Features suggestions

After taking some time to get used to wick editor I’d add a list of features that I’d love to see implemented.
it’s pretty long and some of the features have already been suggested (in that case I strongly endorse the suggestion )
I want to remark that what wick editor is already able to do is really great so this is absolutely not a complaint, it’s a desire to make wick even better.

  • for online animation and game it should be useful to have loading methods to code some loading/ please wait animation.

  • Audio. it would be great if we can use all howler methods on sounds in the assets library.
    if it’s already possible I dont know how to target imported audio with code

  • Gradient shape fill (and support for svg gradient) would Greatly enhance the graphic
    quality

-Tween along spline. for animation it’s very difficult to animate curved motions with linear tween and frame by frame is not always an option.

-Shape tween. Even a basic one where start and end shape have the same number of vertex and lines. this would morph a start vector shape in a end shape over time.

-Clip masks. opacity masks are great tools for many kind of animations. Basically a clip alpha (mask) used to determine another clip (target) visibility.

  • super (?) onion skin that shows content of parent clip frame. that would allow to position and scale elements inside a clip having a look at parent’s frame

  • buttons. it would be great to have an invisible sensible area for buttons. That would allow to make invisible buttons and/ or buttons with sensible area greater/different than their graphic look

-many asked for a bones, hierarchical animations tool. I agree it would be a great improvement for animation

  • Bitmap. for game development it would be awesome if we could import and manage sprite sheets (like in pixijs for example). sprite sheets are single bitmaps that contains all the images for a character/element animations and there is a code that allow to define wich part of the image has to be used in every frame

  • Bitmap. A warp tool would be awesome. It could be animated with tween and would be a fundamental combination with any type of bones animation.
    here you can find a great js library that does it along with examples
    https://github.com/cxcxcxcx/imgwarp-js

as a side note I toyed alot with pixijs and definitely would love to see pixi and wick merge together. it probably would be the final animation tool

Small things:

  • double clic on a text field could switch from selecting tool to text edit tool

  • selecting a layer should select all items in the layer (it’s often difficult to find wich objects are in a layer)

  • change pivot/ center of axis of a clip from outside the clip

  • it should be possible to make clip from buttons, clips and groups of elements (eg. two or more shapes / clips)

-i’d add in inspector text the text content to be modified (eg. for when text is same color as background)

5 Likes

Nice list of features! I like all of them, and can see how this list is capable of improving wick, thank you for taking the time to write these suggestions down :)

+1
I don’t know why, but I feel like this is kind of onion skinning would be helpful to have, it’ll just give a good view over how a clip would look like within the project after exiting it.

Oh yes, shape tween! :-)

forgot to mention that a very good example of bones structure and bitmap skin and morph is implemented in dragonbones (just to have a reference)

A really nice feature would be a full-screen preview, because whenever you do the normal preview, you can see the gray parts of the animation screen and for me, I often have a lot of off-screen characters and stuff.

Hello @hambreyola, the feature you mentioned already exists :)

When you open a project, click alt + K to preview the project in a new window!

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Oh wow, I didn’t know that, thanks!

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The only thing is that there is no sound, but still its a cool feature.

I just noticed that in 1.19 it is possible to make a clip starting from a selection of multiple shapes, shapes and clips and multiple clips. Well done.