Another advantage of having Drawing & Camera views side by side

This is a sketch I'm doing just for fun. (The girls from UFO!) It's not finished... I took a screengrab.

As you can see, I can zoom in and out in the Drawing View to do my details or to paint, and at the same time - the Camera View stays the same such that I can always refer to the "bigger picture" while I draw. I can also alter my Camera View (hand tool, or zoom tool) without affecting my Drawing View. I think this is pretty cool.



In the timeline, my imported jpegs (for reference) are represented by the blue frames. Their layers are hidden right now. When I want to look at them, I disable my Drawing layers, and enable those Jpeg layers, which then show up in my Camera View on the right side.

BTW, I sketched using the Brush tool (Anti-Aliasing disabled in Open GL properties) with Tool Properties set to so that the color is added under my black brushstrokes.

I love this new Workspace! =)

Painting with Texture, Drawing with Invisible strokes

Before vector animation hit the scene, back in the "traditional animation" days we created character color palettes in Animo (remember Animo?) We LOVE that there are character color palettes in ToonBoom ANIMATE!

A screengrab below shows that you can name the swatches and if you edit one color, then all drawings of that item painted with that color will change accordingly. There is also no confusion which color goes where. Color palettes are saved in a Palette library external to this file so you can easily share palettes with other artists.

I had actually created Rocquita color palettes in Toonboom DIGITAL PRO last year and imported them into this ANIMATE file.

Here are some screengrabs showing the Import Texture/Painting with Texture feature in Color Palettes.



To import a texture into the palette (In my case, it's the pattern of "stars" on Rocquita's tights), I generated a PSD file. I had already drawn this pattern in Flash so I exported the image to .bmp and saved as a .psd in Photoshop. I was originally going to create a "Mask" layer for every Leg drawing and add the stars this way, but it seemed like way too much work. This is so much more convenient! :)

Below is another example with our character Indigo, who wears a dark blue leopard print suit.

First the PSD file of the "leopard print"



I imported the PSD into my Palette and it generate a swatch which I renamed "indi suit print". Then painted the character as normal.



The texture fill naturally conforms to the shape that needs to be filled. So if you have a teeny weeny shape, you'll get teeny weeny leopard prints. If you have a large shape, the pattern increases in size... which was NOT what I wanted ... At first, the leopard print shape on Indigo's long pants were massive...



CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS LARGER

What's cool is that ANIMATE lets us edit the texture (scale, skew, rotate etc.) and then we can save the transformation to keep it consistent whenever we paint it.

Before you fill an area, click on the Enable/Disable Saved Texture button (I think this is what it's called) in the Paint Properties window. When Enabled is on, you get a consistent-looking pattern or texture regardless of what size the fill area is.

The screengrab above shows two sizes of leopard print - the top shape is using my Saved Texture size (same as Indigo's suit). The larger bottom shape has the feature disabled so the leopard print fill is much larger.

Drawing with invisible strokes

Our characters have no outlines and painting both strokes and fill areas is quite time-consuming. ANIMATE has a "flatten" tool feature so that you can merge outlines and fills that are the same color... but still.... you have to paint both first...

I was thrilled to learn recently that I can draw with "invisible strokes" in ANIMATE so I did this with my construction of Indigo. To draw with invisible strokes, create a Pencil tool setting with 0 width. In this case I was drawing with the Line and Contour Editor tools and I enabled the "Display Strokes" setting (keyboard shortcut = D) so that I could see my strokes.



CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS LARGER

I wish I had drawn Rocquita and Joe 101 this way (instead of using the Brush tool). Or maybe I could convert those brush strokes to pencil lines (I have yet to try this ANIMATE feature) to have more control over curves...

Brush strokes: Flash vs Toonboom

The first thing you notice about drawing in ANIMATE (compared to Flash) is the much improved line quality and accuracy!  

CLICK HERE to see enlarged pic. These are screengrabs of the brush strokes created in Flash and TB Animate. 

FLASH

Unfortunately, what you get on screen is not true to what you draw... Flash tweaks your original linework and as you can see - those looped lines are really messed up (compared to the Toonboom versions). I would have to manipulate the strokes with the Arrow tool and pull them into shape.  

TOONBOOM 

What you see on screen is exactly what you draw which is great! There's a catch though... In the TOONBOOM workspace, you can have Anti-aliasing enabled or disabled. Anti-aliasing adds a "Soft and blurry" effect to the strokes. Some people may not notice this but I do, and I find this blurry effect a bit distracting, like using ink that bleeds. With the Anti-aliasing Disabled (you can toggle this setting under Preferences > Open GL) it's the total opposite effect. The strokes are pixelly and jagged. This is even more distracting so I usually go with the Anti-Alias mode.

In my ideal world, I would love it if ToonBoom's line quality was crisper, like Flash's, while maintaining its smoothness and accuracy... 

Editing Strokes

To be honest though, I am so used to manipulating vectors in Flash it's weird to not have to do this in ToonBoom. Actually it's more time-consuming to edit strokes in ToonBoom because the Contour Editor feature requires a familiarity with Bezier points and handles... something I never had to learn. The thing I like about Flash is that you can just push and pull strokes into their perfect curve at ANY POINT ON THE CURVE without even having to SEE those points.

Smoothening Strokes

Both programs have a smoothening feature. I have yet to figure out how to smoothen only PART of a stroke in Animate. In Flash, you can very quickly select a part of a stroke and smoothen only this part. In Animate, the entire stroke is selected.

Tips, anyone?