I noticed in the content-creation video, when whoever is drawing the line-work for the rabbit, does something that looks like it has t-crossed lines, where they get rid of the overdraw on either side with the cutter tool in one click, as if it looked at the two overlapping strokes and simply used the border of the opposing stroke as the edge of the selection so it could be deleted.
I work in an angular style, doing full-motion framework, mostly via tablet, and grabbing handles using the contour editor tool (white arrow) always seemed clumsy for me (especially when I’m trying to work quickly, I only use what tools I can assign to the shoulder-buttons of my intuos), and getting a clean hard corner is always a pain. (I’ve had to settle with using the eraser, but that usually leaves a little bit of excess, which while not typically visible in the video render at normal size, is still present in the vector, and could show up on zoom-in.)
I looked for this (apparently) new feature in the descriptions for ver2, and maybe it’s small enough it doesn’t get any press. Just to doublecheck, I looked at the current cutter tool, and it was pretty bare. (I was surprised it doesn’t have any smoothing options available, for one…)
So is this a new feature of Animate 2, an existing feature of 1 I just can’t find for my own use, or an accident of video-editing for brevity which raised my hopes?
various obscenities are shouted in the background
Found it.
more indecipherable shouting, a crash
Can I say, I think I found a gap in the documentation? I found it in the video tour, but I never watched those when I first got the program, just looked at the PDFs, read the booklet, and played around with Animate by myself. The cutter is never described in the material I read as specifically being able to do what I asked about above. (I thought it was a way of lasso’ing specific areas of an existing shape. That’s what the User Guide describes it as.)
wailing, sobbing, fading into the distance
For the benefit of anyone else reading this thread, what RedBlade is talking about is called the “use mouse gesture” and is a part of the cutter tool. If you draw using brush strokes, and you draw overlapping lines, you can easily cut off the excess using the cutter tool. Make sure that you have the lasso selection mode instead of marquee, then if you just drag across the extra overlapping bits one by one then they will automatically get cut off.
I will pass on your comments regarding the documentation. Of course sometimes it’s difficult to strike a good balance between not making the document too long and not making it detailed enough. There are some people that complain that the document is way too much information to read, then there are others that discover that they need more in-depth descriptions of certain items. I agree with you that this is an important feature.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
Actually, what I’m talking about is the Cutter’s ability to select segments of line using a click, not a drag.
Dragging over will select an exact portion of a drawing, like using the lasso tool in Photoshop, say, allowing one to take chunks out of a current stroke. (These chunks are somewhat ragged, and that’s what I was saying before, about it lacking a smoothing option being unusual.)
Clicking a line which crosses another will select the portion of that line which doesn’t overlap the other line. (you could also use it to select the exact portion that overlaps, creating a checkerboard-like pattern.) Effectively, it turns the edges of individual strokes (as if you pressed D) into borders for every stroke available on that layer. A complex intersection of multiple strokes becomes a patchwork of available chunks of line, each selectable with a click.
http://nightmaresinthedark.com/temp/Cutter.png
(I will say that the system can get a little uppity with repeat use, sometimes not responding at all. Probably overload of the ‘what-does-that-idiot-want-now’ analysis system.)
It can also do this with auto-flattened strokes, (though apparently not with strokes merged later by flattening…). From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t truly reflect the edge of the stroke, it only averages the position where the edge had been, with a straight line between corner-angles.
Oh, and I did find a mention of this function later, in a different section of the user guide, on page 370 (PDF page 396), but NOT in the actual Cutter tool description on 115 (PDF page 141).
Thank you for clarifying - now I understand exactly what you’re talking about. I have passed your comments on to documentation.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
No problem. I’d just hate for someone else to go through the frantic searching and confusion I went through.