A Storyboard feature would offer an alternative workflow, focused more on the story and the flow of story. This feature would make Krita more standalone animation program.
Why is it needed?
Storyboarding is an important pre-processing step for animation. It helps get a feel for the story and create a better flowing animation. So it basically helps in planning the animation or scene beforehand.
Storyboard requirements
General
- Storyboard is stored as a single .kra file
- Every stroyboard item is a non-empty frame on the image's timeline
- Duration of a storyboard item is a number of hold frames after the storyboarditem's frame
- Storyboard items are static images, they don't support internal animation
Storyboard docker
- Shows thumbnails for every non-empty frame of the image
- Shows selected metadata for each frame, e.g. dialogs, actions, comments and etc
- The fields in metadata should be configured in per-document basis
- The frames can be reordered with D&D operation.
- The duration of the frame can be configured easily (modifies the amount of hold frames on the timeline)
- The user can paint on the thumbnail in the docker. When painting on the thumbnail, the user paints directly on the image's frame via mechanism of KisScratchPad.
- The frames of the image may be "pinned" to the storyboard, or "unpinned" from it
Import/Export features
- The user should be able to export the storyboard into PDF/SVG
- The layout of exported document should be configured somehow (use SVG for that?) (optional) The docker may have a special text view from where the user may D&D text into metadata fields.
Future ideas
- Shift drag changes duration. (@Bollebib )
- Locking the storyboard to avoid adding changed frames from timeline to storyboard. (@vanyossi)
- Export every storyboard item as individal kra file. (@vanyossi)
- Add transition markers between frames. (@vanyossi )
- Different sized frames. (@vanyossi
- Grouping frames into one storyboard item. ( @vanyossi )
Link to a draft_proposal here
Some links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyboard
https://www.tvpaint.com/v2/content/article/feature/storyboard.php?lang=en