OpenToonz Tutorial Collection, Parts 12 to 14

for the basics of working with color and open tunes I'm going to talk about three main sections first this section will introduce how to add color in the first place next we'll take a closer look at the settings for the fill tool and finally we'll do a section on troubleshooting I should also note these demos will be for using color in tunes of vector levels there's more on that back in part 9 if you haven't seen it I've heard some people insist on using raster levels for color but I'm a big fan of vectors for their flexibility to keep editing lines after color has been applied so let's jump in and add some color I've put them this demo file from a previous tutorial and what we're going to work with today is the level palette here at the bottom of the interface and then the style editor right next to it if you don't see this content in your level palette and style editor make sure that you have a current level active for example here in the xsheet if I click on a blank cell that means I have no current level and no content in my level palette or style editor but if I click on a cell that has a drawing in it then that drawings level becomes my current level and then I can see the swatches and values for that level styles so by default we've got two swatches in each level that we make they appear to be black and white the white color zero is technically transparent indicated by these checkers at the bottom of its swatch and it's basically locked as a null style then the black color one is automatically applied to our brush strokes when we're drawing in the level so here we can see that black in the lines of our chicken our first goal is going to be to create a new style change its color and then use that as a fill for this chicken so to start with and creating a new style you can click on this button it looks kind of like a post-it note and if you hover over it it says new style if you take that approach be careful that you don't click on the button right next to it which would create a new page a very similar icon but it has a folder tab and that is not what we want hmm if you want to avoid that confusion you can also just right-click and the level palette and then choose new style on that list either way that should give us a new style called color too by default and as we create new styles it's a good habit to name them to keep things organized so I'm going to double click where it says color to here and since this is intended as a fill color for the body I'm going to call it body fill and then hit enter to save that a little note on renaming be sure to click directly on the text itself if you double click slightly above or below it opens up another panel of the style editor which for us is redundant right now so I'm gonna close that down and again to rename double click on the text itself so by default our new style comes in as a duplicate of whichever style we had selected previously in this case that means our body fill starts off as a duplicate of color one we can change that over here in the style editor what we've got over here are sliders and values for HSB a for alpha or transparency and an RGB I'm gonna start with a medium brown for the body fill and a quick way to achieve that is to give this style a fair amount of red a medium green and then I'll dial back the saturation a bit to end up with this kind of tan color now that we've got this color we're going to fill in the character with it and for that we'll use the fill tool it's over here in the toolbar with this Paint Bucket icon or you can also just tap the hotkey F to switch over to the fill tool for starters I'm gonna try clicking with our new style selected within an enclosure and that gives us a fill for that enclosure shape note that the shape really has to be enclosed if I want to see what happens if that's not the case if I tap e to switch to my eraser and break the line here so that our shape is no longer enclosed then we lose our fill without include shape here if I try to use the fill tool again I'm not gonna get a result if you've got this kind of issue you can fix it by using the control point editor so here I'll use that to close this gap in my case that made the fill come back I found that's not always consistent but if it doesn't come back on its own you should be able to use the fill tool again to just reapply it another thing to note up here at the comb notice that our main body fill applied throughout the comb as well my eventual goal is to have the main body its own color and then to have the comb read instead so I don't want this bill to apply throughout knee-jerk reaction might be to tap II to use the eraser again and try to erase that fill away but that's not going to work here so this brings us to another point and toons vector levels the eraser tool does not work on fill areas the fill is just a designation basically saying that all the area within this enclosed shape should be filled with this style so it's not something that we can erase pixel by pixel in my case that's also why the fill came back when I reestablish the include shape here because that designation for the fill was still in there so if I want to not have the comb filled up here instead of trying to erase that fill away what I'm going to do is zoom in tap see from my control point editor and then I'm going to clean up my lines to make these two separate shapes here and that doesn't get rid of the fill just yet so if I want this to go back to not having a fill since I can't erase that away what I'll do instead is select color 0 remember that's locked as an old style and then if I use the fill tool with that and fill in that include shape with color 0 it basically wipes out the previous bill