I’m using Animate Pro 3 and I’ve currently found myself in the need of showing a character in a place that becomes gradually darker and lighter in an intermittent way, so his colors are supposed to “morph” from his normal palette to another one that’s already been made (with darker tones but still bright eyes), then back to his normal colors, etc, all of this while he keeps moving.
I haven’t found any info on how to do this in Animate Pro 3… Is it actually possible?
Thanks in advance.
If I were to attempt this I would use a Colour-Override module. If you are free to abandon the preconceived dark palette you could use the Colour-Scale module and have the original palette altered consistently by percentage.
Animating effects over time:
http://docs.toonboom.com/help/animate-pro/#HAR/Stage/019_Effects/016_H1_Animating_an_Effect_Over_Time_.html%3FTocPath%3DToon%20Boom%20Animate%20Pro%20User%20Guide|Toon%20Boom%20Animate%20Pro%203%20User%20Guide|Chapter%2018%3A%20Effects|_____3
I would use a specially named color swatch for the eyes and enable the protect color option so all but the eyes were effected by the Colour-Override or Colour-Scale. I would also use a special swatch for the lines and pupils of the eyes so everything needed to retain the eye characteristics would be intact.
https://www.toonboom.com/resources/video-tutorials/chapter/effects
Thanks for the reply.
I’ve been trying to use the “colour-override” module with the existant light and dark palettes, but I can’t find a way to animate it over time so it will change from one palette to the other in the same scene.
I’ve read the documentation you linked to about how to animate an effect over time, but this module doesn’t seem to have a function button, or an “expand function” button in the timeline… I guess I won’t be able to use the dark palettes I made for this purpose (as cloned palettes)? Or is there a way?
I’d really like to, because there’s many elements that become brighter or just independently tinted in the darkness (they become greener or bluer than they should), and not just the character’s eyes.
Animating Colour-Override over time: I have not tried it and will have to when I have more time. Did you try setting up a simple project and using more than one C-O module at various stages in the Timeline? In theory, you would come under the effect of one then the next then another or perhaps back to an earlier module. It’s just a thought I would investigate if you have not. If you have, how did this work out? What were the shortcomings that did not fulfill your needs?
Well, I currently have two colour-override modules (one for dark and one for bright) and, while they do show up in the timeline, it doesn’t seem possible to make keyframes for either of them…
They just sit there, with no function buttons whatsoever, working correctly through the whole animation if I enable them. =\
In the end, I managed to achieve this by adding a “Transparency” module to the dark palette’s “Colour-override”, and altering its values where necessary.
It’s still kinda weird that the module itself doesn’t allow for alpha transparency or any kind of variation over time, though…
The Hue Saturation module might be suited to this task as it contains function curves and is fully animatable over time.
Looks like you would need to incorporate an Image Switch module to animate the Color Override over time but that is only available in Harmony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4nvOTb3-Sc
Nice to see you figured something out and thank you for following up. Everything helps in understanding how the software works.
Lilly of Toon Boom describes using the Transparency module for animating an effect:
"Here I did a quick example of how to do the blending with transparency effect:
http://s790.photobucket.com/user/lillybirdsong/media/Screenshot2011-03-29at114632AM.png.html
So I have a drawing that is just basically a rectangle filled with a colour. In this case, if I want to go to a night-time scene, I can make this colour a dark blue. If I wanted to change it to a sunset or something, then I would have the colour be a pink or orange colour.
Then you attach this rectangle layer to a transparency effect, and the transparency effect to a blending node. In effect now I’m using the rectangle as an overlay, like a film on top of everything that’s underneath it. I choose one of the Blending options, like Multiply.
Then, to animate from one colour to another, I animate the transparency. I will start out at 100% transparent, for no effect, and then I will animate it down to 50% transparency or so for full effect.
Of course the same effect can be done in Animate Pro, and the advantage there is that you can get more complex combinations of modules to get some neat effects.
~Lilly"