Got a quick question for anyone who works with ToonBoom and might be able help.
My question is: Is there anyway to color the lines of a scanned drawing. Not all of the lines one color, but sections. My reason is because I want to draw lines to mark off my shadows and later color those lines the same color as the shadow.
I was thinking it might be better to just color the images in photoshop where I will have more leverage, and then import them to toonboom with transparent backgrounds. If anyone else has used this method, I would love to hear any stories on it's success or failure.
Thanks for any help.
KalEl118
The drawing of the barn was done in Toonboom Express V2.5.
I actually picked it up in March when they had a special preorder for about $50. And just recently the upgrade to the full version of 3 was offered for $130 for the beta test. So I lucked out and actually saved about $150-$200 on the full version in the long run. I got to use the Beta test version. It's a lot more streamlined as far as the interface not having 2 different work environments (drawing and scene planning).
Right now I just wish I knew when 3.0 comes out. I think it is some time in July.
KalEl118
I was messing around with Fllipbook before I got into Toon Boom, and I found flipbook very capable of doing exactly what you're talking about. Toon Boom has no simple way of doing it that I've found. Even if you wind up doing it in PhotoShop and importing, an import/vectorize will color the lines black, and you can't edit an imported bitmap.
The tedious solution is to use the paint bucket tool to dump hte new color into the line. If you make the changes in Photoshop, you could import and then trace bitmap in Flash, which will maintain color, then import to Toon Boom.
I've been able to work with changing the line color in an entire drawing (single frame at a time) by selecting the whole thing, then choosing the color I want to apply.
Cartoon Thunder
There's a little biker in all of us...
Thanks for the response, rupertpiston.
I agree with everything you've said about Toonboom. I remember reading a long time ago that a program, a very expensive program, called Retas Pro would recognize red shadow lines that were drawn on to the page. Boy I would love that feature in ToonBoom.
When I was talking about the transparent backgrounds, I found some success with using Alpha channels. Since I wasn't worried about vectoring for the web, I would just output the drawings into Photoshop files (or TGA, can't remember) and just import those into Toonboom. I used it for a couple of multiplane camera moves for a previous project.
If you look at the picture, I think you really can't tell that each piece is on a seperate layer in Toonboom. The barn and fence are one layer, then the hill its on, then each other hill is seperate and each set of trees too. I was planning on doing some tests with a walk cycle or something.
Thanks again for the response.
KalEl118
Great work there, and very resourceful. I had never considered the idea of using alpha channels to layer photoshop are that way. Actually opens up a whole new range of possibilities. Are you on 2.5 or 3.0?
Cartoon Thunder
There's a little biker in all of us...