Here is the first ever public preview of Celga the animation app I built in-house for myself. In the video I’m using high definition frames from Akira to test caching and playback.
I built Celga because other animation apps had become bloated with too many features, too many options, too many palettes and toolbars, too many menus and sub-menus. Using these apps means we consume about a quarter of our time navigating the interface and menus instead of staying in a natural flow state.
One of the reasons AI guys say animators need “AI” is because they claim that animation is time consuming. That’s true, because anything good takes time. But we can reduce that time by eliminating some clutter and speeding up processes.
Celga solves these problems by eliminating excessive options. It simulates traditional paper and cel animation only. All essential options you need for cel animation are directly in front of you one click away. You never need to hunt for anything and there are no right click options.
Here’s a list of what Celga does:
1. The fastest one click import and exports of image sequences.
2. The fastest layer switching using keyboard shortcuts instead of layer palette.
3. The fastest frame insertion and deletion.
4. The fastest method to set the time length of a frame.
5. The fastest method to change a projects frame rate.
6. The fastest underpainting for laying down flat colours under line art.
7. Automatically colour the current frame based on colours in the previous frame.
8. Paint and colour mixing that approximates painting with acrylic on cels.
9. Cursors that update to show which colour you are painting or drawing with.
10. One click automated interpolation for in-betweening of basic outlines.
11. Automatically create a colour swatch from an image.
12. A special fill tool for shadow and highlight colouring.
13. Dynamic real time canvas resizing.
That’s just for version 1 which I built for myself. The focus of version 1 was efficient and enjoyable cel creation. Comping the cels into scenes is still done in Clip Studio Paint or After Effects.
Version 2 will have a few extra features and will be available to everyone for free along with a suite of apps and utilities that nobody else makes. It will run on macOS, Windows and Linux.
I’ll be using Celga for my own animations, starting with scenes from a graphic novel I have been working on.