Frame operations
What are frames?
For those who are familiar with frame-by-frame animation, this section might be skipped.
An animation is a collection of static images being shown one by one rapidly to create the illusion of movement. Each of those static images is a frame.
Selection
There are 2 selection modes: individual and multi-selection.
The default mode is individual in which when we tap on a frame number, it will select only that frame.
Multi-selection mode, as the name suggests, will allow us to select multiple frames at once.
To enable multi-selection mode, tap on the "Select" button on the top row, this button is hidden if we have only 1 frame. In this mode, when we tap on a frame, it will toggle the selection status of only that frame, it won't un-select the other ones. There is also a check box on the left (2) to toggle all frames at once.
To exit multi-selection mode, tap the "Done" (1) button.
Navigation/animation
Go to the first frame
Go to the previous frame
Play animation loop
Drag this button to scrub through the frames
Go to the next frame
Go to the last frame
Add new / remove
Remove selected frame(s)
Add a new empty frame after each selected frame
Duplicate the selected frame(s), the new frames will be added after each selected one
Onion skin
Onion skin is the option to show the previous and next frames on the canvas to allow us to use them as the reference to draw the current frame.
Tap the button to toggle onion skin on/off.
Onion skin has a lot of customization that we can mess around in the settings.
Contextual menu
To bring out the contextual menu for frames, you can:
Tap on the selected frame number one more time
The contextual menu will auto-show if 2 or more frames are selected
Duration
A frame will stay visible as long as its duration allows before switching to the next one. If we want a frame to show shorter or longer, we can edit its duration by activating the frame contextual menu and then selecting Duration. We can now adjust the duration of the selected frames.
We can also set the duration by setting the FPS as well, and Pixquare will calculate the duration to achieve that FPS.
You can change the value by dragging the text < Duration >
Tagging
A tag is a collection of consecutive frames. It's the same concept as layer group, but only for frames.
Once a tag is created, the animation will only loop inside the selected tag when you hit play.
Tagging is very useful if we want to save multiple animation clips in a single file.
To tag a range of frames, select the start frame and the end frame (we can select any frame in between as well, but that won't matter). The Tag button will show up in the contextual menu. Tap it, give it a name, and select a color if needed.
To modify an existing tag, we can tap on the selected tag again to bring up the property board of that tag.
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