A way to renumber cells inside a Level?

[Gabriel Gazzán]

Is there a way to renumber a cell of a Level in OpenToonz?
I've tried to find a function for doing that to no avail.
Thanks!

[Mauricio Arrieta]

Hey there.

If you select all cells you wish to renumber, then press right clic and choose autorenumber, each drawing will acquire the given frame position number.

Hope it helps.

[Rodney]

There is something of a problem with both the nomenclature of the question as well as the current process in OpenToonz for accomplishing what you suggest.

Some of this might just need more clarification as I am very likely reading too much into the question.

My apologies for that.

The primary issues I see:

"cells inside a Level"

Technically speaking there aren't any cells in Levels only images (or references to images or perhaps more accurately... references to image sequences).

This is why we can access Level Settings in a variety of locations and change the reference.

That reference will either point to a single image or a series of sequentially numbered images.

So the short answer to the question becomes:   rename/renumber the images.

Ideally we might have some drag/drop functionality in the Level Strip that would tell OpenToonz that we want to swap the names of the images/frame being dragged with the image/frame it is being dragged onto.

That would be sweet.   But this also illustrates why that isn't easy to do because actual images on a harddrive need to be renamed... first the target needs to be temporarily renamed so it doesn't get lost... then the first is renamed then the second takes the name of the first.   Hopefully you are following me there.

There are currently a few ways we can swap image names in this way and perhaps that might suffice for your immediate need pending implementation of something like the above drag/drop renaming and it does exactly what that feature would do if we were to swap them in that fashion.  That is the Reverse option.

With Reverse when two or more images in the level strip are selected we can Reverse (i.e. rename them) in their current sequence so that they swap places.

Reverse is available via Right click and Cells > Reverse on the top menu and it can also be given a shortcut key such as Shift+r (all the other common R shortcut keys are taken)

And I think that Reverse approach will very likely be the best way to renumber images/frames inside a Level.

Now should you opt for that approach the cool thing about that is how we can select the images/frames in any order and sequentially or nonsequentially (hold the control key down while selecting to swap images that are separated).   Of course this works with more than two selections as well as reversing entire sequences.

There is more to this and other approaches to accomplishing the same thing but... I think that's a beginning.

[joshua shute]

@ gabriel there is a great deal of flexibility when working in/with the xsheet. the above gif shows multiple ways to rearrange/reorder your drawings and, as mauricio said, auto-renumber is how they are ultimately changed in the levelstrip. If you use auto-renumber as often as I do, adding the feature to a keyboard shortcut is very helpful.

@rodney  as features and flexibility grow within the level strip, it opens the door to user error. currently what affects the end result of an animation are the frames and order of the drawings in the xsheet. by adding more and more features which change the orders of drawings (drawing that the xsheet is referencing) without updating the xsheet as well, we can easily lead the inexperienced to not only make a mess of the scene they are currently in but also any scene that references that level. In my opinion, any mess this might create is very easily fixed but my question becomes this, how much of a detriment/burden will suggested features be to new users or the learning curve? I've said in the past that opentoonz's levelstrip is already far more robust than it's equivalent in other programs and I sort of feel that other program's version of a "levelstrip" is watered down or non existent for a reason. the ability to have a drawing space unaffected by transform animations created in the xsheet is absolutely necessary, the levelstrip provides this, but perhaps expanding too far beyond that leads to a confusing UI while over complicating something that could be simple and straight forward.

[Gabriel Gazzán]

thank you all for the answers.

very helpful indeed!