that we had applied so now we're back to this not having a fill and let's go ahead and create another style to use as our comb fill here so again I'm going to right click in the style editor and say new style this time I'll double click where it says color 3 and call this the comb fill and I want this to be read for the comb so over here in the style editor this time I've already got red isn't option since we're starting from white more on that in just a second so if I increase my saturation here then I can get red for the cone fill so now that we've done that we might hope that we can use this new style to fill in the comb so with my fill tool selected I'm gonna try cooking within the comb but I'm not getting any result there so it looks like nothing's happening actually what's happening is this style is being used to fill in this area but remember when we create a new style it duplicates the previously selected style and when I created the comb fill style here I had color 0 selected I remember that's transparent indicated by these checkers so our comb fill style also came in as transparent since it's a duplication of color 0 so to fix that over here in the style editor I'll want to change the a value for alpha 0 means it's totally transparent and I want to crank that up to be totally opaque here and once we have a passive view for that style we can see now it's showing up in the comb all right so I'm gonna do this one more time for the beak this time I'm going to have comb fill selected when I create a new style and that means we don't have to worry about the transparency I'm gonna double click on color 4 and call this beak fill and then I'm just going to change the hue here to be orange and we'll go with that as our beak fill then again with our fill tool we'll click and the beak and since that's already an include shape we're good to go there and now we've got our character fully colored in this first drawing a little thing to note if we make any changes to these Styles after already applying than this fills then we can see those changes take effect on the character so let's say maybe I want my a body fill to be slightly darker maybe a little bit less green then we've currently got on the chicken for that I can select body fill I can take the value down a little bit and I can increase the red and as I'm making these changes to the style those changes again are going to show up anywhere I've got that style applied in the drawing on that note maybe for a little bit more contrast between the beak and the body fill gonna try darkening down that body fill I'll stop now I could go on but I mainly wanted to show that kind of tweaking is possible with the open toons coloring system so now I'm gonna speed up the footage while I clean up the lines from my other two drawings and then I'll apply those fills and we end up with color throughout our simple animation loop alright last thing to note this palette applies to all the drawings in the same level so that ability to edit our colors that was showing earlier will apply to all of these drawings as well so if I were to take the body fill and let's just try drastically changing the hue for our chicken here and then hit L to see the animation again again that change applies all throughout the animation now that I've done that I kind of like the purple so let's go with that now let's say we want to get a little fancy and add some cell shading first I'm gonna create a new style to serve as a shadow color for the chickens main body here and remember when we create a new style it starts as a duplicate of our previous selected style so I'm gonna make sure that I've got body fill selected as my current style and then I'm going to make a new style based on that again it comes in as a duplicate and I'm going to rename this as body shadow then in the style editor I'm gonna darken the shadow color down a bit I'll start by taking the value slider and decreasing that for a darker value this is effectively like if you were working with paint mixing the color with black to make it darker and if you're familiar with color theory you know we'll have more visual interest if we don't just stop at that so I'm also going to bump up the saturation a bit and bump up the blue a little to make the shadow color a bit cooler I think I might also darken it down just a bit more so we have more contrast for what I'm about to show altom utley I'll probably lighten it back up but for now we'll want that increase contrast so once we've got our shadow color created now for application I'm gonna tap B for the brush tool and then I'm gonna draw in a dividing line to delineate between the shadow area and the main fill area when I draw in this line I do want it to sect with my outlines I don't want it to be too far in which would mean we don't have enclosed spaces for the main fill and shadow areas also don't want it to be too far out because then it would look messy if it's going beyond our outlines here so I'm gonna make sure that the end points for my dividing line here are intersecting with the outlines if we check the other end looks like there's a little bit of cleanup to do there too so now we've got the line placed where we want but no we've also got this issue where it's overlapping with the outline a little bit and kind of appears to be eating into the outlines brushstroke luckily we can fix that the way that open toons handles brush strokes and vector levels it treats each stroke as its own individual asset and the most recent stroke is kind of layered at the top of the stack of those assets so that's why we've got our dividing line showing up on top of our outlines here we can move this stroke to the back of the stack by selecting it and then using the hotkey control starting bracket to move it to the back of the strokes and if you're curious it doesn't have to stay that way you can also use the hotkey control ending bracket to put it back on top but if we want to move it to the back of the stack again that control starting bracket hotkey will achieve that and now we've still got a dividing line in place and it's nestled underneath our outlines instead of overlapping on top so now I'm going to switch back to my fill tool and apply the shadow fill in its area and now we've got cell shading on our first drawing here to make it a little bit more subtle I'm gonna bump up our value just a bit and then if I repeat that same process for the other drawings then ultimately we'll have this cell shading throughout our symbol loop here you might notice some wonkiness where some areas might lose their fills as you draw lines over them to be honest I don't have an explanation for why this behavior can vary so much especially in these different takes with the same drawing here for this demo I wanted to start by showing a flat fill first and then add shadows from there technically though the best practice would be to draw your shadows dividing lines first and then apply fills if you do lose a fill along the way and generally you can just reapply it but if you find the fill tool not working stay tuned for settings and troubleshooting all right as a final touch let's try adding some color to the lines this is totally optional but for some aesthetics it can be an effective choice so let's go over how to do it first since we've got this medium purple as our main fill color let's try making all the lines a dark purple to go with that so I'm gonna select color one and then over in the style editor to make this purple I'll give it a little bit of red and a little bit of blue now you can see anywhere that color one is applied and that should be all of our brush strokes by default we now have a subtle purple color also note since we made this change to color one which is the default brush color if we switch to our brush tool and draw some new strokes they'll automatically come in with that purple hue okay so we'll wipe those up and next up let's say we want to keep the body lines purple but for the comb up here let's make these outlines dark red so zoom in a little closer and we'll want the red for these lines to be like a darker version of the red fill here so I'll select comb fill before creating my new style and that means a new style comes in as a duplicate of that red let's go ahead and name this comb lines and make this darker over in the style editor I'm gonna bring its value down and then I'll crank the saturation way up okay now there are a couple ways to apply this new style to these existing lines what I'm going to show here is I'll tap s to switch to my select tool and then I'll click on this brush stroke to select it and then with the stroke selected if I click on my cone line style that will automatically apply it to my selected brush strokes now that we've done that it'll look a little bit neater if we don't have this overlap so with this brush stroke selected I'll hit that control starting bracket shortcut that moves it to the back of the stack and we're no longer seeing that overlap all right I should also note that with this new style selected if I switch back to the brush tool and draw with that we can draw new strokes with this color as well and really we could do new brush strokes with any of our styles available color one is the default brush stroke but it's not the only possible brushstroke color that said beware if I click away from this level and then click back on it and now draw a brushstroke again the new brushstroke defaults back to color one no matter what I had selected a moment ago so with that in mind I recommend thinking of color 1 as your main color for lines and then you can make other line styles as needed so let's wipe these out and now if we pull back and look at our other two drawings note that the purple color has been applied throughout since my changes to color 1 in this palette affect everything in this level sharing this palette I'm going to quickly apply the cone style and then move those strokes to the back and once that's done we've got colorful lines throughout the entire loop so now we've got the basic tools to get started with color you might have noticed with the fill tool there were a bunch of settings and options at the top of the screen we're going to take a closer look at those and that's coming up next hmm at this point we've introduced how to create color styles and how to add them to an animation and now let's take a closer look at the settings for the fill tool these settings can help a lot with efficiency especially if you've got a more complicated drawing with lots of separate areas to fill so I've got an example file here with Thunder cluck flapping us wings and it is mostly colored in except for this last drawing which is Ingham bleep so let's tap F to switch over to our fill tool and let's take a look at these tool settings up at the top of the screen first up we've got type normal as we've seen before means that one click gives us one fill so I'm gonna switch to my gold fill style here and with the type and as normal if I click once within the neck and we get that single area filled in we want to check out the other options here and just like the Select tool and we've got options for rectangular freehand and polyline I'm gonna switch to rectangular and what this will let me do is fill in multiple areas within a selected range so if I click and drag a marquee around those blank wing then I can fill in all those shapes at once a little bit of time I'm going to undo that and make a special note here be sure if