Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

[Helm]

The shortcuts list should seriously ship exactly as is with the software as a separate help file. Have you considered sending it to Jan?

[Argyle]

Did some more cleaning
[. . .]
First on the chopping block for the advanced list, imo, are the tools and brush shortcuts or at least the bulk of them. If you have not hit comma 5,000 times then you have not leveled up enough for the advanced list.

Honestly I have never used the comma binding for pipette.  Holding down CTRL alone toggles a sort of 'quick pipette' if you will (just like holding ALT in photoshop) so you can right/left click the color you want for fore/background and release CTRL to return to the tool you were originally using.

I think the keys I use the most often, where tools are concerned and not the obvious undo/redo/various saves, are:

S / D
paint dotted / continuous
F
flood fill
V
line
ALT+B
freehand grab brush
CTRL+A
grab all as brush
Z / X / SHIFT+ / ZSHIFT+B
flip brush / rotate brush / restore brush
1 / 2
previous frame / next frame
ALT+F
fixed background
[ and ]
next / previous palette entry, very useful if using a smaller palette sorted by brightness. These are also bound to my tablet side buttons for faster use because my fingers rarely leave the 'ASDF' area.

My mouse wheel is bound to increase / decrease brush size instead of the default scrolling, though I more use the touch ring on my intuos4 tablet for that instead of the mouse, and the two side buttons for the wacom pen are bound to the CTRL modifier (quick pipette!) and right click.

The other shortcuts I'm fairly fluent with, but don't need them NEARLY as often as the above mentioned. When animating, I find the fastest way to move parts around nice and quick from frame to frame is to always keep a solid background, and my background/secondary selected color as that color.  That way when I go to use the grab brush tools to snag pieces at a time to move around from frame-to-frame, any of the background (usually set to be transparent later anyway) color that got selected will not appear in the brush I grabbed. Not sure if this was mentioned but it is handy to note that if you grab a brush with any of the grab tools by selecting with the left mouse button, it will just make a copy of that brush for you to use, whereas if you select it while dragging with the right mouse button it will lift your selection off entirely.

[AnnIshman]

Helm's suggestion gave me an idea and rather than derail this topic anymore with all this I created a new post.

[Mathias]

Aaarrrhhhhggggguurgrgrghhhh

*Mathias trepidatiously jumps into the Promotion mosh pit and gets trampled

*Then he gets back up and attempts animation . . .

[Mathias]

Ok . . .

Creating a 'Tile Maps' formatted project.

Question: Can you use layers for Tile Maps?

Notice my Layer Settings palette. Currently, Layer "3" is isolated. If I isolate any of the 4 layers, they all have the same exact pixel data. If I make a new layer, it just becomes a duplicate layer as well, inheriting the existing pixels in the document. What gives!?



I want to use PM's layers here so I can have layers of background tiles, foreground tiles, etc visible at once or isolatable if I want. Would not an artist normally draw foreground tiles on a transparent layer right above his background tiles? You gotta know how things jive as you progress . . .



(now don't be stealing my hot new tileset there ok!?)

[ptoing]

Here is a little setup I made for you.

http://ptoing.net/post/layers.pmp

What you have to understand that in PM layers = frames (more or less) tho you can also have different projects show in one. Which is nice for sprite overlay mockup stuff. Also you have to note that you have to assign a colour as transparent. Atm it actually is not possible to have non transparent unless you choose to have alpha, which I would probably not advise for layers.

Also protip: RTFM!

[Mathias]

Ok, that sheds some light, thanks Big Sven! I had actually read a fair bit of the M already.
So, I simply failed to use the 'Use Frame Position' settings thing. Why can't they just be freaking layers???
I suspected PM layering was driven by a different concept than PS layering.

Just gotta spend the time dinking around getting the hand of things now.

And yeah, what I've read (in the M) about linking projects sounds great. Sounds like you can link Tile Map projects that are even different dimensions, and different tile widths/heights. Nice.

[Mathias]

Ok, here's one for ya -

I've got a project with 8 frames. Somehow I drew all the good stuff on Frame 5. I don't want 8 frames. I only want 2. But when I hit the 'Delete Frame' button 6 times to knock it down to the desired total of 2 frames, frame 5 gets deleted.

CTRL-Click on the 'Delete Frame' and I get the delete frame range dialogue, but no matter what I do, even if I just delete frame1, frame5 disappears.  whut

[Argyle]

Try deleting the frames with layers toggled off maybe? If you are working with fixed frame number layers, it might be defaulting back to a frame one of your layers is spotlighting when you delete another? When hitting the frame "-" button it only effects the currently shown frame number. But yeah... CTRL clicking the frame "-" should work to define, say, purging frame1 through 4.

[ptoing]

Mathias, it seems you are not using PM right. I dunno, seriously it is not rocket science.

If you click the - button (ctrl+delete btw) it will delete the frame you are currently looking at.

If you wanna use the range thing you would have to do it twice and delete 1-4 and then again 2-4 (in your 8 frames, frame 5 is good scenario)