OpenToonz Version 1.7 is now out! Here's my top 10 new features

Hello friends open Tunes 1.7 is now out but is it worth upgrading to and what's the difference about it compared to version 1.6 well to answer that I'm going to tell you my top 10 favorite new features in this version and then at the end we'll consider if you should upgrade and if you are new to open Tunes then these features just skim the surface so stay tuned to the end for details of how to get the most out of this free 2D animation software and how to install or upgrade to it so let's go with new feature number one so first let's start with a small new feature that will help when working with references and that's the ability to change the opacity of the main open Tunes window so from the windows menu choose the item at the very bottom toggle main Windows see-through mode or press the keyboard shortcut alt and single back quote and this dialog appears with the initial value set to 50 and you can see straight away what it does I can see anything that's behind the program and that could be an image something on an internet page a video or whatever so now you can still join open Tunes using the image behind as a reference or rotoscoping and you can change the opacity by dragging the slider to see more of open Tunes or more of your image and there's this button to the right for quickly turning this up and back on again and if you hold alt when you press that button the main program is hidden so now you can change your image or move to the next frame of the video or whatever you need to do without moving open Tunes and then just click the button again to bring open Tunes back and this is a really neat feature that I think you'll find very useful and there's some keyboard shortcuts for this that you'll find on the GitHub page that I've linked to in the description and in fact you'll find a page for each new feature in the description so do check those out for the full details of each new feature and for feature number two I've got a super quick feature that I know you'll grasp straight away first use the selection tool highlight part of your image you want to work with and you'll now notice on the options toolbar you'll see these two buttons next to the horizontal and vertical values so just click those and you'll see you can now flip horizontally and vertically with a single click and they're really just shortcuts for negating the percentage value in the box which isn't an obvious thing to do so they're a great shortcut for those and also there's these two buttons to rotate your selection by 90 degrees left and right and again they're just a shortcut for entering values in the rotation box or trying to manually rotate by 90 degrees and it's just a sort of small feature you expect to have with any drawing tool so it's great to have this in open Tunes and the second part to this is the same options are available for the animate tool so just change to the animate tool then change the type to the scale option and there again are the two flip buttons and clicking on them says an animation key on the timeline just as it would if you'd manually flip the column and again you've got the rotate buttons too just change the rotation option and here they are and if you've got enough screen space for the tool options bar changing to the old type shows them all on the toolbar with rotation here and the horizontal flip and vertical flip there the next item is a real game changer for drawing inside open tunes and again it's something you'd expect to already be in a drawing program like this so it just brings open Tunes up to date with your expectations and that's the ability to draw straight lines with the brush tool now of course you can use the line option of the geometric tool but this means you'll be swapping between the brush tool and the geometry tool and changing the line thickness in each to keep it the same between both tools so to use this new feature just choose the brush tool then hold down the shift key before you start drawing and then there's your jaw you'll see this line appear showing you where your line will be drawn and you can really shift now if you want to and then when you release your pen you'll get the line and with shift you can draw lines at any angle but you also have your lines locked to fixed angles hold the Ctrl key instead and then when you jaw this locks your line to 45 degree increments perfect for drawing horizontal and vertical lines and using these key modifiers it means it becomes much easier to change to enjoying curved lines and then straight lines and also much easier to draw in perspective and I hope you're enjoying this quick tour of the new features if so please do give this video a like and consider supporting the channel in other ways details of which are in the description so let's give peace a chance with feature number four and this one is still a feature around drawing and it involves a long-standing fill issue and sometimes when filling small spaces are left especially when you have lines close together or are using anti-aliasing so this feature is just a shortcut to the process of selecting a color then choosing the fill mode billing with that color then choosing the next color filling in that area choose the next color filling again and so on and that can be a tedious slow process so instead of that from the full bucket tool choose the new pick and freehand mode and then all you need to do is to click and drag from the color that you want to fill with over the area that you want to fill so click from the green into the space and it fills that in or you can drag it around it so click and drag around the gaps and the color and those are filled in that way you do is change the color in between each fill operation wherever you start picking from that's the color that is used and this saves chart to find the color from a potentially large list of colors so you can just go through and fill fulfill now before we move on one quick tip I want to give you to prevent some of those gaps in the first place is to increase the fill depth and that's this slider here on the tool options bar when you're using the fill bucket so increase that towards the top and this sets how far into the anti-aliased areas to fill so for light anti-aliasing you can keep it low and then for heavy anti-aliasing move it up towards the top so why not try that out along with this new pick and freehand fill feature stop what you're doing let's look at the next new feature which is the enhanced viewer preview and this is a great feature and bring some of the benefits of the preview window into this main viewer so you may know that to preview your animation that is to see how your final render will look including any effects you click the leftmost eye button at the top right of the viewer and that previews the current frame and when you move to the next frame or a different frame that frame's preview is calculated and shown and so on and if you hit play you see this working one frame at a time and it's a really slow process that you can now speed up and you do that by right clicking on that preview button at the top right and you see two new options up here the first