1 Topic by toonron

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I am an Animation Supervisor, and I use Kinovea to show animation changes in videos to my animation team. I also teach animation at toonimations.com and I use Kinovea to show animation changes and feedback to my students.

What I wanted to ask about is this: In order to change the persistence of a drawing, I can right mouse click it, etc. But when I'm drawing a character pose, for example, I lift my pen multiple times while drawing out the pose.... which means there are actually multiple drawings on that one key image. To change the persistence of that drawing, I have to select each piece of it individually.

Is there a way to hold down a key while drawing so that the program will consider it still part of one overall drawing (i.e. for example, holding down the shift key while drawing so that until you let go of the shift key, it considers every line part of one overall drawing)?

And/or is there a way to select all the drawings in the frame together so that you could change the color/persistence/etc and have all of them effected at once? Perhaps a marquee selection or a "select all" function for drawings on a key frame?

Thank you for your help, and for making such a wonderful program!


-Ron

2 Reply by joan

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You make a very good point about the pencil tool. At the moment there is no secret function to fix the problem.

Holding down a key would be a solution but I'm not sure if it would be very convenient while drawing.

Another idea would be to automatically group the new pieces of the drawing with the existing pencil pieces of the same color on that image. So until you change color, or change key image, the pencil would be adding to the existing group. On a given image, all pencil pieces of a given color would actually be a single drawing.

Or be in this additive mode only until you switch to another tool. This would allow to have several groups of the same color.

3 Reply by toonron (edited by toonron 2013-03-22 03:24:00)

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Joan, I think the solutions you suggested make a lot of sense.

The idea of having consistent color be the grouping factor... so that a change of color becomes the "off' switch and the reset of a new drawing asset.... and so that anything that's the same color is considered part of one group... that would solve the issue I'm having, for sure and prevent the need of holding down a key while working, which may prove awkward as you mentioned.

Or waiting until the tool is changed, or the key image is moved away from.... all of these seem to be solid ways of grouping a series of pencil drawings to keep them considered a single object by the program.

If that's something that would be relatively simple to implement, that would be awesome.

And thank you so much for responding so quickly.

All the best!


-Ron

4 Reply by martbl

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Actually, I would push the idea a little bit further. I was thinking of it this morning and then I saw this post!

What would be nice, is the ability to group drawing together and assign them a name. That way, you could apply settings to the group like you just proposed, but you would also be able to hide/unhide a given group of drawing depending of what you need.

That way, you could group some reference point/angles/cross/etc and call them "Reference" and let them visible when required, but you could hide them with one click if you need to put emphasis else where, without actually deleting the drawing, because it might be important to show them again later to compare final position to initial position.

Does that make sense?!

Cheers!

Using Kinovea for billiard analysis

5 Reply by joan

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Grouping would be definitely interesting. It'd also be interesting in the context of creating a custom tool out of existing ones. However at the moment it's still not planned for short term.
One question will be: how do you know if the user is dragging the mouse to create a selection or just trying to move the image around.

Regarding pencil tool, merging the pieces of the drawing would be easier to implement as a short term mitigation of the problem.

Regarding temporarily hiding a drawing or a group of drawings, how would you "unhide" it ?

6 Reply by martbl

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Well, just like you have a space for key images, you could have a space for drawings (or group of drawing, since a single drawing would be a group of 1 drawing).

That way, you can select your drawing group and hide/unhide it, you could somehow move the entire drawing from a group alltogether so everything stays the same relative to other drawing in the group.

That way, you could pre-setup your drawing and all and then when you're ready to show your student, you can show the initial drawing to comment on the base position (or whatever you analyze!), showing the proper aids, then hide them and move to the next step in your analysis.

Anyway, I was thinking about writing a post just for all this. I got a few questions to ask before I do so, I'm not sure I got how to utilize Kinovea correctly.

Should be writing this post later today.

Thanks

Using Kinovea for billiard analysis

7 Reply by martbl

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joan wrote:

Grouping would be definitely interesting. It'd also be interesting in the context of creating a custom tool out of existing ones. However at the moment it's still not planned for short term.
One question will be: how do you know if the user is dragging the mouse to create a selection or just trying to move the image around.

Regarding pencil tool, merging the pieces of the drawing would be easier to implement as a short term mitigation of the problem.

Regarding temporarily hiding a drawing or a group of drawings, how would you "unhide" it ?

to answer your questions:
- You could have a space dedicated to group of drawing (just like key images) that way, the user could select the drawing there and then move them around.

- Same for hide/unhide. the user would go to the group drawing space and select a group and a hide/unhide button or right-clicking it would display a contextual menu with hide/unhide option.


If you'd be willing to chat about that, I'd be happy to help you design that feature. I'd even be willing to chip in some money to accelerate the development of this feature.

Let me know if you're interested smile

Using Kinovea for billiard analysis