White Elephant

About:

This is a simple animation line testing software written in C++ with Qt toolkit.

For some time I was looking for some line testing software like MonkeyJam for Linux. If there's anything like that, I couldn't find it. There are some animation software for Linux, and they are good enough. But I need more drawing options like in an image editor, and the animation software can't give me that. All I need was some software to test my animations drawn in image editors like MyPaint and Gimp. I'm aware that these two programs have some plugins or hacks to work with animations, but they use layers as frames, and they don't have a real layer system to work with. That's where White Elephant comes in.

In White Elephant you have to create a new animation with a resolution first. Make sure your animation is at the same size as your images. When you add images or empty frames to the project they will be added into the current layer at the end.

White Elephant doesn't use layer composition modes, but you can make white transparent on a layer. So as for v1.4, it's possible to work with scanned images. Be careful though, according to Qt Documentation this may be resource-heavy. I didn't experience this, but still... If you will be working with scanned images, make sure white is "white", by increasing the contrast of the image.

White Elephant only renders a png image sequence. It should be easy to add ffmpeg support I guess, maybe libavcodec, but I just don't feel like doing it. Note that FPS feature is only for in-program playback. You can easily create a video from your frames with ffmpeg.

Or you can use a video editor to bring together your frames and render a video. And for adding sound also. There are a lot of FOSS and freeware video editors that you can use already. White Elephant is good for short animation sequences, but you can work on longer things of course, if that's what you want.

The thumbnail up on the toolbar shows the current frame on the current layer.

You can question the necessity of this software's existence of course. Please understand that I wrote White Elephant for my own use, and thought it might be useful for someone else too. I don't like to keep my code to myself.

White Elephant reached to v1.4 in a very short time (in a matter of days), because it is expected to do a little actually, and it does it right now.

I only tested White Elephant on Linux, but it has nothing platform-specific in it, so it should compile and run on any OS that Qt supports.

For bug reports and feature requests, you can use the Issues tab above. For further discussions you can visit the forum.

Shortcuts:

"N" - New Animation "A" - Add Images "E" - Add Empty Frame "Delete" - Remove Frame "+" - Add Layer "-" - Remove Layer "Right" - Next Frame "Left" - Previous Frame "Ctrl + Right" - Last Frame "Ctrl + Left" - First Frame "Up" - Move One Layer Up "Down" - Move One Layer Down "Ctrl + Up" - Go To Top Layer "Ctrl + Down" - Go To Bottom Layer "L" - Toggle Loop "Space" - Play/Pause "W" - Make White Transparent "H" - Hide/Show Layer

Compiling:

There is a PKGBUILD for Arch Linux at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/whiteelephant/ maintained by mrbit.

You will need Qt 4.8 development files to compile. The usage of translations isn't compatible with Qt 4.7.x, so you will need Qt 4.8 to compile. If you can't upgrade to Qt 4.8, you can use v1.6.1 which is compatible.

Extract the archive. "X.X.X" is the version number (e.g. 1.6.3)

cd whiteelephant-X.X.X qmake make

Install it by running this as root:

make install

Screenshot:

Credits:

White Elephant icon is modified from icon by Leo "14thWarrior" Lalande on openclipart

Arch Linux package by mrbit

Czech translation by Pavel Fric.

Thank you!

Changelog:

v 1.6.3

• This time really fixed the translation issues.

v 1.6.2

• Fixed translation issues.

• Updated Czech translation thanks to Pavel Fric.

• Added Turkish translation.

• Fixed an installation bug (Edit: No, not really. You have to run qmake twice for compiled translations to install. I will include them compiled in the source from 1.6.3).

v 1.6.1

• Fixed the bug when deleting hidden layer.

v 1.6.0

• Added Hide Layer button.

• Added Czech translation thanks to Pavel Fric.