A better light table/onion skinning

Two of the other animation programs I use, TVPaint and Plastic Animation Paper have light tables where you can manually select which frames are included and how faint they are (using sliders to control opacity for each frame). So for example you can have only frames 1, 8 and 12 appear. Also, the previous frames are tinted a different color from the next frames (this feature may be in Animate, I don’t have the program in front of me right now). It’s all extremely useful.

I know in Animate Pro you can make frames into keys and breakdowns and select only those to appear in the light table, which is great, but the method I’m thinking of is faster, more flexible and can be done on the fly.

In a similar vein, it would be nice to select a particular frame for flipping back and forth between two drawings, so you can compare drawing 10 to drawing 1 and see if you’ve made mistakes or gone off-model. Does this feature already exist?

I think, at least for me, the issue is more about being able to easily choose which drawings you want to see with varying levels of intensity. For example, some times I may want to have 3 keys back at about 70% intensity but I may want to drop the inbetweens of those keys to about 10%. Additionally I may just want to see ahead to my 2nd key and just have the 1st one’s opacity way down so it’s there just for reference. The reason for that is to be able to see my arcs without all the muddiness that comes from 10 drawings laying on top of each other with a straight descending order of opacity. Also, if I have to go back and forth to the xsheet that’s just another step that separates my brain into too many directions.

There’s something about paper where your eye can more easily focus on the drawing you’re looking for, but it’s a conversation that comes up regularly around the office where people have a really hard time seeing through the onion skin to find what they’re looking for. Some people get so frustrated with it that they just abandon it and head back to the safety of their paper. Particularly when drawings are close (and rough), it’s nearly impossible to tell what you’re looking at. Honestly, it’s probably the major thing that’s holding us back from going full-on paperless. As always, love the product, and I personally feel that the trade-off of instant playback for less-than-ideal onion skinning is worth it - but it is something that could be improved. Thanks!

I think, at least for me, the issue is more about being able to easily choose which drawings you want to see with varying levels of intensity. For example, some times I may want to have 3 keys back at about 70% intensity but I may want to drop the inbetweens of those keys to about 10%. Additionally I may just want to see ahead to my 2nd key and just have the 1st one’s opacity way down so it’s there just for reference. The reason for that is to be able to see my arcs without all the muddiness that comes from 10 drawings laying on top of each other with a straight descending order of opacity. Also, if I have to go back and forth to the xsheet that’s just another step that separates my brain into too many directions.

There’s something about paper where your eye can more easily focus on the drawing you’re looking for, but it’s a conversation that comes up regularly around the office where people have a really hard time seeing through the onion skin to find what they’re looking for. Some people get so frustrated with it that they just abandon it and head back to the safety of their paper. Particularly when drawings are close (and rough), it’s nearly impossible to tell what you’re looking at. Honestly, it’s probably the major thing that’s holding us back from going full-on paperless. As always, love the product, and I personally feel that the trade-off of instant playback for less-than-ideal onion skinning is worth it - but it is something that could be improved. Thanks!

The issue I have is: say I want to add an inbetween between two frames that have been painted. Those frames display in onion skinning as fully green or red sillouhette, making it very hard to inbetween interior lines. An option to use opacity-based onion skinning like Flash would be very helpful in these situations.

Just noticed that under User Preferences/Drawing/Onion Skin Render style, I can set it to “Normal” and do just that! Scratch my last comment!

This thread has really caught my attention.
The inbetweening is reaaly hard. Myself I have missed a kind of magnet,- smudge,- or liquidise -kind of tool. A tool that could work the line in a plastically manner.
Well, enough about inbetweening. Clean lines that animate smooth are probably hard to make.

For the issue here, a more flexible light table/ onion skin, I have found a workaround, assigning swatches to frames. It may look complicated at first sight, but in fact I found it quite easy to use after only 10 minutes of work.

Assign swatches to drawings.

For a scene of 60 frames create a new palette and add new swatches from - new 0 - to -new 60.(just press the + button 61 times)
Then go to your -preferences -exposure sheet-use current frame as drawing name.
Then -Preferences - Drawing- OnionSkin Render Style
-(choose )Normal.

When one start to draw use new 0 as general line colour.
When one want to adjust opacity for a frame/drawing use repaint tool and choose the swatch with the same number as the drawing.
This way it should be possible to keep track of wich color to adjust for the different drawings.
When the adjustments are over for a segment of the scene, one can repaint to new 0 if thats more convenient.

This technique will not only make it possible to adjust the opacity but also the line color. ( Richard Williams color coding)

If one add the assign swatches to drawings(above) to other Toon Boom features like choosing color and wash for the onion skin, and the mark and show Keys, Breakdowns and In betweens . + Send drawing to drawing view. The adjustment possibillities should be numerous.
While working There will of course easily happen that one work with wrong swatch. But just use the repaint , apply for multiple drawing,to bring all drawings back to new 0.

Best regards
Ivar

Made a video of how to

Assign swatches to drawings to individually adjust color and opacity working with the onion skin and -send drawings to drawing view. The process is described in the reply above. Here is the link:



http://vimeo.com/33963525

Hope it can inspire to find better ways of working with the onion skin.
Please comment and submit experiences working in similar ways.

Best regards
Ivar



Trying to look into the different possibilities of the - Send To Drawing View_ working area,I find that the User Guide is giving very little information, or?

Been a formar user of TB Studio and the -Static Light Table-feature.
Static Light Table, that little box that you can activate in the bottom of the x-sheet and let you turn on and of the drawings you want be exposed there.
(In TB Studio)

Is there a similar function in the - Send To Drawing View- in TB Animate Pro?

---------------
Assign swatches to drawings to individually adjust color and opacity working with the onion skin and -send drawings to drawing view. The process is described in the reply above. Here is the link

http://vimeo.com/33963525

Hope it can inspire to find better ways of working with the onion skin.
Please comment and submit experiences working in similar ways.

Best regards
Ivar
--------------------
That’s a good trick. I will try it out.

If you’re working in Animate Pro, then what you can do is select just the drawings that you’re interested in working with from your X-sheet, then right-click on them and “Send Drawings to Drawing View”. Then if you work in the drawing view, you’ll see just those thumbnails on the right-hand side, so you can isolate the onion skin for just those drawings.

You can then use this special space in your drawing view and add or remove drawings to it as you need to. Then you can also use your Easy Flipping toolbar to flip through the drawings.

Hope this helps.

~Lilly

Hmm that’s kind of a cool idea. Not just varying which ones are shown, but the intensities of those ones. Let me bounce this idea around and see what we can come up with.

~Lilly

You can find more info about the Shift and Trace tool in Animate Pro’s User Guide, page 161, Shift and Trace.

Basically, you send the drawings you’re interested in to the Drawing View, and then when you go to the drawing view and turn on your onion skin, you will only see those drawings.

~Lilly