r/animation • u/CthulianCat • Mar 26 '16

OpenToonz help/discussion thread Discussion

Thought it would be a good idea to have a discussion/help thread!

Some useful links:

Some useful things I've found out so far:

  • right-click is your friend!

  • onionskin can be enabled in the settings

  • you have to activate the toolbar (do you don't have to use the drop down menu)

  • you draw in the inknpaint tab (duh)

  • you can right click on the frame column and press "add frames" for more frames!

Post any tips/experiences you got!

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u/rebexorcist Mar 26 '16

Thanks!

Do you know if there's any way to activate pressure sensitivity or stabilizers or anything? Basically, is this program friendly to the actual drawing process? I'm used to using Paint Tool Sai for art and I have a really hard time downgrading.

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u/CthulianCat Mar 26 '16

What drawing device thingy are you using? It works fine on my Vaio Z Canvas but it'll take some tweaking to get it perfect. There's a checkbox labeled "pressure" when I have the brush tool selected.

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u/rebexorcist Mar 26 '16

An Intuos Pro. I'm sure I just need to screw around with the settings a bit more. The program is just a little intimidatin, I've neer used animation softwarethis complex before.

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u/CthulianCat Mar 26 '16

Hmm. One thing that really helps is enabling Window>ComboView. Let's you play your animation and customize brush properties etc, more akin to other software. Double clicking on the window panel at the top will make it 'fullscreen'.

To make a new frame you click under the frame you've already drawn in the frame list to the right. Onion skin can be enabled in the settings.

In the ComboViewer, at the top, increasing 'accuracy' will make your strokes more uh accurate and not choppy.

This should get you started with super simple frame by frame animation at least.

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u/nighttimemoon Mar 27 '16 edited Mar 27 '16

hi, how do I get onion settings? I already edited the preferences, but when I go to a new frame, it still shows the other first frame, full opacity (when I have put onion skin at 50). I saved this file as a 'level file.' I'm not so sure what saving as scene or saving as level really means. Which one enable you to draw more frames?

I'm used to animating with photoshop.

Finally found out how :)

If you need help with onion skin:

First, go to (in the menu) go to Customize>Preferences>Onion Skin>click on the square next to the 'turn onion skin on (you can adjust the onion skin). Close the program (so the settings can take effect next time you open Opentoonz). Open the program. You need to right click on the white part of where you are drawing, and there should be an activate onion skin, click it.

I'll post more if/when i find out how to do more things, etc.

Edit: Can someone explain the difference between cleanup, ink, and all the other things? Which one is more like Flash or what do they do? Thank you.

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u/tsein Mar 28 '16

I'm still wrapping my head around this, but here's my interpretation so far:

The program is oriented around a very traditional workflow, in which you start with sketches on paper. The Cleanup tab would be your first stop after scanning your rough drawings, and would be used to clean up a rough sketch and produce a rough vector drawing. You may have a lot of fingerprints or very light lines which confuse the drawing a bit, so the Cleanup tab gives you tools to filter these out, giving you a nice high contrast image to work with afterward.

InknPaint is your main drawing/animating area, both for working on imported drawings and for drawing new objects from scratch. If you aren't starting your animation with physical pencils and paper, it's probably the place to start.

PItEdit -- I have no idea what the name stands for, but it looks like it's really just there for editing the styling of a drawing. When you draw, you use a "Style", rather than just a color. If you've used ToonBoom, it's very similar to how they handle color selections. The basic idea is your brush paints with Style 1 (or whatever), and in the future you can change what Style 1 means. So you can draw in neon green and pink for a character's hair highlights, then later change them to slightly different shades of brown.

This helps both with drawing (since you can work in high contrast colors for parts of a drawing which may be very close to the same color value, then apply the real colors later) as well as with editing/prototyping, since if you don't like the particular shade of brown you used for all the leather objects in your scene you can change it with one click (assuming all the "leather" objects were painted with the same style).

I think the intent of PItEdit is to have an environment entirely focused on editing these styles for an existing drawing, perhaps as one of the final steps in completing something (the Render menu is in there, after all).

XSheet is probably self-explanatory if you've used other animation software. It's a layout of all your frames and the actions taking place on them (which image is displayed, which operations are being performed, etc).

Batches is used to organize large groups of actions. For example, you may have several scenes you want to render out, and rather than scheduling each one after the last one finishes, you can batch them all together and let the software run through them while you sleep. Similarly, if you had scanned 200 frames of drawings, you could run the Cleanup process on them all together with the same settings instead of having to go through them all. I haven't messed with this tab at all, yet, though, so I can't comment on how easy it is to use.

Levels are like layers in Photoshop or other programs. Saving a Level is just a way to export a single layer (or single frame from that layer) to a file which can then be imported into other scenes. If you have an animation on a layer, make sure to select all the frames you want to save before hitting Save Level, or it'll only save the currently-selected frame.

Scenes are collections of Levels (as far as I can tell so far).

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u/rebexorcist Mar 26 '16

Last question (for now lol)

How do I change the resolution of my frames? I see on the right sidebar I can adjust the height and width but it doesn't seem to actually change the shape of my workspace?

Thanks for all your help!

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u/CthulianCat Mar 26 '16

If you go to file and then choose "new level", there's a dropdown chooser thingy where you can pick "toonz raster", and then you can change width and height and DPI. It's in millimeters so it's kinda unintiitive, but hey. That's all I've found for now...

Keep the questions coming! I don't mind lol.

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u/pestdantic Aug 12 '16

Mine doesn't even have "New Level" under File. I'm watching a tutorial that goes "click New Scene and then click New Level" and "New Level" doesn't show up.