Hi,
I’m trying to import jpg’s of pencil art for hand tracing in Toon Boom Animate. For some reason, when I import the files, they look terrible blown up…they’re so pixelated and blurry, I can’t really trace them effectively.
when I open the same file in photoshop, i can see it perfectly at the same size. THis is one of those problems in Toon Boom that really has me wondering why i don’t just use photoshop…so frustrating.
I’ve messed around with every preference setting for hours trying to figure out what the problem is, but the preferences never even seem to change anything. What a waste of time.
Thank you for your help, Lilly. I think it was an openGL/Render view issue which I’ve never had a problem with before for some reason. The images I was importing were 2784x1556 and the project was 720, so I knew there shouldn’t be any weird upscaling blurs. I also bumped up the maximum import option (thanks for pointing that out), so that may have helped as well.
Sorry to be so dramatic in my initial post, but it was very late and I’d been trying to figure this out for hours.
Thanks.
First question - when you import the image does it only appear blurry in the OpenGL view? When you switch over to the Render View, is it clear? There are some preferences that affect what the image looks like in OpenGL.
If the image still looks blurry in the Render View, then that means the image has been scaled up larger than its original resolution. Meaning, if you had an image that was 640 x 480 and imported it into an HD scene, then it would scale it up and it would appear blurry.
Second thing to check is your import settings. When you import the image, if it is larger or smaller than your output resolution, you can have it import in at its own resolution to maintain the pixel ratio. So in your import images dialog, if you uncheck the option to put it in a symbol and uncheck the vectorisation option, then you should get a fit option. In this fit option you can check on “Project Resolution”. That means that if you were to import a 640 x 480 image into an HD scene, it would not scale it up, it would simply import the image at 640 x 480 and plonk it into the centre of the stage.
Okay so last thing to check is the preferences. Go to Preferences, OpenGL tab, then there is a preference called “Maximum Texture Size”. You can increase this to be as big as you need it to be for your image. It’s at 2048 by default. It’s a good idea to keep this as a power of 2, so if you want to pump it up go to 4096. Now one thing to be aware of is that this will affect the texture size for any NEW imported images - so it won’t bump up the OpenGL preview of textures that have already been imported - unless you restart the application. After a restart, the OpenGL preview will be updated on all images.
Just so you’re aware, the reason that this preference exists is because people often are importing bitmap images for backgrounds, and these backgrounds can get very large. We limit the size of the texture files in OpenGL so that you don’t bog down the application, so it’s not a good idea to pump it up TOO high or you might see some slow down.
Hope this helps.
~Lilly
No worries - we’re just here to help! I know how frustrating it can be to go through that Preferences window. Even me, who’s very familiar with all the Preferences, can still have a hard time locating where the Preference is that I want. It’s great having the option to turn on and off these various Prefs, but it can be hard to handle it sometimes!
~Lilly