Pencil2D Bitmap VS Vector Layer

welcome back to another pencil 2d tutorial in this video we're going to be exploring the differences between the bitmap layer and the vector layer so I'm going to go into the bitmap layer and up until this point this is what we've been using in the tutorial series I'm gonna go to the pen tool and I'm just gonna make sure I'm on a black color and I'm just going to create a little triangle here we'll do a circle and then using the polyline tool I'll just left-click and create an X and hit enter and we'll just create like a sort of X here now we're gonna zoom in and look at these what we've created because with bitmap everything is always a collection of pixels you're basically coloring the pixels to be a certain color and a certain lightness so we can do red here we can do blue but it's always just a collection of pixels and they sort of fade off into a lighter color we have really dark black in the middle and then Gray's on the outside and when you zoom out that kind of creates a nice smooth look and everything looks nice but when you zoom in you see it's pixels even with the polyline it's pixels so it's these squares and there's only so many of them on the canvas in our animation when we use vector in contrast so if I go down to vector layer and left-click to select the vector layer as our active drawing layer I can use the same tools we'll use the pen tool and I can draw a triangle I can draw a circle and I'll go to the polyline tool and I'll draw this left click once hit enter left click again and again and enter and so now if we zoom in here we see these are going to look a lot different they have rounded edges and that's because what vector is doing is just creating a series of nodes we can click on the smudge tool and then select our object and we can see all of these dots these gray dots that have been created are the nodes and we can reshape this triangle according to these nodes and everything stays sort of smooth and it we make it thinner and thicker on the line we can adjust this however we want to after the fact whereas with this one up here we can't do that in fact if we do smudge on this one I go back to the bitmap layer and we try and smudge this it's just gonna smudge and blur those pixels because that's all it knows how to do it doesn't know anything about nodes and so we can't really do anything with this so there's advantages and advantages and disadvantages to both another advantage of vector is once it's drawn I go back into the vector layer we can move these around by just clicking on them so we can move and we can even move them over top of each other so we can move all of these over top of each other like this and then we can go back and say now we didn't want these here and we can move them away from each other with the bitmap we can't do that first of all if we're in the bitmap layer and we just click we can't click and select it because it's really just a bunch of pixels we'd have to move one pixel at a time which we can't even really do and so what we have to do is tell the pencil to D okay this area all of these pixels are what we want to move so we grabbed a selection tool and then we have to move and we can move this over top of something else and then we can take this grab the X over here and then we could move it over but you're probably going to notice the problem pretty quick here so now that we have this which is what we did down here with the vector something similar well now we can't undo we can undo it by going edit undo but we can never come in here and click and move these away from each other these pixels are sort of fused together now and if we try to select and move away just this X we're going to accidentally or not accidentally but we're going to cut apart our drawing now we can't we can't get just the triangle so if you're working with objects and it's important to you to be able to move around an object especially on top of each other let's go back into the vector layer then it's going to be good to work in vector because we can click and move these over top of each other within the same drawing without messing things up too much but a disadvantage is we can't color so let's say we move this into here well first let's look at the bitmap how we would do this we grab the fill tool and now that all these are interacting with each other we can use the fill tool we can select like a an orange red color here and we can fill just this portion in and we can go to a blue color and fill this and so we can create some pretty cool things just at the inner action of these pixels we cannot do that with a vector layer in fact normally we may be able to fill just a single object so we would fill in just the circle but it's select a vector layer it's not really working right now it's still in development but we would grab the fill tool and then change to the color we want and then fill that in but you see how everything is working now as we change the color all the objects are changing with it so I would say at this point in time until more development happens on the vector layer probably only work plan on working in one color or if you want to have multiple colors you can always add another vector layer to do that go to this plus sign and just go new vector layer now we have something called vector layer two and this one will be able to draw something different and be able to have it be its own different color what we selected on now maybe it's changing the color of all of them looks like the layers are tied together now so for coloring you may have an issue with that with vector for the time being what else oh I want to show you some of the different tools for vector so while we're the tools behave a little bit differently like the brush tool for example it creates this vector line and if we go to the smudge tool we learned we can click in here and edit the nodes of this line so this line is very big right now but it but we can look and see let me get to the selection mode the actual line in here if I can click on it it's just this line right here and then it has a thicker outline what's our brush tool had this width so we lower the width down so the actual line is that blue line there and then it has sort of a thickness to it which is kind of kind of cool just be aware that's how that works a feather is not gonna work so feather only works in the bitmap layers not the vector layers because the vector is just always goes to a certain width beyond the line that you draw if that makes sense what else oh and then there's an option here under if we do like the pencil for example we can go fill contour and what that's going to do is whatever color we have selected when we finished drawing it it's going to fill it in with that color so we don't have to actually grab the fill tool and if we don't even close our shape it'll still fill it from start to finish or from the place you started to the place that you ended oh and let's look here what's happening so so notice this bitmap layer is on top and so that's why we're not seeing everything through to here we're drawing on our vector layer one is where we were drawing and so but the bitmap layer is above that so we'd have to click and drag this vector layer above to be able to have that be on top so we touched on that a little bit in past tutorials but the order that these are in down here makes a difference I think I'm gonna leave it there this may have been confusing for you and it's perfectly okay just to stay in bitmap if you're more comfortable with that but as you as you get more familiar with pencil 2d you're probably gonna find some situations especially where you're wanting to move objects to go on top of each other you'll find some situations where it's really nice to be able to select an object and either resize it or reshape it or move it without affecting the pixels that are around it so we'll probably touch more on this in future tutorials but go ahead and play with that and get comfortable and leave your questions and comments below if you have any and I look forward to catching you in the next video

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 81,947

Keywords: tjfree, free software, open source, pencil2d, pencil2d vector layer, pencil2d vector, vector animation, pencil2d vector vs bitmap, vector vs bitmap, pencil2d vector animation, pencil2d vector nodes, pencil2d smudge, pencil2d tutorial, learn pencil2d, pencil 2d, 2d animation, pencil 2d vector animation

Id: 8GYxcOdEUH8

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020