one is the current frame and that's what open Tunes has always done it just previews one frame at a time and the second is to preview all the frames in your play range so now I've returned the preview off and on again you'll see that the preview bar beneath the viewer Works through all of the frames and they're now all set up for viewing so if I hit play it can play at the full speed without having to wait for the preview of each frame and final option will regenerate all of the selected cells and then auto play those if I select that turn off the preview and then select the number of cells when I turn on the preview it'll regenerate those 18 or so frames and play them on a loop so this is really handy if you need to make lots of changes and then play to see them over and over again now feature number six so let's take a look at the improvements to the graph view of the function editor so first let's go to the schematic I'll choose a column to show I click the button at the top right of the function Editor to show the graph View and you can change how the graph view is shown on the function editor from the preferences so the first change is a minor change to the color of the lines so they're easier to see on darker themes along with having this circle on the ends of the handles for adjusting the speed in and speed out so they're easier to grab and the second change is that you can change the scale across multiple keys so showing four Keys here for the X movement if I click and drag over all of them which highlights them and makes them editable now I can hold alt and then click and drag one of the N Keys either on the left or on the right notice that the keys in the middle move with it at a variable rate but keeping the spacing equal and this is really useful if you have your spacing set out but just need to slow down or speed up the transitions through the time feature number seven the next I want to show you the change to the timeline color filters and I know that some of you might never have seen these at all but we've had them in open tunes for a while now let me quickly show you that to use them just open the drop down on the column that you want affected and choose a color filter from this drop down and that applies a filter over all of the drawings in that column and this is Handy for two reasons first you can easily see which drawings are in which column which helps when you're chasing over a sketch so you see on new lines while you're making a neater copy and it's also good to use with the opacity option so you can make your sketch lines fainter but these just affect what you see when you draw are not what is rendered if you want to render with this color filter and opacity simply tick the Box on the scene settings available from the X sheet so now you're using these filters to affect your rendered output and this can be a really fun thing to do just try drawing in black and then render different colors of the same image so that's what we've had for a while but what's new well what's new is these colors used to be fixed you couldn't change them but now we can so if we go back and open the scene settings again from the xsheet menu you'll now see this button to edit the filters so click that and we'll get this dialog so you can just select on the color box and then adjust it here in the color editor and change its name if you wish so if I always use red for sketch drawings we can call this sketch and now when you open the color drop down you'll see your new color and name so it's clearer what you should be using each color filter for so you're no longer limited to these six simple colors you can now actually create up to 10 unique colors of your own so we can add a new color at the bottom here of the list let's make it a deep purple color and again let's give that a nice name so we could use this for our ink columns so again it's clear which color filter is used for what and if you change your mind you can always click the delete button here so applying color filters is really flexible why not give it a go new feature number eight well actually I've got three new features to show in this section and there are three new export options so first off there's now an easy way to share a scene with someone else and this is useful if you're working with somebody else or if you want to share your scene to help figure out a problem you might be having and you can always do this from the browser but now it's been made so much easier so simply from the file menu you'll see an export fly out and the top option export current scene so let's choose that so from this dialog you can choose to export this scene from this project into a different project at the top here or choose to create a new project at the bottom which is the most likely thing you want to do so simply give your new project a name and tell it where you want to export to and then click export and that's it you've got a new project folder on disk that you can choose to zip up and send to a friend so the next export option is the option to export to OCA format that's the open cell animation format and this is used by lots of other animation software so now you can export your scene out of open tunes and into that software like after effects or blender and there's some limitations to it so please do take a look at the link to this feature that I've put down in the description and finally for exporting I've got a fun one for you and it's a feature to allow you to export the camera movements to an image and this is to help you plan out your backgrounds if you paint them in another program or to use the camera movement as a reference in compositing programs like after effects so I've added a camera movement here just to demonstrate that the switch to the camera view and then hit play the camera starts off at Blanco's feeds zooms out a bit safety all of him and then pans to the side so to export this cover movement go to the file menu export menu again and choose export camera track and you get to see the camera movement here on the left hand side and there's quite a few settings on the right that you can change and again you can find details of each of these on the linked Post in the description so once you've made any changes to settings click export choose a folder to save into and I'll save into the outputs folder then name the image then camera is just fine and you can change the image format just by typing it in with the name so I'll change this to camera dot PNG and then if I open the image you'll see the image with boxes showing each key point of the movement and the steps to move around so if I zoom in a little bit you'll see the camera starts off at the bottom here and then zooms out and you can see the frame numbers as the camera zooms out to the center point of where the camera is then it Scrolls to the right and again that's the ending point but the frame number shown there in the center and for those of you that use an external composting software it should start to see how you could use it so give it a go and of course you will have noticed all the export options in that menu and you should take a look at those when you're ready so the ninth new feature I