Personally, I think actually planning out the shading and inking/painting it in with toonz/smart raster (same thing, different name between OT and T2D), and then adjusting the colors there. It has upsides, and downsides. Upside is, it's not a cludge (this solution kind of is one, and I could make the argument that, since it's overpainted and non form fitting/tailored, that it shows a lack of planning) but, the downside is, by inking/painting the shadows directly, you lose out on some potential post processing. This is true for OT's internal compositor, and external ones like natron or blender, etc, where it could be beneficial to have a separate shading layer. That said, it's also possible to do that with 'inked and painted' to specs/tailored shadows, by applying matchlines to multiple levels of your final ink outlined artwork. Then painting the multitude of layers onto which the matchlines were merged, in the respective color/shadows you want them to be. This would result in many layers, with each of them carrying only so many colors, but completely form fitting to the linework (which, again was 'projected' via matchlnes). And if you then delete the matchlines on those separate paint/shadow layers, then the projected linework would disappear and you would be left with your bunch of layers of separate colors. Which you then could all render separately with OTs/T2Ds "multiple rendering" setting. And THEN...in the final end, you could load all those separate files into your favorite third party compositor/editor, and have ultimate freedom and power over your picture elements. But that's quite a lot of work. So it all has pros and cons with varying effort vs payoff. I don't want to slander the method explained in this video, but I think it yields the least potential flexibility, but if you don't need that, then it's the fastest solution, if you enjoy experimenting and not 'hardline planning' (which anime studios, for example, do, but they're studios...)
Personally, I think actually planning out the shading and inking/painting it in with toonz/smart raster (same thing, different name between OT and T2D), and then adjusting the colors there is the best general practice, I mean. I don't dare edit my long post, youtube has eaten things before...when I did that.
Thanks for sharing your experience with this. There's many ways of accomplishing, not only shadows/highlights, but lots of styles/effects in animation, so it's always good to hear others. And you're right, planning this up front can be helpful in some pipelines, particularly studios, but most users with OpenToonz, and most of my viewers, are single animators, so it becomes down to the individual to figure out what their favourite or most efficient workflow is. So again, thanks for sharing. And happy animating folks 😀
Thank you very much! I really appreciate your channel for OpenToonz tutorials. Warning, long text incoming I was using Adobe Flash/Animate for years (never finished any of my personal projects then) and took classes for it, but saw that I just cannot keep using that expensive software, long ago. So I haven't animated in a very long time. I had thought Adobe Flash was my only viable option as I had initially intended to use "puppets" just like they do in the professional field of cartoons, but I realized way too late that rigging puppets is a massive time waster for me. I understand using puppets to reuse the characters episode after episode, but it's only useful for long term (and assuming you're not changing their design). They take a long time to create at first, but it can be reused forever. Such as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, nearly 10 years of the same puppets. That's what I noticed puppets are useful for. Industry environment to cut time and cost to reuse the characters for years to come. That's not viable for solo animators working on much smaller projects. Typically from what I've seen, multiple people are involved in making a puppet (at least in the case of the aforementioned cartoon) and are made relatively in a reasonable time frame before producing the episodes begin. For a solo animator, it takes way too long. It was what had initially made me stop animating for a while, I was so keen on puppets that when I began making my own, I noticed I was taking days after days to barely finish one puppet, and not even begin creating the first frame of my cartoon. It was very discouraging and I just stopped. I wasn't the only one either, I met a friend that worked on a project with a few other artists with the same desire to create their own puppets. He showed me all their project files and video streams, and I noticed they were making puppets. He told me they canned the project (that had been worked on for years mind you) because they changed direction many times and nothing really got done, but I noticed they took a long time discussing and rigging the puppets. Deciding on the style, colors, etc. I feel if they just went with hand drawn frame-by-frame animation, they could have gotten started on the first episode MUCH sooner and feel encouraged that progress is coming along. Maybe they wouldn't have canned all their years of hard work. Anyway, eventually when I stopped caring about making puppets and just wanted to animate again, I went ahead with the good old fashioned way of frame by frame hand drawn characters. Since I was at that point, and Adobe not being an option for me anymore, I hoped to find a free or at least cheap animation software. I found this, OpenToonz. It was a little overwhelming since it was not very much at all like Adobe Flash, but you and other animators making tutorials really help out making me feel right at home and start making cartoons again. I wish I knew about it many years ago, but better late than never. Thank you again for the videos.
