First-timer notes on using Friction

[donn-xx]

Hi, I tried Friction for the first time about 1 week ago. Very impressed. Compared to Synfig and Blender, it's a real treat to use!

I kept these notes as I hacked-away on an animation. I hope they are useful. I have looked-around in the other discussions to try minimise repeated stuff. (Most work done in v1.0.0-rc.1; today I compiled the latest dev on Linux. The version is 1.0.0.-dev Commit 3432a1d)

1. [Has improved] When you select in timeline, it should select in the viewer too.
   I notice this is much better than in v1.0.0-rc.1. I have not yet stressed it.
   In rc1, the viewer would go out of 'sync' (my word) with the timeline. After a while, selecting an object in the timeline, would not select it in the viewer and using 'G' (for example) would not move it. Only a restart would fix it.

2. Scroll-wheel in viewer zooms. Scroll-wheel in timeline does nothing (afaict). One must Ctrl+Scroll to zoom there. This gets confusing. Make it the same for both areas.

3. I spent a lot of time digging-around in my scene tree, looking for the objects I wanted to work with. Selecting things in the viewer did not help me to find them in the timeline. While there is a filter for the timeline, it is not quite enough: When selecting in the viewer, the selected should appear clearly in the timeline. Maybe, have a 'goto' button/shortcut/option to jump to the selected object in the timeline.

4. Some mechanism (like Inkscape has) to select inside groups! The current process is too click-heavy, going up levels and back down again. Ctrl/Alt + Click on a thing == select it within that group!

5. Following-on from those, a visual hierarchy of lightness could help making sense of both the viewer and the timeline. I recall that Flash did this well. When you sank-into a movie-clip, the objects on other levels would draw visually lighter and would not be selectable! It really helped to sell the idea of stepping up and down, into and out of things.

6. Space should be play/stop not play/pause. The current behaviour makes it hard to bring the playhead back to the active frame. I don't know what the shortcut key is for 'stop'.

7. Make shortcut keys easy to see or change! I only just noticed they are in the help->about dialogue. That's weird. They should be in the settings/prefs.

8. A shortcut like F2, or double-click on object names to rename! Not only the rmb menu thing. Please! Mercy :)

9. A hope: Frames could have thickness, so it's easy to know what frame one is on. Right now it's very hard to know if one is on frame 277 or 278, for example. When frames have width, they separate and that is easier to see, click and use. (OpenToonz and flash do this well.) (Blender has this same thin-frame problem.)

10. Have a way to preview the scene in a popup, so it's zoomed-out correctly and cropped. At the moment, one has to jiggle the viewer into shape and then faff with the playhead etc.

11. [Might be fixed]Grouping tends to move the new group to some position higher in the tree.

12. Scrubbing audio. Afaict, it's impossible to scrub the timeline to hear snippets of audio. This makes it quite hard to time things and I have not tried lip-syncing yet. It seems one has to press space (to play) and then wait for caching, but this is not ideal. I did play with lowering the resolution and using very small sound files, but it's not really helping.

13. Command-line args! For e.g. to render an input file. Maybe they exist, but I couldn't find them.

Okay, that's my list of observations. I hope they make sense!
All-in-all, it's a great bit of software and I am enjoying it a lot. Thank you!

[rodlie]

Thanks for taking your time to provide valuable feedback.

I compiled the latest dev on Linux

btw, we offer binaries of the main branch, for Linux just go to https://linux.ci.friction.graphics and you will always get the latest. For builds from other branches etc go to https://github.com/friction2d/friction/actions and click on a build you want.

1. Objects selected in timeline/properties should also be selected in the viewer (unless your are on another scene), if not that should be considered a bug(?).

2. / 3. / 4. Yes, we need to work a bit on the UX here. I'm already working some improvements.

6. Stop is actually Esc. Yes we need to improve this.

7. We don't have a shortcut manager yet, so this will be "fixed" when we have one (v1.1/v1.2).

8. Didn't I add something like that? I will need to check :)

9. Should be doable.

10. Hmm, might be better to just "fit" the preview in the viewer on playback?

12. Audio is basic, enough for simple tasks. A refactor is on the roadmap, but time and priorities ...

13. This will be worked on for v1.1/v1.2.

[donn-xx]

Hey. Thanks for those links! Much easier than compiling :)

All good on the replies. I totally understand the time and priorities sitch. Good luck!

Yes to 10. That would make sense. Perhaps also darken/hide anything off-canvas too. My motivation for this one was sharing an animation with someone else. I wanted to just send the 300kb friction file and not a 10mb video! However, I realized they would have to install friction and then have the nous to rewind and play it! What would be ideal would be a friction command-line arg like "friction --play somefile.friction" and then I could just explain that to them!

Thanks for the feedback and the project!

[papyrazzi]

Thank you for all the effort, because this software is really great!