Toon Boom Basic Effects

Toon Boom Basic Effects

By Laura Jennings

You can add effects such as blurs, glows, shadows, color filters, and transparency filters to enhance your project's quality. Effects change the way layers or groups of layers are rendered in your scene.

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​Like a road connecting all of your layers and drawings.

Node view:

Some effects need to be linked to another layer, referred to as a Matte layer

Node View​

To add effects or other types of nodes to the Node view, you must first find them in the Node Library view.

Node Library View​

Multiple Choice

What is a matte?

• The shape or opacity level of an element that can be used as a mask

• A solid coloured background that fits the camera view

• An element used to create a background

• An element that will be cut

Multiple Choice

Which is a visual representation of how every element in your scene, be it drawing layers, pegs, effects and others are combined together to form the final composited image. And allows you to rig the elements in your scene together and add a wide range of effects to your scene.

• Node View

• Drawing View

• Camera View

• Timeline View

Multiple Choice

T/F: while layers in the Timeline view are ordered from bottom to top, in the Node view, Drawing nodes are ordered from right to left. This means that a node at the right of the Node View will appear underneath a node at its left.

• True

• False

​You can add effects through the Node view. You can select an effect from the Node Library view, drag it to the Node view and connect it to drawing layers to form a network of nodes​

Adding Effects

Blue indicates drawing information.

Light green indicates position and movement (transformation).

Each node has an input port at the top and an output port at the bottom. Some are blue and others are light-green or bright green.

Multiple Choice

On a node, what do blue and green ports represent?

• Blue indicates drawing information and light green indicates position and movement (transformation)

• Blue indicates position and movement (transformation) and light green indicates drawing information

• Blue indicates the element on top of the composition and light green indicates position and movement (transformation)

• Blue indicates drawing information and light green indicates matte information

Multiple Choice

In the Timeline view, how do you connect the layer that will be used as a matte into the Cutter?

• After expanding the Cutter effect layer, you drag and drop the matte layer onto the designated Matte field

• Drag and drop the matte layer onto the Cutter effect layer

• Right-click on the matte layer and select Connect to Cutter

• Right-click on the Cutter effect layer and select Connect to Matte

The Blur-Radial effect creates an effect that softens, fogs or obscures the image evenly in all directions

The Transparency effect is useful when fading images in and out, such as a phantom or to make something partially see-through, such as a window.

The Cutter effect cuts out a portion of an image

Multiple Choice

What are the 2 input ports on a cutter node?

• composite (drawing) and matte (can also be the invert matte if selected)

• output

• peg

The Glow effect turns your image into a glow area with a bright soft-edged light or diffuse light region around an image.

The Highlight node lets you brighten an image's area to simulate a light source.

Multiple Choice

What is the Auto- patch node? What does is do?

• It is used mainly when creating joint patches for cut-out puppets drawn with pencil lines and painted in the Colour Art layer. Instead of removing a portion of the outline to attempt to create a seamless joint

• fills in holes in the software

• fills in areas that are unpainted

Effects Preview

• You can preview a single final frames with all effects calculated in the Camera view when you enable the Render mode. ​

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• You cannot playback your animation in Render mode.

Multiple Choice

where can you playback effects to see how they'll look before exporting?

• the play button

• The effect will only be applied where the matte overlaps the original image. Sometimes the matte will act as a negative shape that the effect will exclude. This all depends on the nature and editing properties of the effect.

• the render button