Features planned for VPaint 1.5
A complete list of features planned for version 1.5 of VPaint, graphics researcher Boris Dalstein’s interesting free 2D animation software.
This list was originally included at the end of our story on VPaint, which you can now read here, but has been split out into its own separate post for the sake of clarity.
Navigation:
- Infinite resolution-independent canvas (pan/zoom as much as you want)
Drawing:
- Free-hand sketching of vector strokes
- Wacom tablet support: pressure can be used to draw variable-width strokes
- Automatic neatening/smoothing of free-hand strokes
- Automatic snapping of end strokes to existing end strokes or stroke intersections
Sculpting (sculpt strokes “à la ZBrush”)
- Local stroke pushing
- Local stroke smoothing
- Local stroke width editing
Stroke connectivity:
- Awareness of stroke connectivity (i.e., which strokes are incident and/or intersecting)
- Stroke connectivity can be locally disabled (i.e., overlapping strokes ignoring one another)
- Drag-and-drop end points and/or intersection points while preserving stroke connectivity
- Drag-and-drop entire strokes while preserving stroke connectivity
Coloring:
- Manual coloring: fill a region by selecting the strokes in its boundary
- Automatic coloring: Use the paint bucket for automatic filling of a region bounded by strokes
- Support for holes (equivalent of “compound paths” in SVG)
Filled regions connectivity:
- Awareness of filled region connectivity (i.e., which filled region share one or several bounding strokes)
- Filled regions “remember” which strokes define their boundary
- Editing strokes automatically updates all filled regions using these strokes in their boundary
- Drag-and-drop end points, intersection points, strokes, or filled regions while preserving filled region connectivity
Topological operator:
- Glue stroke end points together
- Glue strokes together
- Split strokes in two sub-strokes
- Detach connected strokes
- Split filled regions
- Detach connected filled regions
Depth Ordering:
- Change depth ordering of strokes and filled regions independently
Animation:
- Timeline with classical controls: play / pause / go to first, previous, next, or last frame / set fps
- Frame-by-frame animation: draw every frame of the animation if desired
- Automatic inbetweening: automatically interpolate manually designated strokes
- Onion skinning visualization: overlay several frames of the animation in the same 2D view
- Side-by-side visualization: arbitrary split the view horizontally/vertically, each 2D view being able to visualize a different frame of the animation
- Motion-pasting: copy-paste the selection at a different frame, with automatic inbetweening
- Autokey: dragging an inbetween stroke creates a key stroke
- Local keyframing: a given frame can be composed both of key strokes and inbetween strokes
- Retiming: the frame associated with each key strokes can be refined
- D view: visualize your 2D animation as a 3D space-time structure where time is the Z axis.
Import/Export:
- Save/Load in .vec (new XML-based vector graphics format)
- Export individual frames as SVG or PNG
And the following will NOT be included due to lack of time, but are planned in future versions:
- Color gradients for strokes and filled regions
- More styling option for strokes: rounded/miter/bevel caps and joins, dash patterns, etc…
- Masking/Clipping
- Layers
- Grouping (some grouping ability is already achievable using the “select connected objects” feature)
- Export as bitmap video (e.g., h264 encoding)
- Export as SVG animation
- Import bitmap files for tracing