Free transform tool

[chchwy]

When i’m drawing a rough animation, I like to work very quickly, reajust elements of my drawings, etc; to check if the animation is working as it should.

It would be awesome that Pencil had a good transform tool to work on part of drawings (selections) with bitmap layers. It would allow to scale, rotate, skew, …

it should be able to keep ratio (shift click) and have it’s anchor point moved dynamically…

Maybe the code for this tool could be found in another open-source software ?

[ghost]

Nice and simple idea.

The transform tool was also in my mind. So far it has only the scale function, but I feel it needs the rotation as well.

[Jose-Moreno]

I was wondering about this as well and it would be fantastic since so far pencil has just minimum capabilities to transform and move your drawings in bitmap layers, if anyone wants to know how though, do the following:

1. Make any kind of drawing in your canvas
2. Use the Select Tool (V) and drag a Marquee over the bitmap drawing you want to transform
3. With the Move Tool (Q) go to the grey corner dots that comprise the Marquee and click and drag any of them

Result: You can resize your drawing non-proportionally

OR

3. With the Move Tool (Q) you can click and drag in the center of the marquee

Result: You will be able to move and reposition anything that is inside the Selection Tool Marquee

I'll post this in the forum as well under HOW-To's at a later time for any unsupecting novice user to know about it.

[ghost]

Very detailed your explanation @Jose-Moreno !

[Jose-Moreno]

@chchwy It's been a while but we have proportional ratio scaling, and rotation now. Skewing, Free Point transform (as in photoshop) and pivot point re-location (transform from a movable pivot point) would be pending though.

I think Krita has matured enough and it's written in QT C++ so maybe we can check that code?. However I don't know about their license or even if they have an API for such procedures.

[Jose-Moreno]

[2020] Reading my previous comment, i'd like to expand a bit on the expected functionalities of a modern free transform tool.

In general there are various characteristics & modes that tend to come mixed in a transform tool these days and that we would require in Pencil2D:

• [x] Free Transform mode: Move, Rotate, Scale
• [x] Non-uniform & proportional scaling
• [ ] Transformations relative to a moving pivot https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil/issues/1073
• [x] Skew Horizontal / Vertical: You can freely distort the selection by grabbing the transform cage middle points in any of the bounding box sides (top, bottom, left, right)
• [ ] Free control point deformation: Not quite like skew which moves a segment of the bounding box but rather this allows to move any single control point on the transformation cage that will in turn distort the surface while having a while trying to preserve the shape of the surface as much as possible.
• [ ] Perspective Deformation: You can scale two points of any given side of the transform bounding box to the relative center of that side. Usually what defines which side takes priority when clicking and dragging any point, is to use the cursor proximity to the other point as an indicator of priority.
• [ ] Mesh warp: As the name implies a grid mesh is created over the drawing which allows free manipulation of the grid and distorts the surface and it's contents accordingly. https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil/issues/654