Hi Deakcor! Hope you're doing well! Here I am with another idea! :D

I've been diving into some pixel art tools lately and stumbled upon something cool in PixelMash that I think could be super neat in PixelOver. Vector drawing and animation capabilities, then transformed to pixel art!

I saw it in PixelMash and I was thinking it might resonate with not just pixel artists animators like me, but other (Vector/Flash/Adobe Animate) animators too ^_^

PixelOver is much better, no doubt about that, but the simplicity of PixelMash and a couple of its features (like vectors and text) caught my eye. Might be worth checking out their UI and some features for a bit of inspiration. 

PixelMash's vector editing screenshot:

    PixelMash's video about this feature:

PixelMash's site: https://nevercenter.com/pixelmash/ (it's got a free trial of a week I think)

Summing up, the requested features would be the following:

• Vector importing / exporting (SVG)
• Vector drawing / editing
• Vector animation

Also, here's some links I found about vectors in Godot, in case it helps:

• https://godotforums.org/d/29460-support-for-svg-vector-graphics
• https://miniluz.github.io/posts/screen-space-projected-lines/

Oh, and I remember some folks on the forum mentioning vectors a while back. Here are the chats:

• https://itch.io/t/1309074/line-art-feature
• https://itch.io/t/1402140/more-scaling-options-and-vector-drawing
• https://itch.io/t/2472243/a-couple-suggestions-as-animator

Thanks for always listening and being awesome. Looking forward to more cool stuff from PixelOver! ^_^

Cheers,
JJ

Hi JJ, thank you very much for your feature request ! Yes indeed, vector support should be very interesting. Inside PixelOver I guess it's just updating the mesh mode to handle bezier curve.

The hardest part should be the SVG import and export functionality. For the import part, I think I saw a godot plugin somewhere so I'll check this but for the export, it will be much complicated. I'm not sure the SVG format support animation natively and not sure how to handle if there is for example 3D elements in the PixelOver project we want to export.

But yes definitively I'll note that for a future update, thank you again for the interesting request like always !

Thank you so much! I'm happy you liked the idea! ^^

I'll admit I wasn't too knowledgeable about SVG animations, but wanting to help, I asked GPT-4 for help XD

From what I've understood, it seems that SVG and SMIL are the best choice for vector animations! So, SVG is basically an XML format made for scalable vector graphics, and SMIL is an XML language for synchronizing and animating multimedia.

It seems that SVG combined with SMIL allows for a wide variety of animations, not only the basic ones (movement, rotation, scaling, color), but even path animations where you can move individual points (for shape animations and the like) :D

Here are some resources I gathered on the topic:

• SVG Documentation: https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/
•  MDN on SVG: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG
•  SMIL in SVG: https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/
•  MDN on SVG animations with SMIL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animation_with_SMIL
• Wikipedia on SVG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG
  
• Wikipedia on SMIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronized_Multimedia_Integration_Language
•  SVG + SMIL Example (just click on "Raw" to see the animations. It works in Chrome but not sure about other browsers): https://gist.github.com/bigxixi/011ff9c633fc50aeb9398f3b42e1b69b?short_path=c355...   

Additionally, I found some open-source tools that might be of interest (though the licenses might not be fully compatible, someone from these communities might be able to help, or they could provide some inspiration):

• OpenToonz Vector levels (PLI format): https://opentoonz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/drawing_animation_levels.html
• ShapeShifter: https://github.com/alexjlockwood/ShapeShifter
• Synfig (Vector Animation) - Exports to LOTTIE format: https://www.synfig.org/  https://github.com/synfig/synfig/
• HaikuAnimator (Vector Animation) - Also exports to LOTTIE: https://www.haikuanimator.com/
• More on LOTTIE: https://lottiefiles.com/

I hope this info comes in handy when you dive into this feature in the future! :)

Has there been any updates on this? I would love to see vector drawing and animation features come to PixelOver.

Aside from PixelMash, I have not found any other apps for creating pixel art animations from vectors.  Vector animation apps like Adobe Animate often can't be configured for pixel perfect tweens, so pixel art tends to get blurred during motion.

I feel it's unfortunate, because vector based animation can save a lot of time and is generally easier to edit than traditional frame-by-frame animation. And while PixelOver can render 3D models as pixel art, modeling and rigging them is a larger effort for me than creating  2D  characters.

So I hope basic vector animation features will be apart of  PixelOver someday. And thank you for your work @Deakcor!