot modify the timings easily in the NLE or anything else.

So with these two features I feel that Krita would take its animation feature from a neat little feature to something that can power animation-studios!