Fun with onion skins

The first new feature of the GSoC project on animation in Krita is has landed in git. Until now, I have been mostly concentrating on refactoring the core structures toward their final form, which has taken much more time than I anticipated. Fortunately, it is now mostly done, and I am getting to the point where progress is more visible.

In addition to better organized code, we now have fully functioning onion skin rendering. It comes complete with independent opacities for multiple skinned frames and coloring future and past keyframes. The user interface for changing these settings is still missing, but will be coming soon. Currently the settings can be adjusted by manually tweaking Krita's configuration file.

Onion skins in action

I did a little test animation this weekend, and found the combination of proper onion skins and Krita's powerful toolset (esp. free transform tool) made it very easy to tweak and adjust my roughs. It's a joy to work with good tools. I have high hopes that animating in Krita will be a very pleasant experience.

For the adventurous among you who are itching to try it out, and know how to compile Krita, the code is available in the krita-animation-pentikainen branch. I must warn you, however, that while it is beginning to get into a semi-usable state, it's still very unstable and definitely not ready for any sort of production work. Also, files created with it will likely be incompatible with future versions.

Now that I'm at the stage of implementing new functionality, I hope to bring more frequent updates of new developments during the rest of the summer.