I would love to see extremely basic animation implemented into mypaint. I’m willing to help out with development as well. This isn’t asking to make it full fledged like OpenToonz, but very short (say 10-30 seconds long) animations that you would staple together in another program.
This would be extremely convenient because I like MyPaint and the brush system, it be much better to flip through the individual images without having to have them open in an external program.
Making the timeline widget shouldn’t be too hard. The real difficulty would be what format to use to store the animation. I had a couple of ideas in mind:
- GIF - Probably not a good idea due to hard limitations on 256 colours.
- PNG/APNG - The official PNG spec was updated back in june to allow animation. Optionally, an animated PNG can use the extension “.apng”. MyPaint already exports to PNG, so it might be convenient to use that.
- Webp - The google created file format officially allows animations.
- MNG - Closely related to PNG and appears to be better than GIF for animations.
- Use open cel animation (.OCA) - Not a file format, but a directory containing a list of files to import into another program such as blender or after effects. It was created for easy sharing of animations between programs. It’s not uncommon to distribute as a standard zip file.
- Add an extension to the already default project format, .ORA - I do believe that the spec allows for extensions and there has been a proposal (that really hasn’t gone anywhere) to allow animation. I presume that if GIMP for instance opened an animated ORA, it would only care about the first frame.
So there are options available. As I mentioned, it would be incredibly convenient to make a short (and I mean very short) animation because it shouldn’t bog down MyPaint if it’s short enough. I could see it as a single few second scene be absolutely possible.
Now, should this go forward, would it be better to have the timeline be a widget you place on either side of the window or be like other animation programs and have the bar be aligned at the top or bottom of the screen?