only really reliable fill bucket ive ever found was a modified version of csps one and its ruined my life cus im constantly wishing it was in animation software 😭
🔴Hey people, I'll give you some advice. I mostly do my animations inside Toon Boom Harmony, and the coloring stage Is the fastest for me. Of course the cleaner the line the easier it is, but I streamlined a simple process to color even messier lines. You just need to, after transfering the vector lines to the color art sublayer, go to Drawing /Cleanup /Close gap and choose an amount that you see closes most of your drawings. After that you can use the 'apply to all frames' option to cover the first flat colored matte to avoid getting transparencies. Once you do that you just change to the 'repaint' option as well as to 'apply to onion skin Range'. And that's it, remember you can circle the areas you want to fill, or you can just 'draw' with the paint bucket. If you want to I could record a tutorial only if you are interested.
True. I try to think that coloring is the fun part of the animation, but it ends up being a pain due to little streaks that aren’t colored in. Not to mention composition (which can be fun at times a bit; at least from my perspective).
@ Well…………………………..…I animate in Procreate, and I often use reference layer to color. However, some stray marks get away, and I have to color them in and go back through frames just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
It wastes so much timeee for real! Especially when you don’t close lines and it fills everything and you have to redo it. The only good thing is consuming podcasts and music and shows during the process like you said 😭
this is why I use opentoonz (it is free if you wonder) draw with clip studio (there is export option to opentoonz) color cell animations with opentoonz saved sooo many hours of my time
@@MicBain It not only auto fills lines with color, it can also change color to drawings automatically by adjusting it in the palette section if you change your mind about it. The fill bucket can also paint multiple frames at once instead of one at a time (if the drawings aren't too far apart from each other.)
I love using MOHO for animating painterly stuff, also so i dont need to colour so much. Its like 2D rigs and Vector based, but in a handdrawn way? Victor Paredes did an amazing job on their channel, specifically the wolf animation he did based on a watercolor drawing!!!!!!!! 10/10 Recommend it.
Just a tip for the matte layer, for the TVpaint users… instead of filling the inside of the image, fill the outside instead with the paint bucket tool (with gap closer jic), do some strokes of exclusion if the color seeps into big patches. Rasterize and duplicate the layer, clear all without auto instance on the copied layer, open reverse stencil on the original layer, highlight the entire copied layer and right click on the clear icon to fill the entire sequence with color B. Then delete original layer and do touchups. Way faster than manually colouring the matte into the color layer directly.
Also just to add on, pressing enter on TVPaint allows you to repeat your last action. So if you have 60 frames of sequence that you need to fill the outside for, just paint bucket on a spot that none of the drawings will touch, highlight the entire layer, turn off auto instance, and press enter. Entirely filled without manual input.
Thats why it was called "The coloring department" in the old days. A bunch of people just focusing on coloring cels and blending paints all day long. I think ai can be used for faster raster coloring. Autofill frames at a certain point on screen was available in Digicel flipbook. I think Opentoonz has this feature also. But yeah closing raster lines properly takes time even if its done with separate line color. Vector is different since you work with shapes that can be autoinbetweened including fills on separate layer.
Most people refer to "lip syncing" as "acting" and it's usually what separates good and bad animation. It's like the core of the whole thing. And then there's anime, where the mouth just switches between open and closed while nothing else is moving in the frame.
Trying to frame by frame animate with a complicated shading style like mine is a nightmare. Though good layer management makes things a whole lot more manageable. Separating the elements into groups so you can focus on the head, body, hands and other elements separately instead of all at once. This really helps with a very complicated shading style though you have to be an OCD freak like me to tolerate doing this. Also making it so things are onion skinable helps a whole lot. On my last animation project I thought I could save a whole lot of time by making each frame a folder of shading layers. Well in Clip when you do that it onion skins the whole folder and not the shading layer you want to focus on making onion skinning completely useless. That was fun to deal with for just 8 frames of animation that took me a bit more than a week to do. Though I learned my lesson and will be making each shading layer it's own animation folder so it can be onion sinkable. Putting those animation folders into a group with the element I'm working on should work with onion skinning a whole lot better for me next time. Also I prefer doing a hybrid approach of doing both frame by frame and motion tweening. If an element is closeup to the camera I usually do frame by frame, and if it's far away I do motion tweening. Now if I could figure out how to make the motion tweened parts only animate on specific frames instead of it animating on ones the whole time this approach would look a lot better. Motion tweening also mostly works for simpler scenes and doesn't work for more complicated animations at all. So it's not exactly a crutch to save you time in many instances. Oh and when motion tweening you want the elements you're tweening to have a very small footprint. Flatten you layers and don't try to animate layer groups if you can you're computer will thank you. In the instance of eyes where I want the pupils to move independently from the shading I can't do this and I used to have masked shading layers where the non visible color of the shading layer was the size of the canvas. Even though it wasn't visible due to the mask Clip was still animating the non visible parts. Since I animate at pretty much 4K just the eye shading layers caused my computer to chug really bad and in some instances crashed the program. The solution to this was to make a selection around the eyes invert the selection and delete all the non visible parts of the shading layers. This way it wasn't animating 8 or so layers the size of the canvas and it was just animating the shading around the eyes. This made things so much easier on my computer.
coloring due to those gaps has always been a struggle. I usually go in with a color pen to close the gap and then fill it. Sometimes I use lasso fill tool and liquify tool just to push the color when its outside the line. I also color with hard pixel edges because it kinda does better job at covering all those micro gaps. I think it would work for you to combine frame by frame with cutout animations for parts that dont change much and just deform them slightly to skip a ton of recoloring
I want to underline that we don't see "AI" and immediately jump the seat looking to start a crusade. We know there's stuff AI is useful and definitely made to *assist* the user rather than doing the whole work for them. Cascadeur's AI secondary movements for 3D model animations for me is one of them. It helps the knowledgeable user into improving own craft without having to do everything manually, instead of being an instrument to bypassi it completely the process, in the attempt to make people who didn't bother to learn into thinking they're professionists out of the blue. I'm still looking forward for an AI that flat colors stuff while keeping a somewhat reliable layer hierarchy. Unfortunately at this point I doubt any company will ever bother. All they want seems to be to get rid of any human creator, rather than a way to improve their workflow.