Hi. Thank you for taking the time to share this. (long reply incoming 😉) I think this is a really important area that you've touched on. And something that lots of users find frustrating. I think one of the reasons is that it's easy to see the professionals and assume (sometimes rightly. Sometimes not) that they've created one magic puppet that you can reuse over and over, and pose for every shot. As I like to say, with reference to Lord of the Rings, there's is no "one rig to rule them all". It's best to build only the rig that you need for each shot. You'll still get a lot of reuse out if it. And you'll still be able to reuse the drawings and maybe the rig in other shots. So rather than building a single, magic rig at the start. Just build each rig, as you need it, only for the part of the character that you can see. That'll ensure you only build what you need and you'll get some cartoon completed as you go! But it's worth remembering that the rigging tools in OpenToonz aren't as complete as other software, so you need time to learn what you can and can't do with them. I hope to take some more time to work with puppeteering myself and then maybe I'll be able to share my experience with it. But my true love is frame by frame, so I'm not sure when I'll be doing that. But it's certainly on my radar. Although, you can mix frame by frame with puppet, so who knows?! But it's good to have you with us in our little OpenToonz community. I hope, if you've not done so already, you can join me on my Discord and share your progress with OpenToonz, with the rest of the community. All the best, DarrenT
The bucket tool only fills up to the lines in the current drawing. For most users, this is exactly what you need. Otherwise, you'd have to keep 2 sets of drawings in sync as you change the timing. Drawing for animation is different to drawing for a single image, so putting the lines and fills in the same drawing makes more sense. However, if you want your lines in a separate drawing, you can copy/past your lines to another drawing in another column and fill there. Or you can use a feature in Tahoma2D for filling in one column using the lines of another.
There isn't a "best frame rate". But the usual frame rate is 24fps, which is what I always stick to. But if you're showing your drawings on 2s, then you might prefer to set it to 12fps, then you can show each drawing on 1s. But it all depends on your style.
*Thanks for watching*
Do you use shadows and highlights in your animations?
Have you used the effects before for shadows and highlights?
Really complete and great tutorial👍❤
Thank you.
I'm glad you found it useful 😀
Thanks, GOD bless you.
Thank you
this is pretty helpful! thank you!
Cheers. This was fun to work on
Personally, I think actually planning out the shading and inking/painting it in with toonz/smart raster (same thing, different name between OT and T2D), and then adjusting the colors there.
It has upsides, and downsides. Upside is, it's not a cludge (this solution kind of is one, and I could make the argument that, since it's overpainted and non form fitting/tailored, that it shows a lack of planning) but, the downside is, by inking/painting the shadows directly, you lose out on some potential post processing.
This is true for OT's internal compositor, and external ones like natron or blender, etc, where it could be beneficial to have a separate shading layer.
That said, it's also possible to do that with 'inked and painted' to specs/tailored shadows, by applying matchlines to multiple levels of your final ink outlined artwork.
Then painting the multitude of layers onto which the matchlines were merged, in the respective color/shadows you want them to be.
This would result in many layers, with each of them carrying only so many colors, but completely form fitting to the linework (which, again was 'projected' via matchlnes).
And if you then delete the matchlines on those separate paint/shadow layers, then the projected linework would disappear and you would be left with your bunch of layers of separate colors.
Which you then could all render separately with OTs/T2Ds "multiple rendering" setting.
And THEN...in the final end, you could load all those separate files into your favorite third party compositor/editor, and have ultimate freedom and power over your picture elements.
But that's quite a lot of work.
So it all has pros and cons with varying effort vs payoff.
I don't want to slander the method explained in this video, but I think it yields the least potential flexibility, but if you don't need that, then it's the fastest solution, if you enjoy experimenting and not 'hardline planning' (which anime studios, for example, do, but they're studios...)
Personally, I think actually planning out the shading and inking/painting it in with toonz/smart raster (same thing, different name between OT and T2D), and then adjusting the colors there is the best general practice, I mean.
I don't dare edit my long post, youtube has eaten things before...when I did that.
Thanks for sharing your experience with this.
There's many ways of accomplishing, not only shadows/highlights, but lots of styles/effects in animation, so it's always good to hear others. And you're right, planning this up front can be helpful in some pipelines, particularly studios, but most users with OpenToonz, and most of my viewers, are single animators, so it becomes down to the individual to figure out what their favourite or most efficient workflow is.
So again, thanks for sharing.
