TBS 3 – change of palette style is affecting other scene – known glitch/shortcoming? workaround?

Retired Products Toon Boom Studio Support and Troubleshooting
1

I’m using Studio 3* and finding that selecting a palette style in one scene is affecting the choice of palette style in another scene. The result is that the animation must be exported more than once and then externally edited.

Anyone aware of something about TBS3 that I’m missing here?

The documentation says:

When you switch between palette styles, Toon Boom Studio recolors the zones you painted using the color swatches in the original palette style with the values in the active palette style.

This allows you to see the effect of a new palette style and to quickly repaint objects for different scenes. When you export your animation, Toon Boom Studio uses the active style to paint your movie.

What I gather from this — and from looking at the actual behavior of TBS3 — is that if I have, say, 2 scenes, each using a different palette style for a character, then I’ll need to export the animation twice — once with the first style, once with the second, and then use an external editor to stitch them together.

Which is okay, I suppose, but it seems like a PITA.

  • Yes, from 10 years ago. No, I’m not buying a new version right now. (What, you think I’d bother asking the question in that case?)
2

Color palettes and palette styles are global settings, so when we change the style assigned to a palette, all scenes using that palette get the new setting.

To use different palette styles in different scenes, we can create separate custom palettes dedicated to the scenes.

For example:

  1. For Scene 1, create a custom palette called ‘sc01 palette’ and set the desired style (e.g. ‘sc01 style’)
  2. For Scene 2, create a custom palette called ‘sc02 palette’ and set the different style (e.g. ‘sc02 style’)

That way, whatever style selection changes we make in one scene won’t apply to our other scenes.