Explain
Display palette of Pencil working environment.
Answers
Explanation:
Pencil was originally an application created by Patrick Corrieri by the end of 2005 under the name “Pencil Planner”. It was a simple yet effective pencil test (a.k.a. line test) programme. It included a drawing area, a single-track timeline where keyframes could be added, previous and next onion skins. The drawing tools were a pencil and an eraser, along with a colour chooser. The animation could be played at a specified frame rate, and in addition it was possible to add a background image and a background sound. It was developed under Qt 3 and made available on Macintosh and then Windows platforms under GPL license. The Mac version could output QuickTime files. There were two releases v0.1 and v0.2. This is a screenshot of v0.2:
v0.2 screenshot
When I became aware of this programme, I realised that it could be evolved into an application for making traditional animations rather than just pencil tests. Obviously what was needed was more drawing tools to fill shapes with colours, and some selection tools to move things around. I got in touch with Patrick, and started implementing those functions, along with cleaning the original code.
I also implemented tablet support. This became v0.3 of Pencil, released in October 2006. Pleased with the result, I went on with more ambitious goals. On the one hand, the basics of traditional animation is to sketch pencil tests, and then draw clean images on top of those sketches.
Another fundamental of traditional animation is to be able to organise separate elements (background, character, or parts of it) into different superimposed layers. This definitely called for the possibility of superimposing layers. On the other hand, I also convinced myself that vector graphics rather than raster (bitmap) graphics were useful for making animated drawings. Vector graphics can be rendered at any resolution, can easily be deformed and resized, colours can be readjusted, etc. They are quite well suited to render the traditional animation style: contours filled with some colours – inherited from the “cell(uloid)” style. Therefore I decided to introduce not only raster layers, but vector layers as well. Yet I wanted vector drawing to have the same artistic feel as raster drawing, so I implemented the same tools for both layers – although some of them such as the pencil and brush behaved differently.This lead to v0.4 released in January 2007. Below is a screenshot: