auto-extend frame, distribute to column, retiming columns

[joshua shute]

I'm throwing a few feature requests for the xsheet into one thread. Why not; less clutter.

AUTO-EXTEND FRAME

It would be nice to have a button/shortcut that fills in empty frames with the most recent drawing of a column up to the selected frame. Just trying to avoid the click and drag to extend frames. Select an empty frame (let's say frame 29), press a button, and the closest drawing is extended to frame 29. This is a feature available in toonboom harmony...... and flash/animate....... and after effects......etc etc

DISTRIBUTE TO COLUMNS

I often create a character on a single column and then distribute the pieces/elements that make up that character (separated into groups) by selecting everything in a column except the back most element, cutting, and then pasting into the next empty column and repeating this process until everything is distributed. Something that automates this process would be convenient and time saving. This is a Flash/animate feature but instead of being based on symbols, have it based on groups.

RETIMING COLUMNS

Hoping to implement some way to retime both drawings and keyframes of a column (or multiple columns) at the same time. Currently the easiest way to do this is to collapse the column into a subxsheet and retime that subxsheet but in some cases this can cause rigging problems and the alternative is pushing things around in a very cumbersome manner.

[Jane Eyre]

In terms of auto-extend, have you tried time stretch? If you right-click on the cell you want to extend and select time stretch, you can specify how many frames you want the drawing to span across.

[joshua shute]

Thanks for the suggestion. The closest function would probably be Repeat off the same menu as Time Stretch. Repeat lets you specify the exact frame to extend to without have to do any math. But it would still be faster if you didn't have to refer to a popup window to extend a drawing.