Transitioning from Animate to Krita

Krita is a free raster animation software available on Windows and MacOS. It has a similar timeline to Animate and is a great alternative for hand drawn animation.

To get started, download and install Krita here: https://krita.org/en/download/

In order to export video and gifs from Krita, you’ll need to download ffmpeg.

Download ffmpeg

  1. https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html

  2. How to install ffmpeg: https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-install-ffmpeg

  3. To link ffmpeg to Krita, click File > Render Animation > then link this icon to the ffmpeg file you unzipped and installed

  4. Now you can export video and gifs!

Keyboard Shortcuts

I’ve created a keyboard shortcut file you can import into Krita that brings some Animate shortcuts in to help ease the transition.

Dropbox link to keyboard shortcuts file

To install the shortcut file, head to Settings > Manage Resources…

Then click Import Resources on the bottom right of the popup window

Custom shortcuts carried over from Animate/Flash

, - back one frame
. - forward one frame
9 - back one keyframe
0 - forward one keyframe
F5 - add frame
F6 - add keyframe
F7 - add blank keyframe


Krita shortcuts

TAB - fullscreen
⁃ - zoom out
+ - zoom in
4 - rotate left
5 - no rotation
6 - rotate right
Shift + CMD + A = deselect

Linework and Fill

A little tutorial I made for animators on a project I directed for Shiseido. Shows the workflow for drawing and filling animation using tagged layers. It is a bit of a clumsy tutorial but shows some of the cool features with the fill tool!