Frustrating moment to moment Fixes

[FrankenKlumpp]

Hey there!

 

Just wanted to first up, just say thanks for an incredible piece of software. Downloaded yesterday, and it is just so efficient for creating new animation, has really optimized my game asset pipeline. My life so much better now, so thank you!

 

That said, there are a few things that I would really love that would make the software just perfect:

 

1. An option to change the size of the gizmos. (ie, increase the size of the rotation control zone, and the visual/selection size of the bones). At the moment, I am losing so much time trying to select the bones to put keyframes on, and its driving me crazy! lol. In maya, to change the size of all gizmos they just use the - / + keys.

 

2. Whenever I select a key frame in the editor a little picture of the graph (stepped / linear etc) comes up. This is also a really frustrating feature. I understand why it is there, but I would love the option to turn it off, or to be honest, not see it at all (especially as you can right click on the keyframe to see what it is!). 

It makes it so hard to move quickly through the timeline, and adds a lot of frustration as you have to wait for it to disappear before clicking a keyframe right beside it to the right.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3c6nsv4lzs62kg/Untitled-1.jpg?dl=0

 

3. A simple way to clean up the main timeline of keyframes where they don't correspond to any of the keyframes on the asset timeline.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0upblbvbv4h4l7c/Untitled-2.jpg?dl=0

 

4. I would really love a way to organise the timeline hierarchy as I see fit, so I can organise it mentally as it makes sense. Ie, put arms with arms, have the head on the top etc.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4qkf7wgsyeb7f8w/Untitled-3.jpg?dl=0

 

Again, thanks for everything so far, and I hope I have posted this in the right place. I look forward to hearing back from you :D

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Hi FrankenKlumpp,

 

Thanks for the kind words, and the thoughtful, concise and useful feedback.

1) Great idea...we'll look into it.

 

2) Well see what we can do about this...in the mean-time, do you know about the 1 and 2 hotkeys to advance and go back a key frame instantly? This could save you some frustration and time in the meantime.

 

3) We agree, and we do plan on a feature to auto clean empty mainline keys as you work (like if you delete the last object keyframe from the mainline key, the mainline key will be removed automatically.)  In the meantime, I've never seen so many empty mainline keys.. are you by chance clicking and dragging specific object key-frames do adapt timing? If that is the only object keyed at that point, I suggest you drag the mainline keyframe for it instead., that way you wont get all those empty key-frames left behind. Again though, we'll definitely add an auto empty keyframe cleaning feature to Spriter, but for now this might help you avoid making so many inadvertent mainline keys.

 

4)  Another great suggestion.  Are you aware that at least for now we offer the ability to show only the timelines for currently selected objects? This might help for now.

 

Also, our apologies for the currently slow update rate for Spriter itself, as Edgar is very busy working on the fully featured reference implementation, and until its finished we can't spend much time on any substantial Spriter feature additions or UI changes.

cheers.

-Mike at BrashMonkey