[back] New feature highlight - Dogwaffle 1.6 Onion Skins for Animations

Have you ever peeled an onion and looked through its thin skin? Did you notice that you can almost see through it? No, they're not meant to make you cry. Much to the contrary, onion skins may well be making your life as a traditional animator a little bit more enjoyable.With onion skins, it's like drawing over semi-transparent paper. If you didn't have that, you'd be flipping the paper up and down again and again to see the prior image(s) as reference lying under the current frame you're working on, right? Well with translucent paper you can see the current drawing as well as the prior one a bit dimmer, and even the next one before that. And Dogwaffle 1.6 even looks ahead into the future and shows you the next two frames. This is of course a feature found in the animation control bar.: Between the FPS (frame per second) and the +/- buttons (add/remove frames), there is the onion skins button.   When you click this button, Dogwaffle will show not only the current frame of the animation, but also the prior and following two frames. Of course if these frames haven't been drawn yet, they'll be blank and not distinct from the background color (e.g. plain white). However, let's say you're drawing a ball which is on its way own for a bouncing animation. You could see the current frame's situation as well as the two prior and following two positions of the ball. As the ball reaches the floor on the ground you could squeeze the circle into a flat ellipse.  And seeing the multiple frames overlying eachother will allow you to vary the distance of the ball between frames to change the apparent speed at which the bouncing ball flies due to gravity's acceleration. Where else is this useful? When doing character animations like drawing a walking person. As a kid, have you ever taken a pencil to draw short mini-animations along the border of the pages of a boring book, such as a person looking like a stickman jumping off a cliff and opening a parachute for a safe landing? Don't you wish you would have had semi transparent paper then, to see the prior pages through the current one?