Re:Onion, Align and Stroke

  1. Select one of the objects and then in the Tool Properties window you will see the buttons for the snapping options. One of them is Snap and Align. This will allow you to snap one curve to another curve - but not necessarily on its centre point. It will snap based on where your cursor is on the curve that you’re dragging.

    Another one that might be useful to you is snap to grid. Turn on your grid, and select the Square grid (View > Grid > Square). If your circle is a perfect circle, with Snap to Grid and Snap and Align on, you should be able to snap your circle to the centre of the grid and then snap your line to your circle.

    We are investigating ways that we can improve the snapping, so I will pass your comments on to R&D.

    2. You can modify the line width afterwards as long as it was created with the line/rectangle/ellipse/polyline/pencil tools. Just select the stroke with the select tool, then in the tool properties window you will see an entry for “Pencil Selection”. You can enter a number in the field or drag the slider to adjust the size of the pencil line.

    3. The way that our onion skin works is that it will always display for a certain number of frames before or after the current frame. So you can adjust the length of the onion skin so that it shows more or less frames. You can adjust this either by dragging the triangles around the playhead on the timeline, or you can set them to 1, 2, or 3 frames before and after through the View menu, View > Onion Skin.

    Hope this helps!

    ~Lilly
    Toon Boom Support

I am a true newbie coming from Flash and just started using Animate 2 last night. A couple of questions:
1. I created a vertical line then a circle. I wanted to align them by their centers. Could not find an align field anywhere.
2. I wanted to thicken the stroke on my circle. Couldn’t find where to do it. Looks like you can set the stroke width BEFORE you create the circle but how about changing it afterwards?
3. Using onion skin, I wanted to lock it down to show the same frames no matter what frame I moved to. Couldn’t find it.

I looked through the starter guide and cannot find it. Sorry for the simple questions but I am so used to Flash and Illustrator, this is tough to adapt my thinking.

Thank you for your response.

1. Please do suggest an Align (and Distribute) Panel similar to Flash and Illustrator. I tend to use it a lot as I am sure many others do as well.

2. Aha, it seems I needed to scroll the panel down to see it.

3. Would love the option of locking the onion skin to certain frames as Flash does. Saves the trouble of constantly adjusting. For instance I was working on a 25 frame segment. On frame 25 I pull the onion skin all the way to frame 1 to see beginning then when I go to inbetween at frame 3, I have to pull the onion skin out the other way to frame 25. Would be easier to lock it down from frame 1 to 25 and keep it there as I skipped around inbetweening frames.

Thanks for listening.