How to create an animation from two separate frames?

[Alex Cherkasoff]

Hi!
Can anyone make a video tutorial how to create an animation from two separated frames without using "motion paste"?

And by the way, is there an option to make a previous and future frames semi-transparent in onion skin mode?

Thanks.


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Alex

[Boris]

Hi Alex,

I'll see if I have time to make a better tutorial later, but the basic idea is explained here: https://youtu.be/Xk1_CugdytI?t=3m34s
The idea is the following. I assume your two separate frames are at frame 0 and 4.

1. Go to frame 0, and select one of the edges
2. Go to frame 4, and while holding SHIFT, select the corresponding edge
3. Press the i key (shortcut for Animation > Inbetween Selection)
4. Repeat for every pair of edges

This is a bit tedious but eventually you get the full correspondence between the two frames. If you want one edge to "shrink" to a vertex, you can select the edge at frame 0, the vertex at frame 4, and press i. In a similar fashion, you can make an edge "grow" from a vertex. If you want two consecutive edges at frame 0 to be interpolated into one single edge at frame 4, you can do this too. More generally, you can interpolate any "path of edges" into any other "path of edges". In future version, I am planning to extend this feature, so that any selection at frame 0 can be automatically interpolated into any other selection at frame 4. Of course, in complicated situations, there will always be a chance that it will not give the result you expect. The hope is that things that are "easy" to interpolate would work out of the box, and whenever it's hard for VPaint to know what to do, you would use a "smaller selection" to help it.

Unfortunately, onion skins cannot be made semi-transparent at the moment. It is indeed a serious limitation, which should be fixed in future versions.

I hope that helps!
Boris

[Alex Cherkasoff]

Okay, I'll wait 'til you fix it.
thanks.

[Boris]

Ok! If you haven't yet, you can subscribe to the mailing list (here: http://www.vpaint.org/) so that you know when the next version is released!