Reorganizing my Workspace for Character Design

ANIMATE comes with a few default workspace layouts but when I am designing or drawing a character using imported bitmaps or jpegs, the imported images only show up in Camera View, not the Drawing View.

Yes, it is possible to vectorize images into Symbols, then expand the Symbols to make them visible in the Drawing View (this is if you want to trace your scanned artwork) but if I only wish to use my imported jpegs as visual reference while I am designing or drawing, then it makes no sense to vectorize them.

Francisco from ToonBoom offered a cool little tip - We can rearrange the modules so that both the Drawing and Camera Views are positioned side by side and visible at the same time.

This is a great idea for Character Designing: I can draw in one window (Drawing View), and refer to the imported jpeg in the adjacent window (Camera View).

*As we can't publicly display some of our work due to confidentiality agreements, this pic below is something I whipped up quickly for the purpose of this blog post.

I imported the "Character Lineup" .jpeg which is what you see in the Camera View on the right, and represented as a Symbol in the timeline below. I do my rough drawing on the left in the Drawing View, which will then be cleaned up and colored. Note that the Drawing layer on the timeline is "hidden"/disabled so that it doesn't show up in the Camera View. I have the Lightbox enabled so that I can still see it in the Drawing View.



Note also that I have shifted the Tool Properties, Color and Library modules over to the left side next to the Tool bar - this is just a personal preference.

To move modules around, grab the tab and drop it wherever you want it to go.

• If you drop it ON TOP OF another tab, you will be able to toggle between these tabs in the same module.
• If you drop your tab ON ONE SIDE of another tab, then you will have separately-docked modules.
  
• If you drop your tab anywhere else, it becomes a free floating module.
  

I don't know about anyone else, but the process of painting in ToonBoom Animate with Windows Vista O/S is still slow as hell. When I am choosing colors using the Color wheels, the program hangs and sometimes crashes. Solution: Disable Anti-aliasing in Open GL properties when working with color.

I like my new workspace for character designing. When animating, I would switch back to the Default/Animation workspace.

UPDATE: Here is a screencap video

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Or click HERE.

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...