A great (free) companion program for Opentoonz

[Willson Baer]

For anyone who has not heard of the program PAP (Plastic Animation Paper), it is a digital lightbox that used to be very expensive but is now free to use for private and commercial use. PAP was designed for making digital pencil animation that would be exported as a image sequence for cleanup in a different program, and OT was designed for cleaning up hand drawn animation frames. Pencil animation made in this program can easily be exported into an image sequence for importing into OT for cleanup, coloring and compositing. It is virtually bug free and a little outdated but has excellent support for tablets and is easy to learn, closely mimicking a traditional animators lightbox for easy transition from regular animation paper to Plastic Animation Paper.

Download here: http://animationpaper.com/old-pap-free-download/

Manual here: http://animationpaper.com/tutorials/

Hope you like it.

[Anthony Ethridge]

Thanks!

[Christopher Sobieniak]

Too bad it hasn't been updated in years, and the guys behind it are trying to work on a new program that's still being developed simply called "Animation Paper" (which won't be freeware/open source otherwise).

Another program of a similar premise is "Pencil2d", which has been maintained after being abandoned by the original developers, there has yet to be an output fuction for exporting your work as a video file at present.
http://www.pencil2d.org

[Herbert123]

We can do much better now thanks to the frame-by-frame animation tools in Krita. And those tools are much simpler in use compared to PAP, and the onion skin function is great. And the drawing and painting tools are out of this world: superior to Photoshop.

https://krita.org/item/krita-3-0-first-alpha-release/

The Mac version is still rather buggy. They are working on it.

[Trygve Høiseth]

Yes, Krita 3 alpha has the same bug on mac as OpenToonz, the windows keep zooming out on tablets when the pen enters the document. It may be a problem i QT ( the Krita main developer said something like that on github).

If they can solve this in Krita, maybe they can give some insigth to the developers om OpenToonz. It's really sad to have these two great, free programs and noe being able to use them on mac.

[JJ Parks]

I've used PAP in the past and it is good :) though like others said it's no longer updated. For those of you with iPads or even better iPad Pros, I highly recommend "Animation Desk" (shows as Animation+) as it's the best pencil animation software I've used to date. I'm currently using it on my project and loving it now that I can vectorize my final inks (thanks Herbert123 & BlenderBeetle!).

[Willson Baer]

@Herbert123: Thanks for telling about Krita-animation, you're right; the onion skin feature is way better in Krita than it is in PAP. I think Krita is my all-in-all top creativity software now (OT is great too, but not so much for painting).