Thanks to the 2015 Kickstarter, Krita has animation. Inspecific, Krita has frame-by-frame raster animation. There’s still alot of elements missing from it, like tweening, but the basic workflowis there.

To access the animation features, the easiest way is to change yourworkspace to Animation. This will make the animation dockers andworkflow appear.

Learn how to properly export animation in Krita as GIF, MP4, etc. Also includes installation of FFMpeg as it's a prerequisite for rendering your animations i. If you another version other than Krita 2.8, there’s a new version of the brush sets now available for download on Krita 2.9. Get the Modular Brush set V5.0 here. Krita Watercolor Set V1.01. One of the best brush sets out there to create stunning watercolor paintings. Render Animation¶. Render animation allows you to render your animation to an image sequence,.gif,.mp4,.mkv, or.ogg file. It replaces Export Animation. For rendering to an animated file format, Krita will first render to a PNG sequence and then use FFmpeg, which is really good at encoding into video files, to render that sequence to an animated file format.

Krita - Free and open source digital painting application for Illustrators, comic artists, concept artists, matte painters etc. R/krita is for sharing artworks made in Krita, general help, tips and tricks, troubleshooting etc. Hi Mart here, This is an update for my last video about exporting I tried to cover all the situations and mistakes that are common and uncommon so you can ha.

Note

New in version 4.1: The Timeline docker looks a bit different from the screenshots shown in this tutorial, however you should be able to follow it if you take care to select options mentioned in text.

Animation curves¶

To create an animation curve (currently only for opacity) expand theNew Frame button in the Animation dock and click Add OpacityKeyframe. You can now edit the keyframed value for opacity directly inthe “Layers” dock, adding more keyframes will by default fade from thelast to the next upcoming keyframe in the timeline over the framesbetween them. See animation curves for details.

Workflow¶

In traditional animation workflow, what you do is that you make keyframes, which contain the important poses, and then draw frames inbetween (tweening in highly sophisticated animator’s jargon).

For this workflow, there are three important dockers:

1. The Timeline Docker. View and control all ofthe frames in your animation. The timeline docker also containsfunctions to manage your layers. The layer that are created in thetimeline docker also appear on the normal Layer docker.

2. The Animation Docker. This docker contains theplay buttons as well as the ability to change the frame-rate, playback speedand useful little options like auto-key framing.

3. The Onion Skin Docker. This docker controlsthe look of the onion skin, which in turn is useful for seeing theprevious frame.

Introduction to animation: How to make a walkcycle¶

The best way to get to understand all these different parts is toactually use them. Walk cycles are considered the most basic form of afull animation, because of all the different parts involved with them.Therefore, going over how one makes a walkcycle should serve as a goodintroduction.

Setup¶

First, we make a new file:

On the first tab, we type in a nice ratio like 1280x1024, set the dpi to72 (we’re making this for screens after all) and title the document‘walkcycle’.

In the second tab, we choose a nice background color, and set the background to canvas-color. This means that Krita will automatically fill in any transparent bits with the background color. You can change this in Image ‣ Image Properties. This seems to be most useful to people doing animation, as the layer you do animation on MUST be semi-transparent to get onion skinning working.

Note

Krita has a bunch of functionality for meta-data, starting at the Create Document screen. The title will be automatically used as a suggestion for saving and the description can be used by databases, or for you to leave comments behind. Not many people use it individually, but it can be useful for working in larger groups.

Then hit Create!

Then, to get all the necessary tools for animation, select the workspaceswitcher:

And select the animation workspace.

Krita Desktop Download

Which should result in this:

The animation workspace adds the timeline, animation and onion skindockers at the bottom.

Animating¶

We have two transparent layers set up. Let’s name the bottom one‘environment’ and the top ‘walkcycle’ by double clicking their names inthe layer docker.

Use the straight line tool to draw a single horizontal line. This isthe ground.

Then, select the ‘walkcycle’ layer and draw a head and torso (you can use any brush for this).

Now, selecting a new frame will not make a new frame automatically.Krita doesn’t actually see the ‘walkcycle’ layer as an animated layer atall!