you're taking this approach that your Marquis fully encompasses all the shapes that you want to fill in so this gives us a successful fill but if I undo again and just click and drag within the shapes I'm not going to get any result that way so again make sure that your Marquis fully encompasses the shapes that you want to fill if you're taking this approach okay so that's tight I'm gonna set that back to normal and next up mode is set to areas by default and as we've seen so far and that means our fill tool works within the areas contained within our lines we can change that to fill in the lines themselves or to fill in both lines and areas what I'm gonna do is set this two lines and notice I've got a slightly lighter color put the detail lines within the wings I'm gonna switch to that wing detail line style and then with my type set to normal I can click once to fill in lines one at a time or I can change my type to one of the other options and get multiple lines at once all right so I'm gonna set mode back to areas as it was by default and next let's take a look at this selective option if this is unchecked then we can fill in any area whether it currently has a fill or not but if it's checked then our fill tool only affects areas that are not currently filled in so on Thunder clock right now the only areas left to fill are the waddles and a comb might look like the horns and the eye whites are still blank technically they have this slightly off-white fill already applied so the wobbles in the comb are left to fill I'm going to switch to my red fill style and with selective checked and my type rectangular I can do a marquee selection around the entire character and only those empty areas are going to be affected by that by contrast if selectively were not checked and I were to do that same rectangular or selection it would recolor the entire character which is not what we want so let's undo that and the Selective setting is especially useful when you're finishing up a coloring job you've only got one style left to apply to multiple areas for the onionskin setting I'm gonna revert back to not having any fills on this current drawing and as I've said before I'm not the biggest fan of having onion skin on but I'll use it here for demonstration purposes so now we can see a faint image of a previous drawing that's already colored in and if we check onion skin it can save us a little bit of time for switching between fill styles without having to click down in the palette because anywhere an area on our current drawing overlaps with an area on that previous drawing that has the fill color we want then we can click on that overlap and even though I don't currently have gold fill as my selected style when I click on that overlap it will auto select that style to fill this area on our current level so here where the wing is overlapping with some gold I can click to fill that where the tail is overlapping where the leg is overlapping these are all filling in with gold and then if I click on the torso where it's overlapping with the previous drawings torso then I'll get the brown there automatically without having to select it in the palette and then we can go back to gold so on and so forth to be completely honest I don't use the setting all that often for my taste adds a lot of visual clutter and without adding that much more efficiency but if you're curious what it does there it is and in case you find it useful it's one more tool at your disposal the frame range setting is really useful once you get it working but it can be a bit temperamental so I'm gonna show it working well first and then I'll point out a few things to be aware of so here I've got this example file with a bird sliding across the screen and coming to a stop and use the frame range fill I'm going to stop playback navigate to my first frame make sure that my fill style is selected and then I'll tap f to use my fill tool and let's go ahead and check frame range and with this checked if I click inside the character where I want to fill I'm not gonna get a fill right away instead I'm gonna get an indicator for the start point of our frame range fill now if I navigate forwarding the animation to about the end of that sliding motion and then click within the character again now we're going to get a fill across that whole range of motion so that is the frame range fill working well again instead of one click for one fill you click at the start point for a range of motion and then the end point for the range of motion and if things are working well the fill applies to the character all the way along so again that's what the setting can do but a couple things to point out for one thing note over here in the xsheet as we're looking at the numbers in our cells over here notice that they're going down in numerical order and that is actually not the way that the cells are numbered when I first made this animation that's something I had to apply manually to make the frame range fill work if we revert back to a previous version of this file note that the motion is the same but if we check the numbers in the X sheet over here they're a little bit jumbled up so just to clarify what these mean the numbers on the left of the xsheet are the frame numbers of the animation aha the numbers on the cells are the order in which I drew them and that's the order that they are numbered in the level so what this means is I first drew this first frame of the animation and then I drew this last frame of the animation and then I drew this in between and so on so these numbers are the order in which the cells were drawn and if that doesn't match the playback order it doesn't cause any problems for how the animation shows up you can see here it's going just fine