So excited to see the animation feature appear in ArtStudio Pro! I wanted to share a design idea that would be a bit a of a paradigm shift, but one that I think would empower it and make it stand out from the crowd.
One limitation of the idea of using layers and frames interchangeably is that you don’t get multiple rows of frames in the anim panel timeline. Programs like Rough Animator on iPad and Flash back in the day have timelines with multiple rows of frames, which is a very powerful feature. It’s very similar to what groups of layers get you- overlapping layers in one frame- but it requires less digging into groups within the layers panel to work with. It’s a simple transposition, but it makes things easier to get to and speeds up animation workflow. It makes it simple for example to have a row of frames for line art, and row under it for color fills. This lets you easily hide/show all the color fills by hiding its frame row, instead of having to dig into the layer group for every single frame and hit the eye icon for the color fill layer, one by one. It also lets you do a background with multiple layers, which is more flexible that the bottom layer’s special case behavior to act as a background in the current paradigm.
If we get the feature of frames being able to last for arbitrary durations, the frame rows allow you to make different overlapping frames last for different times, which is very powerful. In addition to the obvious use for backgrounds that last for a longer time that other things, you could make for instance a characters face shape last longer than it’s animating facial features.
If you do implement multiple frame rows, you will have to figure out how to make it work with the existing layers paradigm, since I’m sure you want to preserve the ability to swap back and forth. One potential solution would be to make a special type of folder, a “timeline row folder,” and all layers within it would sit in their own row in the animation panel. making multiple timeline row folders would let you have multiple rows of frames in the anim panel. Normal folders could still be used to group layers into single frames, and could still work inside a timeline folder. There may be other ways to make it work as well, but this approach seems pretty convenient!
The way it’s done right now with a single row of frames in the anim panel is very similar to procreate’s animation feature. Having used that in the past, I can say that this issue really is the core thing that holds it back from being a truly powerful animation tool. Other programs that have multiple frame rows on iPad like Rough Animator or even Callipeg I think, are less polished or less approachable that ArtStudio Pro. Rows of frames is a feature that could speed up some tedious parts of animating. I would love to see the idea come to life here, I think it would be a stand out feature and a real game changer for animators.
I made a quick mockup to make the idea more clear- Realizing I didn't mark the folders in the layers windows as special, but they should have a special icon or something to indicate that they are folders that would make a new row on the timeline. The anim panel would likely need to be able to scroll to better support more rows, too. Maybe they could be thinner to squeeze some more in!
Thanks for your consideration, very excited to see where this feature goes!