Final project: experimenting with the software part 2

 In this post I am going to focus on some more experimentation with OpenToonz. I have already experimented with it quite a lot in my first post about it, and you can access that post by clicking here. 

I wanted to try some different tools and make another very basic animation piece. I started by opening the software, exactly like the last time. 

Here I had to name my scene and pick my camera size. I chose HD 1080, because I think 1080 are good quality videos. I could have chosen 4K, however I need to keep in mind that my computer is not a new computer designed to this type of work, and working on a really high resolution files could make it work slower or just shut down in general. 

The next step was to create a level. I have talked a little bit about creating levels in my last post. 

I needed to click on "New Level". If I clicked on "Load level" I could upload an already existing image and I think this will be a very useful feature for me. I did not concentrate on this feature this time though, I decided to continue with the drawing tools. A level is a little bit like a flipbook, to add another frame in my animation I do not create a separate level, but just add image to the existing level I have already created. 

When creating a new level, it is important to name the level, so when I create a little bit of a more complicated project, I do not get confused with the existing levels. What is also a good trick is to set the level dimensions a little bigger than the camera, because thanks to that, I will be able to draw outside of the camera as well and it might be useful when creating a close-up shot. 

When working on this project, I have forgotten how to add another image that would be my next frame, instead of just clicking alt + d, I have created a new level. What was weird to me, was that colors on my palette were not saved and I could not activate onion skin. Then I knew I have made a mistake. I opened youtube and found a video tutorial that quickly reminded me not to create a new level. Click here to see the video I watched. 

Next thing I had to do was to start drawing. I have explored the pencil tool quite a lot in my last post, however this time I wanted to add color using the bucket tool. I think using this tool can be really useful, because it does save a lot of time to just click on an area and have it colored instead of playing with a brush. 

This is the icon of the bucket tool:

There are a few important things to remember about the bucket tool. Firstly, there are different options of the bucket tool: regular, polyline, freehand and rectangular. I have used the regular bucket, that is well known from programs such as Paint. One more thing to remember and always make sure is to close all the lines when using the bucket tool. I did that and it was definitely a time-saving tool. 

The next thing I wanted to explore was the Text tool. I assumed it would work exactly like the text tool does in every other software, and I was right. The icon is also well-recognizable: 

I wanted to add text to all of the frames I have already created, but I wanted to make it quick, not very time-consuming. I have decided to try out an option in OpenToonz that I have not used yet, which are the columns on the timeline. Each column should work as a separate layer on my frame, therefore If i put something on top of one frame and just drag it down so it appears on all the frames, it would save me a lot of time. 

This is how it looks like in OpenToonz, so once again, each row is a separate frame in my animation and each column is a layer on a frame. Column 2 is on top of column 1 and column 3 is on top of column 2. It is not difficult to understand, but it is important to get used to. As it is visible in the screenshot, I had created 19 images (frames) in column 1 and just 1 image in column 2, bud dragged it all the way to the 19th image, therefore what is in that image, appears on every frame. 

When I did that I decided to export the file, once again, I could not export it in a MOV or AVI file, therefore I exported the images. Here I made a big mistake, which I will avoid from now on, I have saved the pictures in TIFF files, forgetting that there is a huge difference between a TIFF file and a JPEG or a BMI file. TIFF accepts transparency, therefore if I had any parts of my images be transparent, they would stay transparent. It is different with JPEGs and BMIs, because they just change the transparent areas to white. 

I have noticed my mistake, when I uploaded all the frames to IMovie. All the elements I wanted to be white, were black. There are two methods to avoid this problem, either save a file as a BMI or a JPEGs or fill in all transparent areas with white color using the bucket tool. 

I am glad I have made this mistake, because it is better learning on my errors while doing a practice exercise than while actually finishing the project itself. 

After I threw all of my images to IMovie and exported them as a MOV file, I have saved it on my computer and uploaded it here. 

This is a very primitive animation, however once again, this was just a test of the software to make sure I am able to learn how to operate it. I think OpenToonz is a very intuitive software to use and there are many resources online that can help me when I get stuck. I am glad I did some experimenting again, because I have made some mistakes on the way and now I know more about how to avoid them.