but it does cause problems if we try to use the frame range fill option so here just to demonstrate that I'm gonna go back to my first frame of the animation got my fill tool selected and I'm going to check frame range and just like I did before I'm going to click within the character here at the start of the motion and navigate forward through my frames to the end of that motion and if I try to click again this time it only filled and that first frame and that last frame so this was not a successful use of this setting to make that work I'm gonna undo here and then we need to renumber our drawings so that these numbers are in order to do that I'm going to click on my first cell here then hold shift and click at the end to select all of my cells and then I'm going to right-click on that selection and choose all to renumber about 1/3 of the way down the list so you might have seen a little pop over here in the level strip as these drawings are being read numbered and now our drawing numbers are ordered based on their playback arrangement so now that I've made that change once again we're feeling I'm gonna try to use this frame range fill we'll start at the first frame of this motion set that start point there and then I'll navigate forward to the end of that motion and this time I got that successful fill again ok so again make sure that your frames are numbered and order over in the xsheet the other thing to keep in mind with the frame range setting is that it works best if the character is either static or moving at a steady speed but it doesn't work as well if there's a change in speed or direction so here at the end of the slide when the character slows down notice that it's no longer moving forward it's going to work best if I fill this in as a separate frame range from that initial slide if I were to try to go from the very start here to the very end here that change in speed would throw things off but instead have I treat this is one frame range to fill in and then treat this as a second frame range then ultimately I'll have the entire sequence filled in finally maximum gap will determine how much of a break you can have in your lines and still have the fill tool work so to demonstrate that here I've got a drawing of baby thunder clock and I have intentionally left just a tiny little gap in the lines over the wing in this area so if we zoom back out I'm gonna use my fill tool and to demonstrate if I take maximum gap and set it all the way down the lowest it'll go is 0.01 then that tiny little gap is going to prevent the fill tool from working but if we set the max gap back up a bit I believe 1.15 is a default there then if I try to use the fill tool again success I wouldn't necessarily rely on this generally try to keep your lines as clean as possible but it can be useful and to know it's there also a little bit of trivia after a Phil's been applied if it's relying on maximum gap if you bring max gap back down sometimes you can lose your fill after the fact so be careful with that and with that in mind if you're aware of a gap in your lines my recommendation is to use the control point editor to clean them up and that should keep your fills more stable hmm that max gap setting will come into play in our next section on color troubleshooting this is going to include a lot that I wish I had known earlier on and I hope that you find it helpful that's coming up next mmm coloring and open tunes can be a lot of fun when everything is working well but every once in a while issues come up the most common ones that I've encountered are when the level palette won't make a new style when a new style is visible in the palette but not in the viewer when the fill tool doesn't fill and finally when colors seem to just vanish from the level palette for some of these we'll do a little recap for some will show some new techniques and for some will even see some odd behavior in the program so let's start from the top of this list with the level palette not making a new style so here we've got this drawing a thunder clock looking about the way that I feel about technical difficulties and down here in the level palette if I click on the new style button I'm not getting any results there so a couple clues to notice right off the bat the level palette says no styles and the level strip says no current level remember we need to have a current level selected in order to work with that levels colors and what's happened here is at some point I clicked on a blank cell that didn't have any content in it so we don't have a current level selected if I click on this cell that has our drawing in it then note we've got a current level now and we can see the swatches for that level so at this point I could click on this new style button and that would successfully give us a new style but the other thing to keep in mind is this new page button right next door looks awful similar I mentioned it before and let's take a closer look at it now if we click on that by accident we're not going to get a new style you might notice each time we click that we've another tab here in the level palette if you don't notice that happening and you just rapid-fire click click click watch out sometimes you'll end up with a lot of tabs without realizing it and that doesn't do any harm but it can feel disorganized so these tabs would allow us to organize our palette styles into categories which could be useful we could sort Styles into these for example if we have multiple characters in a level and each one needed its own collection of colors but if that's not the case here if we just want to keep all of our level Styles under this v fault colors tab then we don't need these additional pages so if you created some by accident you can