And happy animating folks 😀
Thank you very much! I really appreciate your channel for OpenToonz tutorials.
Warning, long text incoming
I was using Adobe Flash/Animate for years (never finished any of my personal projects then) and took classes for it, but saw that I just cannot keep using that expensive software, long ago. So I haven't animated in a very long time. I had thought Adobe Flash was my only viable option as I had initially intended to use "puppets" just like they do in the professional field of cartoons, but I realized way too late that rigging puppets is a massive time waster for me. I understand using puppets to reuse the characters episode after episode, but it's only useful for long term (and assuming you're not changing their design). They take a long time to create at first, but it can be reused forever. Such as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, nearly 10 years of the same puppets. That's what I noticed puppets are useful for. Industry environment to cut time and cost to reuse the characters for years to come. That's not viable for solo animators working on much smaller projects. Typically from what I've seen, multiple people are involved in making a puppet (at least in the case of the aforementioned cartoon) and are made relatively in a reasonable time frame before producing the episodes begin. For a solo animator, it takes way too long. It was what had initially made me stop animating for a while, I was so keen on puppets that when I began making my own, I noticed I was taking days after days to barely finish one puppet, and not even begin creating the first frame of my cartoon. It was very discouraging and I just stopped. I wasn't the only one either, I met a friend that worked on a project with a few other artists with the same desire to create their own puppets. He showed me all their project files and video streams, and I noticed they were making puppets. He told me they canned the project (that had been worked on for years mind you) because they changed direction many times and nothing really got done, but I noticed they took a long time discussing and rigging the puppets. Deciding on the style, colors, etc. I feel if they just went with hand drawn frame-by-frame animation, they could have gotten started on the first episode MUCH sooner and feel encouraged that progress is coming along. Maybe they wouldn't have canned all their years of hard work.
Anyway, eventually when I stopped caring about making puppets and just wanted to animate again, I went ahead with the good old fashioned way of frame by frame hand drawn characters. Since I was at that point, and Adobe not being an option for me anymore, I hoped to find a free or at least cheap animation software. I found this, OpenToonz. It was a little overwhelming since it was not very much at all like Adobe Flash, but you and other animators making tutorials really help out making me feel right at home and start making cartoons again. I wish I knew about it many years ago, but better late than never. Thank you again for the videos.
Hi.
Thank you for taking the time to share this. (long reply incoming 😉)
I think this is a really important area that you've touched on. And something that lots of users find frustrating. I think one of the reasons is that it's easy to see the professionals and assume (sometimes rightly. Sometimes not) that they've created one magic puppet that you can reuse over and over, and pose for every shot.
As I like to say, with reference to Lord of the Rings, there's is no "one rig to rule them all". It's best to build only the rig that you need for each shot. You'll still get a lot of reuse out if it. And you'll still be able to reuse the drawings and maybe the rig in other shots.
So rather than building a single, magic rig at the start. Just build each rig, as you need it, only for the part of the character that you can see. That'll ensure you only build what you need and you'll get some cartoon completed as you go!
But it's worth remembering that the rigging tools in OpenToonz aren't as complete as other software, so you need time to learn what you can and can't do with them.
I hope to take some more time to work with puppeteering myself and then maybe I'll be able to share my experience with it. But my true love is frame by frame, so I'm not sure when I'll be doing that. But it's certainly on my radar. Although, you can mix frame by frame with puppet, so who knows?!
But it's good to have you with us in our little OpenToonz community. I hope, if you've not done so already, you can join me on my Discord and share your progress with OpenToonz, with the rest of the community.
All the best,
DarrenT
how to make the lines and the color column separately. if we separate we are not able to color on the color column
The bucket tool only fills up to the lines in the current drawing. For most users, this is exactly what you need. Otherwise, you'd have to keep 2 sets of drawings in sync as you change the timing. Drawing for animation is different to drawing for a single image, so putting the lines and fills in the same drawing makes more sense.
However, if you want your lines in a separate drawing, you can copy/past your lines to another drawing in another column and fill there. Or you can use a feature in Tahoma2D for filling in one column using the lines of another.
More videos on shadows
:-) I've a couple more coming up...
What is the best frame rate to start at for beginning animators ?
I started at 6 frames per second. Then 12.
There isn't a "best frame rate". But the usual frame rate is 24fps, which is what I always stick to. But if you're showing your drawings on 2s, then you might prefer to set it to 12fps, then you can show each drawing on 1s. But it all depends on your style.
Yo
Hey hey