Esn
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No animation, but 8:25 in this video shows the kind of accuracy that it's possible to get in Pencil by drawing on Pandora's touchscreen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vb9MWJr0jY
Beta Pencil
- Thread starter sebt3
- Start date
Esn
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Okay, so I finally got my Pandora and tried out Pencil. And you know what, the screen is not too small, it is very usable for animation! Here's what you need to do:mcobit said:
Open Pencil, DO NOT make it fullscreen, keep it in a separate window. DO NOT detach any of the tool tabs inside it. Widen the corners of the window until they fill up your screen. Then, navigate the program using the stylus, and press L (left shoulder button) when you want to move the window around. It's actually really comfy to use.
I think you can add it to the file archive, sebt3, just be sure to add the above instructions so that people know how to use it comfortably. It will be even better when pressure sensitivity on the Pandora is made use of.
However, it seems like there's no way to export my animation. In File->Export, it seems that you can only export the palette. I can only save my animation in the file format that Pencil uses, not in sequences of PNG images or GIF images, or a movie file, or a flash file. This is really a shame. Instead, I had to copy my file over to my PC and export the movie with the PC version of Pencil.
I made a little 19-frame animation in the bitmap layer. I haven't yet tried the vector layer, or the sound, or multiple layers.
Here it is:
http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1296012126
(saved as a .swf with Windows version of pencil)
Okay, not so impressive maybe, but it was fun making it.
I'm just trying to figure things out slowly. The workflow with Pencil on the Pandora feels quite nice, so maybe I'll make more complex things later.There is sometimes a tiny bit of lag when I draw fast, and the lines end up looking a bit jagged. Is there a way to fix this, besides overclocking or drawing slowly, of course? (I remember hearing something about latency somewhere... maybe it's not related)
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Esn
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Did some more testing. The speed at which touchscreen input is transferred into the program seems to be pretty slow. If I try quickly drawing some circles with a thin paintbrush, for example, many of them end up looking more like triangles, because it only has time to register a few dots of input (even while overclocked to 800Mhz). So my usual drawing style of making many short, sketchy strokes is hard to do here, because the touchscreen can't keep up. (I don't know why it's so slow... is this an inherent limitation of the Pandora's touchscreen, or is it to do with the program itself?)
Vector drawing works fine, BUT: showing the previous & next frames in vector animation has bugs, even though it works fine for bitmap images. The previous frame is shown to be about half the screen diagonally down-right from where it should be.
Vector drawing works fine, BUT: showing the previous & next frames in vector animation has bugs, even though it works fine for bitmap images. The previous frame is shown to be about half the screen diagonally down-right from where it should be.
Esn
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By the way, I got the program to crash. What you do is make a large number of short vector strokes in a short time. It hangs every time I do that.
sebt3
homebrew player (P. & C.)
@Esn : worth the fileArchive ?
Esn
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Read my post from 26 January 2011 - 04:18 AM, 3rd paragraph.sebt3 said:
Mention that the way to use it is to have your left hand on the left shoulder button (to move the window around), and your right hand using the stylus. Unless you do that, the animation aspect is very awkward to use. (so I guess for left-handed people, it would make sense to map Shift to the right shoulder button instead...)
Mention its limitations in the description - i.e. that you can save your animation, but then you have to open it with a desktop version of Pencil to export it as a movie or image sequence. No pressure sensitivity. Previous/next frame viewing with vector images is buggy.
I haven't tested the sound or camera layers yet, so I don't know if those work.
It's quite capable already, though.
Maybe include a prominent link to the user manual:
http://pencil-animation.org/wiki/doku.php?id=en:users:manual:0.4.4b:index
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Esn
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Pencil is saving everything in /mnt/utmp/pencil. That's not in the NAND, is it?
Found another bug: "open recent" in the file menu doesn't work.
Found another bug: "open recent" in the file menu doesn't work.
sebt3
homebrew player (P. & C.)
No that's not. (it is actually your appdata directory)Esn said:
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Esn
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Another bug: if I change the brush settings (width/feather), they don't always actually change in reality. It seems to get worse the longer the program stays open. The way to test this (without actually drawing on the image): change the settings, then switch to another tool, then switch back to your original tool. Sometimes the brush settings go back to what they were before you changed them, other times they don't. If they go back, then the change didn't actually take effect. Sometimes, only after 10 or more times of changing the settings, will the change actually take effect.
Esn
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Here's another short animation made in Pencil, this time testing out character animation, how well the stylus works for sketching, as well as colours on a separate layer. Also copy+pasting of frames. Made on Pandora, then opened in the Windows version of Pencil and saved as a .swf:
http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1298173462
(about 4mb, so might take a while to load)
Another thing I discovered: Pencil can't be used in Minimenu except as a painting program, because it's impossible to move the window around in Minimenu; therefore, the animation part of the program is off the screen.
Someone over on the OP boards figured out how to enable pressure sensitivity in a program:
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/1817-mypaint-port/
I hope he'll share his secret and it can be incorporated into Pencil.
http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1298173462
(about 4mb, so might take a while to load)
Another thing I discovered: Pencil can't be used in Minimenu except as a painting program, because it's impossible to move the window around in Minimenu; therefore, the animation part of the program is off the screen.
Someone over on the OP boards figured out how to enable pressure sensitivity in a program:
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/1817-mypaint-port/
I hope he'll share his secret and it can be incorporated into Pencil.
Esn
(:";
Here's another short example of character animation made with Pencil on Pandora:
http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1304156142
EDIT: Also, the way to avoid the brush-changing bug is to keep your pointer on the slide itself when you're done changing it... I think.
http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1304156142
EDIT: Also, the way to avoid the brush-changing bug is to keep your pointer on the slide itself when you're done changing it... I think.
Esn
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I decided it would be useful to make a wiki article/tutorial, and I also took a screenshot of how Pencil looks on the Pandora:
http://pandorawiki.org/Pencil
http://pandorawiki.org/Pencil
