TB Storyboard Drawing and Color

TB Storyboard Drawing and Color

Review of layers

Bitmap Layers

• composed of a grid of pixels

• allow you to lay on brush strokes onto a single flat canvas, and to tweak your artwork by the pixel if needed.

•  composited into the canvas, so it remains a single drawing that can only be painted or erased upon, but which does not allow you to tweak individual parts of it.

Vector Layers

• made of points and curves that compose the contours of the shapes of the artwork

• can be scaled up and zoomed in without losing quality unless they contain a texture.

• each drawing stroke and pencil line is a separate object which can be manipulated individually.

Drawing Tools

Brush and Pencil

Vector

it is possible to draw with pencil lines, vector brushes and textured bitmap brushes. While pencil lines are merely vector centerlines to which Storyboard Pro adds the thickness, brush strokes are solid vector shapes filled with a color, and textured brush strokes are regular brush strokes filled with a bitmap texture that filter out their color.

Pencil Tool- Vector

Advantages: Very light and easy to tweak. Can be manipulated, recolored and tweaked by the centerline. Can be zoomed in on or scaled up without losing quality.

Disadvantages: Does not support textures. Not optimized for transparency.

Recommended Use: Sketches, clean drawings with a solid and uniform outline style.

Solid Vector Brush- Vector

Advantages: Light file size. Reproduces traditional animation style. Can be manipulated, recolored and edited by the contour or centerline. Can be zoomed in on or scaled up without losing quality.

Disadvantages: Cannot reproduce the look of natural media.

Recommended Use: Sketches, clean traditional animation-style drawings.

Textured Vector Brush- Vector

Advantages: Can reproduce the look of natural media. As capable as textured bitmap brushes, but can be manipulated, edited and recolored like solid vector brushes.

Disadvantages: Overlapping strokes can make the drawing heavy on application performance and file sizes. Strokes of different colors cannot be flattened together. Tweaking, scaling up or zooming in on artwork is liable to make it lose texture quality.

Recommended Use: For light bitmap-style textured artwork or mixed-style artwork.

Bitmap

• On bitmap layers, you can only draw using solid or textured bitmap brushes.

• while vector layers are more flexible because they allow you to easily manipulate and tweak parts of your artwork, they can also accommodate more art styles.

• if you use a textured brush on a vector layer, your brush strokes will have a bitmap texture. This means that, just like with artwork in bitmap layers, attempting to tweak or resize a textured brush stroke will require Storyboard Pro to resample the texture, which is liable to make it lose picture quality, unless its texture resolution was sufficiently increased before you started drawing

Textured Bitmap Brush- Bitmap

Advantages: Can reproduce the look of natural media. Better performance and lighter file size than texture-heavy vector artwork. Can be edited pixel by pixel.

Disadvantages: Strokes are always flattened together and cannot be modified individually. Can only be drawn or erased upon. Scaling up or zooming in on artwork is liable to make it lose picture quality.

Recommended Use: Texture-heavy bitmap artwork.

Multiple Choice

What is the difference between a Bitmap brush and a Vector brush?

• A bitmap will create a flat image with a selection area that surrounds the whole image; a vector brush creates separate shapes that can be edited separately

• A vector will create a flat image with a selection area that surrounds the whole image; a bitmap brush creates separate shapes that can be edited separately

Drawing Tools

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jG0mmUDaR3IjHkov71fEkvcRsr071VWjzAnnA-7VrsI/edit?usp=sharing

Multiple Choice

Which tools are unavailable when working on a bitmap layer?

• pencil, line, rectangle

• brush, edit gradient/ texture, paint, paint unpainted

• all tools are available

• select by color, contour editor, perspective, edit gradient/ texture, pencil

Multiple Choice

Which of these is not an option if you want to get a textured line for your drawing?

• create your line on a bitmap layer using a variety of brushes

• create your line using a textured pencil line

Color

TIP:

If you want to save your color so you can reuse it later, click on the Add Color button in the Color view to store the color into a new color swatch.

About the Centerline Editor

The Centerline Editor allows you to tweak and reshape brush strokes by manipulating their center line rather than their contour. This gives you a flexibility that is similar to the one you have when using the Contour Editor tool to manipulate pencil lines.

Continued

The Centerline Editor tool creates a center line for a brush stroke, and gives you access to control points and Bezier handles for this center line, allowing you to deform the brush stroke the same way you can deform a pencil line using the Contour Editor.

In Storyboard Pro, pencil lines are composed of a centerline, to which the thickness and color is added by the application. This makes it easy to edit pencil lines with the Contour Editor, as you can tweak their centerline, and their contour will . Brush strokes, however, are stored as their outer shape. Therefore, using the contour editor on a brush strokes does not allow you to edit the center line of the stroke, but rather, its contours.

NOTES: The Centerline Editor is also able to tweak textured brush strokes with their texture. Note that this will resample its texture, which may make it lose quality. If you use the Centerline Editor to deform a closed brush stroke with a fill inside it, the fill will not be reshaped to fit the new shape of the brush stroke.

Multiple Choice

What does the Centerline Editor do?

• it creates another brush stroke within an existing brush stroke

• it gives a brush stroke a spine so you can edit it

• it edits a spine of a pencil line

Multiple Choice

What key would you press to add a point while using the Centerline Editor?

• alt

• ctrl

• +

• shift

Onion Skin vs. Light Table

Light table

• When the light table is activated, all layers apart from the currently selected one are shown in washed-out colors in the Stage and Camera views and when using the layer tools.

Onion Skin

Using Onion Skin, you can display the outlines of the previous or next panels as semi-transparent overlays in the current panel, to use them as references for your artwork.

Multiple Choice

In the onion skin, the green color represents...

• the current drawing

• drawings from next panels

• drawings from previous panels

Editing Artwork on Multiple Panels

Sometimes you need to reposition, resize or in some way modify an element on a layer that appears across multiple panels (like a cloud), and you want the change to be consistent. This is also useful when you want to hide elements or delete drawings across multiple panels.

A quick way to do this is to select the layer on all your panels and then make your change. The layer must have the same name on all the panels.

NOTE:

To quickly select multiple panels, select the first panel and Shift + click the last one in the series. Use the Thumbnails view.

Multiple Choice

To edit multiple layers across several panels, you must ensure that...

• layers are visible

• layers have same name

• layers are in the same scene

Generating Auto-Matte Layers

• enables you to quickly fill in sketch objects, hiding anything that is behind the object. You can create new layers by applying Generating Auto-Matte to selected vector layers.

• When sketching characters with a background in Storyboard Pro, the characters need to be filled in to hide the drawing that is behind them.

• With sketches, using the Paint Unpainted tool is not convenient because of holes and lines in the drawing. Using the Brush tool with the Draw Behind option can be time consuming. Having the ability to automate this process speeds up storyboarding.