I’ve been training myself in OpenToonz, and I had this idea to speed-up the workflow in Synfig since the latter can do well what the former cannot and yet is a slightly slower in process.
Right now the only thing the Paint Bucket tool seems to be most useful for is changing the color of lines and regions. Not saying that’s not useful, but I thought we could have another different “mode” for it in the Tools Option.
For example: When planning your animations, you quickly draw rough, then polish it by properly drawing keyframes. In OpenToonz, you have a consistent color-palette that stays on every frame, letting the software know that it’s the same object.
So how about this: Let’s say we use a tablet to draw lines in a group, not perfectly (even if it’s chicken-scratch), they at least overlap even if they are different objects, visually defining the regions the colors must be created. So rather than create the color region by hand for every frame via vector-handle manipulation, you can simply switch to “Animate-Mode” in the Paint-Bucket tool options and fill inside the overlapping outline region. You can then delete those thousands of outlines, rightclick the fill object and recreate the Advance Outline layer on top.
OR, for animation purposes, rather than deleting the thousands-of-over-lapping-outlines (if you’ve been animating frame-by-frame by hand), you can fill each region with that same color in different frames, and it will let the software assume that it’s the same object in different frames automatically key in-betweens between them.
The concept is simple and it would save animators a LOT of time, but I understand this sort of thing can be pretty daunting to program. So, unless somebody volunteers to program it, I’m hoping I (or someone else) can pitch in a bounty for this sometime in the future if we can. I would gladly PAY for such a feature to exist, the trouble is finding that money.