want to highlight today is the additional support for audio formats so firstly the audio recording dialog has had a makeover and you can find that in the windows menu so this is for recording audio directly in open Tunes without using another program so first you can choose the audio input device you can choose to record up to 44 kilohertz instead of just eight kilohertz so your recordings will now be much clearer and you can choose the sample format to record in and there's been two tips added to each of the controls so you can clearly know what each control is for and the recommended setting to use plus there's been many bug fixes here including changing the size of the window and controls so overall it's not just much easier to use there's also been full support added for 24 bits and 32-bit audio files so you should be able to import more audio files than you used to because the common complaint I heard from users was asking why their audio file couldn't be imported and you may have had this too and this will fix many of those issues plus as well as wav eighth and MP3 import you can now also import ARG and flag files too and there have been some fixes for recording audio on a Mac so if you use a Mac you'll find the audio recording now works and while I'm mentioned in books it's worth pointing out that there have been dozens of bug fix throughout the whole program since the last release both big and small far too many to mention today but so many areas of the program have been improved so before I reveal today's 10th new feature which happens to be my favorite new feature of the year I just want to quickly thank my patreon supporters for all your support with special thanks to Maria Robert and Rodney who along with the supporters on my team Morgan tea party is can all watch my tutorial videos a week early you can download the projects I use in the videos including those from today's video as well as lots of other benefits so why not check that out so like a zombie raising from the dead we've shambled our way to my 10th and final favorite feature and that's the ability to paste images from the clipboard and this is a long overdue and long asked for feature in open tunes and it basically allows you to copy any image into your computer's clipboard and paste it into open Tunes so if you've drawn part of your background or character in another program you can highlight it and choose to copy it and then come over to open Tunes click in the timeline and choose paste from the edit menu or just press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl V and then choose to add a new raster level and it'll paste into that raster level and now this is just part of an image in a new raster level so you can choose the selection tool highlight it and then resize it holding the shift key to keep the aspect ratio the same rotate it holding Ctrl you can skew it at the corners or use the standard drawing tools like the eraser or the brush tool to paint over the top and if you've already got a raster level going to the next empty frame and then choose the selection tool and click on screen and now if you paste an image it'll be pasted already with the whole image highlighted as part of the selection so you can then resize it and reposition it without having to select it first and one more tip for you if you're using Windows there's a built-in feature to copy an image into your clipboard from anywhere on screen just press the Windows key holding shift and then tap s and the screen goes darker and then you can click and drag to highlight a section of your screen and that'll be copied to the clipboard and then again using the selection tool click on screen and press Ctrl V to paste that image and again you can resize it using the selection or rotate it or manipulate it in any way the selection tool allows and again go into a blank frame first we'll paste the image into that blank frame so let's take another copy and this time I'll highlight part of the timeline and again just press Ctrl V and it'll create a new drawing with that image in it and this is such a useful small feature I'm so pleased it's been added and I'm sure you will be too so that's my 10 favorite new features out now in version 1.7 and I could easily have picked 10 more but we don't have time to go through all of those so should you upgrade to this new version well those of you that know me and I've seen my previous videos about new versions already know the answer and that is a very big yes every new version always has new features that you might find helpful and Bug fixes that make the program more stable a 1.7 is no exception so let me quickly show you how to upgrade to this version and it might seem obvious at first but trust me there's a few things about it that always catches someone out so first head over to the open Tunes page then click on the download link at the top choose open Tunes scroll down and now you can click the official 1.7.1 download but I always recommend downloading the nightly build this will have any of the new features and fixes in it since the official version was released and already since 1.7 came out there have been extra bugs fixed in fact that's why the official download is 1.7.1 and not just 1.7 there was an emergency bug fix patch added so please please download the nightly build and it might be worth coming back here in a month or two an upgrading to a newer nighty build there are fixes and changes being added all the time so when it's downloaded you can just double click to install it and for new users this is all you need to do but for upgrading from an earlier version for some people that can work but I have had issues in the past with this so I prefer a full clean install and to get that you simply rename your opentune stuff folder and this is the folder where your settings are stored so by renaming it the install will have to create a new folder and that will guarantee to have only the settings that this version needs so once you've done that run the installer and after it's completed if you'd created any projects in the old version copy these back to your new opentune stuff folder and here's a quick tip for you to save copying your projects around after updating like this each time just take the Box in your preferences to allow saving projects to your documents folder or any of the other options here and then create all of your projects in there and you're going to have to move them on the next install you just retake this box so that's version 1.7 lots of new features lots of bug fixes and I hope you feel inspired to try it out or to upgrade to this new version and please do subscribe and hit that Bell to catch my upcoming tutorials showing more features of this fantastic free 2D animation software if you want to see how to get started with open Tunes check out this video just here and next week I'll create a video showing how to get the best out of open tunes and you'll find that just over here so I'll see you soon for more tutorials and that's a guarantee

Channel: Darren T

Views: 8,664

Keywords: animation, opentoonz, opentoon 1.7

Id: 6LO9EJ7CH1Y

Length: 24min 25sec (1465 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023