always just right-click on the tab and choose delete page to get rid of it again pages can be useful if you intentionally want them but if you create them by accident it's best to wipe them out so you don't have a bunch of extra clutter here okay now that we've got all that covered I could either use the new style button to make a new style is desired or if I want to avoid that button confusion again another option is to just right-click and choose new style there all right next up let's talk about when a new style is visible in the palette but not in the viewer so back to Thunderer click here we've got our color too that I just created and let's say I want to make this red to fill in the wattles income so if color to selected over here in the style editor I'm just going to take my saturation slider and crank it on up looks like that's already giving us a red hue so let's start with that and I'm going to double click again good organization habits and we'll call this red fill and then I'll tap F to switch to my fill tool I'm going to click on the comb to fill it in and I'm not getting any result so there are a number of reasons the fill tool might not be filling we'll talk about more in a second but one more thing I want to show here if I tap B for my brush tool and then try to draw a line we can see that line kind of show up for a second but then it's gone so the issue here isn't just that the fill tool isn't billing but this style isn't showing up at all in the viewer and the reason for that is the Styles transparency so again little recap from our intro and notice these checkers down at the bottom of the swatch when we created this new style it came in as clone of color zero which means it inherited color zeros transparency also if we look in the style editor we'll see that the a value for alpha is a zero so if we take the slider and drag it all the way up or if you manually click on this value and enter its max 255 now we've got full opacity for our style again we can see the fill on our comb and we can also see that line we tried to draw earlier with the brush tool since we don't want that line I'm gonna tap s from my Select tool select the line tap delete to wipe it out and to finish the job we'll tap F for the fill tool fill in the waddles and how we're ready to move on so next let's talk about more reasons why the fill tool might not fill moving on with our example here I've created another style to use as a gold fill in the neck and head area got that style selected got my fill tool active but if I click on the neck I'm not getting a fill there so first up let's check on that transparency not seeing any checkers in the swatch the alpha value is all the way up so that's not the issue another thing to check is your settings and so since this is an area that I want to fill want to make sure in my fill tools mode is it two areas then also want to make sure that selective onion skin and frame range are all unchecked unless I specifically want any of those so if your transparency and your fill settings are all good to go and you're still not getting a fill the issue is probably that open tooms is detecting a gap in the lines so the shape isn't considered enclosed and that means it won't fill in this case let you in on a little secret here we could have close this gap up by editing the lines and that would solve our issue I'll show that in a second but one other thing I want to demonstrate here if we click on View and then fill check this can be useful for previewing which shapes are eligible to fill so we saw some things become great here that's not actually changing the color of these areas if we were to export this animation it wouldn't come out grey like this the gray is just a preview to let us know what areas can be filled so with fill check selected we can see that the helmet the comb the waddles and the eyes are all eligible to fill but not the neck and the head area and and that's because of the gap one other interesting thing to note here if we adjust the fill tools max gap sitting at some point there's a threshold where that area is considered either enclosed or not enclosed depending on how much of a gap open tunes will allow on the lines so if max gap is high enough that this area is considered and closed then we can turn off our fill check by clicking view and unchecking fill check now with that off we can see the actual colors of our drawing and with the gold fill selected and the fill tool active now if we click on the neck we'll get a successful fill there so that max gap can be a quick fix for tiny gaps if you don't want to edit your lines but if I don't want to rely on max gap my other option is to get in nice and close here tap see for the control point editor and adjust the lines and now the shape is fully enclosed now if we zoom back out and apply a fill since we've made sure that the shape was actually enclosed that'll remain stable no matter what our max gap setting is so I'm just gonna set that back to the default 1.15 that said every once in a while there's a case where a shape appears to be totally enclosed but open Tunes perceives it as having a gap and changing settings doesn't seem to help this can be unpredictable so for this tutorial I was planning on just faking it basically and pretending there is an area I couldn't fill but it happened for real with grumpy thunder click here so I've moved ahead with my Styles and fills and everything was going great until I got to this last eye area but with my blue fill style selected and my build tool active if I tried to click on that area I'm not getting any result weirdest thing if I click on View fill check a moment ago that area was previewed in grey as good to go but now with the fill check activated for whatever