We can make it animatable by adding a frame to the timeline. a frame inthe timeline to get a context menu. Choose Create Duplicate Frame.

Attention

If you select Create Blank Frame, the content of the layer will be dropped and a new blank frame will appear; since you want to preserve the image, you need to use Create Duplicate Frame.

You can see it has become an animated layer because of the onion skinicon showing up in the timeline docker.

Use the Create Duplicate Frame button to copy the first frame onto the second.Then, use the MoveTool (switch to it using the T shortcut) with the Shift+↑ shortcut to move the frame contents up.

We can see the difference by turning on the onionskinning:

Now, you should see the previous frame as red.

Warning

Krita sees white as a color, not as transparent, so make sure the animation layer you are working on is transparent in the bits where there’s no drawing. You can fix the situation by use the Color to Alpha filter, but prevention is best.

Future frames are drawn in green,and both colors can be configured in the onion skin docker.

Now, we’re gonna draw the twoextremes of the walkcycle. These are the pose where both legs are as farapart as possible, and the pose where one leg is full stretched and theother pulled in, ready to take the next step.

Now, let’s copy these two… We could do that with the Ctrl+dragshortcut, but here comes a tricky bit:

Ctrl+ also selects and deselects frames, so to copy…

• Ctrl+ to select all the frames you want to select.

• Ctrl+drag. You need to make sure the first frame is ‘orange’,otherwise it won’t be copied along.

Now then…

Squashed the timeline docker a bit to save space.¶

1. Copy frame 0 to frame 2.

2. Copy frame 1 to frame 3.

3. In the animation docker, set the frame-rate to 4.

4. Select all frames in the timeline docker by dragging-selecting them.

5. Press play in the animation docker.

6. Enjoy your first animation!

Expanding upon your rough walkcycle¶

You can quickly make some space by the Alt+drag shortcut on any frame. This’ll move that frame and all others after itin one go.

Then draw inbetweens on each frame that you add.

You’ll find that the more frames you add, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of the onion skins.

You can modify the onion skin by using the onion skin docker, where youcan change how many frames are visible at once, by toggling them on thetop row. The bottom row is for controlling transparency, while belowthere you can modify the colors and extremity of the coloring.

Animating with multiple layers¶

Okay, our walkcycle is missing some hands, let’s add them on a separatelayer. So we make a new layer, and name it hands and…

Our walkcycle is gone from the timeline docker! This is a featureactually. A full animation can have so many little parts that ananimator might want to remove the layers they’re not working on from thetimeline docker. So you manually have to add them.

New in version 4.3.0: In Krita 4.3.0 and later, all new layers are pinned to the timeline by default.

To show a layer whether it’s active or not, you can “pin” it to thetimeline by right-clicking on the layer in the layer docker,and toggling Pin to Timeline. We recommend pinning any layersthat you’re currently animating on.

Exporting¶

When you are done, select File ‣ Render Animation. To render to a video file, you’ll need a program called FFmpeg. To learn more, please read Render Animation.

Enjoy your walkcycle!

Importing animation frames¶

In Krita you can import animation frames.

First let us take a sprite sheet from Open Game Art. (This is the LibrePixel Cup male walkcycle).

Krita Animation

We’ll use Image ‣ Split Image to split up the sprite sheet.

The slices are even, so for a sprite sheet of 9 sprites, use 8 vertical slices and 0 horizontal slices. Give it a proper name and save it as png.

Then, make a new canvas, and select File ‣ Import Animation Frames. This will give you a little window. Select Add images. This should get you a file browser where you can select your images.

You can select multiple images at once.

The frames are currently automaticallyordered. You can set the ordering with the top-left two drop-down boxes.

Indicates at which point the animation should be imported.

Indicates the difference between the imported animation and thedocument frame rate. This animation is 8 frames big, and the fps ofthe document is 24 frames, so there should be a step of 3 to keep iteven. As you can see, the window gives feedback on how much fps theimported animation would be with the currently given step.

Press OK, and your animation should be imported as a new layer.

Reference¶