Martin Owens wrote :
Hi Martin and everyone!
Hi there, sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
I might actually be interested in this. I don't know what you have in mind precisely about "the simple animation plan", but here are the main possible goals I see:
Not quite, your solution would be a rock solid implementation (or the start of one) what i have in mind is much simpler and is mainly enabling:
Step 1 - Code change to add a slide bar which when enabled quickly switches between layers, causing other layers to be invisible/not editable. This has a benefit on static artists too. Add option for causing the +1 and/or -1 layer to be semi transparent.
That's a great onion skin addition to Inkscape's GUI. Note that animators often work with more than -1/+1 layer visible - it would be nice if it's possible to chose the number of layers (like -2/+1, or -10/+10) since it's quite useful for non linear-speed moves (like an object falling/bouncing, or a simple walk motion)
Step 2 - Write a python based plugin to take the current layer and copy verbatum the layer into a new layer for tweening.
Great since this could be a workaround for backgrounds. If Step one is customisable, it might be possible to select a few layers that would always appear (background/foreground) to save speed during editing (less objects than redrawing the same background 3 or more time with transparency on 2 or more layers.
Step 3 - Write a _very_ forgiving plugin which outputs an animated svg based on each layer being a keyframe.
This produces some simple animation for us and wouldn't take long to do and wouldn't even change the code base very much and the gui changes are benificial to non animation editing too.
You may or may not want to add to the plugin the ability to control the keyTimes for the keyframes.
These are some nice features to look forward to if the SoC project is accepted. I've been toying with the idea to write a blueprint for basic onion skin animation support in Inkscape, but didn't know if it was just asking too much. Animated svg looks really promising.
Loïc