reason that area is no longer considered eligible to fill as far as I can tell this kind of inconsistency is just a bug in the program I think that's why some people prefer coloring with raster levels which we might talk about in a future section but sticking with vectors here this is an ideal but fortunately there's a workaround I'm going to click view and turn Phil check backoff and since this area is not responding to the fill tool what I'm gonna try is I'll tap B for my brush tool and then with a single brush stroke I'm going to draw around the perimeter of that shape I tend to find that open toons does a better job of recognizing shapes as enclosed if they're drawn with a single stroke like this and so with that done we'll try the fill tool again and now we've got it filled in so the issue now is if we pull back a little bit this eye is looking pretty different from this one because that new brush stroke we drew is layered on top of the previous outlines and those outlines are what we actually want on top there what we can do to fix that is tap s for the Select tool and then click to select that brush stroke and as we've talked about in the cell shading section if we hit ctrl starting bracket and we can move that brush stroke to the bottom of the stack for this layer so again it's not ideal when this kind of situation comes up a fender clock doesn't look too happy about it but with that workaround we can still get to the desired end result and for the record if anybody has any idea what might be causing this kind of issue other than a bug I am all yours any input wouldn't be welcome there couple bonus notes here reverted back to a previous version of this file because after doing that last take I read a couple other tips to try in this kind of situation one was to just close and reopen the file and the other was to try grouping your brushstrokes so I'm gonna show real quick what I found trying to sell for closing and reopening the file not a guarantee but that actually did seem to help here because now if I try to apply the fill it's working without any of that trickery I was showing earlier out of curiosity I also wanted to see what would happen with grouping brushstrokes so I'm gonna undo that fill tap s to switch to my select tool and I'm going to select the two brushstrokes around the area in question here and if I right click and choose group kind of step in the wrong direction here and we lost our gold fill for the name neck and head area if I switch to my gold fill style and try to reapply that I'm not getting any result now I'm going to try hitting controls to undo and we got our gold fill back but now it's gone into the eye looks kind of like thunder cloaks got some jaundice going on here I can reapply my eye white fill but now if I switch back to my blue fill now this area has gone back to not fillable in a future video we'll talk about what grouping means and why it affects fills but for now I'm not finding it to be a reliable fix when the fill tool isn't working so my recommendation when this issue comes up would be to try closing and reopening the file and if that doesn't work and try the single brush stroke approach I was showing earlier and if anybody does have better luck with grouping brush strokes again any input here is welcome all right now let's talk about when colors become unavailable this happened to me a lot early on back before I understood the importance of level management so let's go back to a work-in-progress version of that flat pan emission and as I scrub through the frames the colors are all there and looking good until we get here and not only is this drawing not colored in but it's level palette doesn't have the styles that we could see in our previous drawings so a couple things to keep in mind for why this happens first note over here in the xsheet all these drawings are in the same column but that doesn't mean they're in the same level remember columns are just out content is arranged in the xsheet while levels are collections of drawings that share the same palette regardless of column so all these previous drawings were together in a level called color v2 and they all shared that desired palette but the drawing we're having the issue with is often its own level which appears to have been automatically created with the name F and that levels palette does not have the colors that we want so as a reminder for how this happens I'm going to rewind and show an excerpt from the previous section on the xsheet and creating new frames remember earlier when I made a new frame I made sure to click on this X and draw within that that created a new drawing in our current level which is what we want we want all of those drawings organized together you can click on any of these cells and start drawing but watch the level strip when I do this if I start drawing here it's not in the same level as the other drawings we were doing so try not to do that but if you do end up with an accidental level there are a couple options to resolve the issue the quick fix is to just copy and paste the styles that we want from our original level into our accidental level so to do that I'm going to navigate to a drawing that has the Styles I want then I'm going to click to make sure color one is selected press and hold shift and click on the last style and the level palette this should select all the Styles in the palette and then if I right click on those styles and choose copy then navigate to my drawing that's missing the Styles I can right-click and choose paste insert and now this level will have those styles by the way ctrl-c ctrl-v will also work for that but if you use that and be sure to click in the level pallet before hand so Open Tunes knows to copy the swatches not