Wow, this is gaining votes...can we go all the way? I've been waiting decades! Thanks for all alternative tips and keep up-voting.

:)

I was thinking the same. Why not make a new brush called Animation Brush, that has onion skin options and some other cell animation tools built in?

I hope Adobe starts to listen to everyone asking for some good animation tools in After Effects. And have been asking for almost 20 years, from what I can tell lol

Either create a new brush that has the feature to view the PREVIOUS frame(s) with less opacity, Onion Skin solved; the Animation Brush

Or simply make an effect that shows the previous frame(s) with less opacity, that is applied to the layer.

Not sure why either of these have ever been implemented into After Effects. The community has been asking for any kind of built in Onion Skin for well over a decade. We all know Animate is on it's way out and it is not very good anyway. The only feature Animate does well is it's Onion Skin.

There needs to be an onion skin option for frame by frame drawing, it's not difficult!

Here's a quick dirty way you can do it yourself.
Place two instances of the Echo effect on an Adjustment layer at the top of your comp.
Then adjust how many instance of the Onion Skin you want and then the only really cumbersome part is the time offset. I'm sure there's a mathematical way of doing it but you can set one positive and one negative for your before an after. Decay set down to 35 does seem to do the trick.

onion skin for after effects :)

With After Effect's versatility, it surprises me that the workflow doesn't lend itself well to any kind of hand-drawn animations.

One of the most simple ways I can think of to make AE more viable is just to allow onion skinning when painting frame-by-frame with the brush tool. As it stands right now I mostly have to guess and hope I got my drawings right.

@Micah & @ Terle, I was thinking the same thing, but with CC wide time, as you can precisely set the number of Pre/Post frames it calculates. :)
(I use this effect most often to average out grain/noise and create clean still frames, for compositing)

If an Ae Onion Skin feature matched what Adobe Animate does, that would be great; however, I'd like it if the Take Snapshot feature gained some enhancements along the following lines:
▪ Offer a preference that allows the user to keep the current behavior of displaying the snapshot for as long as the Take Snapshot button is pressed or to have the Take Snapshot button toggle the current snapshot on with a click and then off with another click.
▪ Allow the user to set an opacity value for the snapshot displayed so it can be 100% as it currently is or any opacity percentage value specified by the user.

Now I understand what you mean, thanks for the video Terje !
Indeed an echo effect does the trick. If you are only doing animation then a special plugin dedicated to that could do the trick instead of a new feature from Adobe

Excellent @Micah :) Not perfect, but very usefull. Thanks !

Echo effect on an adjustment layer? It's not elegant, but it would get you a similar effect. Set it as a guide layer so it doesn't render in the output, lock it so you don't accidentally select it.

Here's a link to the old Flash onion skin feature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snPgHMc6vzY

Onion skin is excellent to see previous and next frame to adjust the current accordingly. Must have for any serious animation software.

There are multiple and duplicate post request for this feature. Make sure to up-vote everyone or perhaps the admin could join them into one-halleluja-request that will stick.

This one https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/35478151-onion-layer

Hi,
why is it a duplicate? I havn't dound any similar.
Have you a link to a similar suggestion?

Sorry I flagged that idea. I just wanted to report it as duplicate

Would you have a screenshot to illustrate your feature ? I don't see it

A Onion Layer function like in Flash would be great in AFX.
Its for seeing multiple layers in the timeline at teh same time also if they are invisible. Its for a better animation workflow if you need to see invisible layers.

A Onion Layer function like in Flash would be great in AFX.
Its for seeing multiple layers in the timeline at teh same time also if they are invisible. Its for a better animation workflow if you need to see invisible layers.