What I’ve been doing is using the line art and color layers to paint tone or base color. Then I paint in the shadow and highlight colors with the repaint feature and clean up any errant lines with the base color that I used.
I know there are tone and highlight effects that could be used… but adding both of those modifiers for each and every piece within your hierarchy would get tedious even with a script.
I’d really like to be able to select a closed path that masks everything outside of it from further manipulation so I could use it for quick precision painting without the need to go back and clean up color strokes that I don’t want… similar to the standard marching ants selection method of Photoshop. Think of it as using and enclosed path as a temporary mask.
If there is already a way to do what I just described then I’d love to hear how its done 
Great tip Lilly!
Thanks!
I have standard Animate so I’ll experiment with this. Thanks for the info.
We don’t have a way to save a selection like Photoshop does but what you can do is you can always paint a mask into its own layer and then use that to manipulate the image.
Are you using Pro? If so I have a few tricks for you:
So one thing that you can do if you want to use the Tone and Highlight modules is you can apply the Tone/Highlight AFTER the character composite - and then you don’t have to do it on each individual layer, you would just do it on the whole character at once.
Something else that you can do, which is kind of cheating a bit but which is really fast, is you can plug a copy of the character into an Apply Peg Transformation node, and then also put a Peg into the left hand port and use this peg to move the character over a bit. Now plug this copy of the character back into your Highlight/Tone module, and this will act as your mask. Then you don’t need to paint anything at all!
If that was a little confusing, here’s a screenshot:
http://i790.photobucket.com/albums/yy184/lillybirdsong/Screenshot2011-02-23at104241AM.png
The nice thing about doing it this way is that the shadow will change with the animation as the character moves around, which is really cool.
If you’re using Animate regular, then you can’t do that particular trick, but you might be able to do something like duplicate your character, then use a peg on it to move it over, and then drag and drop this onto the Mask portion. Then in your Tone/Highlight you can invert the Matte and this should work.
The only thing about doing it in Animate is that since you don’t have the network connection, you can’t plug the same thing in to multiple effects - so even though you can do the automatic tone and highlight, you have to animate your character before you clone or duplicate it. If you don’t, as you start to animate it, the shadow and tone will stay in place while you animate the character. But if you animate the character first, then you can just duplicate (or clone) your animation and then apply the effect and you’re done, the shadow and highlight will share the animation of the original puppet.
Here’s a screenshot of it in Animate:
http://i790.photobucket.com/albums/yy184/lillybirdsong/Screenshot2011-02-23at110310AM.png
Let me know if this helps.
~Lilly