the drawing so now that we've got those styles in this level I can go ahead and apply them to the drawing and once those styles are applied even though this drawing is technically in its own separate level it appears to fit right in with the rest of the frames now even though this method feels pretty straightforward it does have a drawback let's say once I've got everything colored in you know what I want Thunder Klux vest and helmet to be a little bit darker so I'm going to select this brown fill style and then I'll decrease its value you have to darken it down now if I check the rest of the animation that change should apply throughout all these drawings that are in the same level sharing the same palette but it does not apply to our drawing that's in a separate level and if we toggle back and forth between our frames we'll see a discrepancy here and that would cause a little flicker in the animation we can fix this by navigating back to one of the previous frames selecting that Brown fill style making a note of the number for its value field then go into our separate level drawing selecting Brown fill and making that number match but this process is tedious especially if you have to do it across multiple frames so even though copying and pasting the palette can feel easy at first it can cause issues down the line now our second option here takes a little more effort upfront but can keep things more organized in the long run and that is to transfer the drawing from our accidental level back into the original level so to do that I reverted back to our drawing not having the desired colors and I'm going to select the two cells that are in that accidental level then I'll click on the bar on the side of the cells and drag over sideways to move them to a separate column so once I've done that I'm gonna want to copy the line work here from the cells and paste it into a new cell and that will be a new drawing within our original level that has the desired palette so I'm going to click on my cell with the line work that I want I'm gonna tap s to use a select tool and then I'm gonna do a marquee around my entire character here make sure that you are selecting the lines so you can see the little dotted line selection for this content you don't want to just select the cell in the xsheet so with that line work selected if I hit control C that'll copy it to the clipboard and then for a little more visual clarity when I paste this I'm gonna turn off visibility for this second column in my egg sheet so over here on the X you note up at the top under call two for the second column there's a little icon that looks like a circle with a square inside it that's going to toggle the visibility and our viewer here so if I click that this level is no longer visible here but those lines are still copied to my clipboard now if I go over to this X under my previous frames and column one then hit control V to paste that'll paste these lines into a new drawing in this original level with the desired palette so now with the cell selected we're seeing our other drawings in the level strip and our colors in the level palette so now that we've got that line work in blake's I'm gonna go ahead and color it in and once it's all filled in now this drawing fits right in with the other drawings on the same level and shares the same palette so now that we've come this far just a little bit of tidying up to do for one thing note we've got a redundant color one that came into this level when we pasted the content from our other level because those lines have the flat black color one applied since this isn't part of the final palette we can go ahead and select that and hit delete and this warning comes up basically saying that the color is or mites be in use it's a little odd because I'm pretty confident I replaced all uses of that pasted color one but maybe there's a small dot somewhere that still has it applied to keep things moving here I'm just gonna choose delete styles only to make sure I don't delete anything else by accident and that wipes out be redundant color one then a little more cleanup to do in the xsheet since we only pasted the drawing into this single cell I'll need to click on the blank cell below it and then right click and choose fill in empty cells and then we've still got our old cells from the drawing in the accidental level over in column two here if we click to toggle visibility you can see it's still there since we no longer need these cells we can go ahead and select them and hit delete to wipe them out as well and once we've done all that then we've got this drawing added to the original level and sharing it's palette so if I wanted to make any further changes to color for example if I wanted to change the eyes then that change would apply throughout the entire animation without having to edit any frames individually all right confusion with color Styles is one of many reasons to be extra careful about level management and open tunes with that in mind I want to demo not only how to work with multiple levels but also some changes we can make to the open Tunes interface to help keep those levels organized so that's coming up next I hope you find these videos helpful and if so subscribe for more tutorials and check out thunderclaw comm especially if you have any young readers or fans of animation in your life thanks for watching

Channel: Paul Tillery IV

Views: 6,111

Keywords: animation, software, opentoonz, tutorial, beginner, color, style, palette, level, style editor, fill, fill tool, brush, brush strokes, cel shading, settings, mode, type, selective, frame range, onion skin, troubleshooting, bugs

Id: e4uBFDWYwMs

Length: 45min 40sec (2740 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019