I dread coloring more than lines these days. Constantly changing the range value in tvpaint because some frames just don't want to cooperate. To make things worse I lost all my character pallet windows recently so that's another layer of bullshit I have to worry about
this is at least part of why I do everything kinda... "backwards" when I draw. Admittedly, I don't really do much 2D animation tbh, but when drawing concept art for the game I've been working on for the past couple of years, I always try to start with big swaths of color, blocking out all the major foreground and mid-plane shapes while deciding on the basic composition and color palette, really focusing more on where light is and isn't present in the scene rather than the features/curves/anatomy of the subject matter. I usually start with a dark grey background and work with about 15-30% opacity on a large brush at around 40% hardness. Once I'm happy with the more gross foreground work, I shrink the brush size by half or more and start working on establishing subtler shapes in the background. I then lighten up my canvas to a light or medium grey, and repeat the afformentioned process one or two more times with progressively smaller brushes, switching to contrasting and complimentary tones in which to define the highest level of true details I can manage and imply anything further I wish the viewer to see in the final piece, and only after that do I switch to a pen, pencil, or harder brush to begin drawing the linework. I intentionally avoid doing so "to completion," which is to say I leave gaps all over the place because I don't usually want a harsh, crisp outline around everything. The lines I draw mostly just tend to serve as the darkest shadows and brightest highlights caused by the Fresnel effect, and particularly fine elements such as wires and strings and fly-away hairs; everything else I leave softer edges on. I'll admit working this way can be fairly un-intuitive at times, but it far more consistently and thoroughly engages my creativity throughout the entire process, completely side-steps the kinds of dead-end road blocks of frustration I always encountered trying to work more traditionally, and it results in a wonderfully distinct, somewhat airy aesthetic that I feel suits me and my current project well.
Interesting. I am currently animating a 2d-animated Intro-Cutscene in Krita, and I find that coloring via Fill-Bucket works really well, I don't have any Issues with it. Also tried Krita's Colorizing-Mask Tool, but just using the Fill-Bucket generally works much better for me. Coloring is one of the quickest and simplest Parts of the whole Process for me. So this Video took me by Surprize. Maybe it just depends on the Brush one uses for Lineart.
CSP and Krita magic wand tool and colorize mask tool are actually godsend tools. Toonboom, Animate CC and several other animation software lack this tools which makes the coloring process a bit more time consuming than coloring your animation in CSP and Krita.
I just found a 100% working way to fill out shapes without having to worry about gaps. You use vector shapes to interpolate different parts of the character, based on the keyframes (as vectors are used, then there is no worry about gaps in the lines). But that way shapes overlap - you send every single part on a new layer, so that it overlaps the correct way. The extend of the parts that doesn't have to be shown will be covered by the part layered above, so that way you have 100% assurance that you'll fill everything without facing gap issiues
I don’t really animate much, (I just draw) but I love to work in black and white. It helps when I do animate, and just focus on the feel and structure rather then the color scheme
great video. when i first started dabbling in 2d animation i was thinking "is this really the way you go about coloring the frames? ?". when i found out "yeah- this is actually how you color the frames" i was a little shocked lol. to your point, you can still find enjoyment in it!
Uuuuuu, i wish more programs had opentoonz options for coloring. If you have an object within an area for a couple of frames, you can select a point in the image and a beginning and end frame so it colors it for ya, this is done with normal bucket and lasso tool. I also believe you can manage gaps with the color bucket, so gaps in lines are not as disastrous
I'm not in the 2d space a lot but I remember when Blender added multi-frame coloring to grease pencil that was a big deal at the time, not sure if that ended up being as useful as it sounded or not
this was helpful. as a self taught animator in process, I thought I was doing something wrong. glad this is just the nature of it, a little comforting haha
What I do is I skip steps... after I get my Rough with all the frames I am willing to make, I just export it and then do line and coloring at the same time on Procreate, although, that is like also adding a whole other multi step of having to export from Blender to Photo Shop to make folders for each frame, and then exporting that to my Google drive to then open the file in procreate, and then after I'm finished with it in procreate I save it as a PSD file, and send it to Photoshop again I think?(it's been a while) and then I send it to After affects, and I had to create a whole Mathematical formula in order to make sure that the frames are consistent, like you would think you could just export 24 frames throughout the whole project, and you would be right! but because after affects is in seconds and not in frame number I have to use equations to convert frames into seconds. AND because I use stills for some stuff, I make the project smaller by just using a PNG image for the stills, so that means I have to use two more equations to find out where I place my scenes in after affects, I don't even remember how I came up with the math for it but it works. and at least I have a script that will folder up to 75 layers in Photoshop
Art community dont like Ai but one day AI will do all that shit for us, all the colors, all the in betweens. I am telling you, you dont have to look only at all the bad stuff
OMG... I mostly do vector/puppet animation, and I only do frame-by-frame for VFX and animated storyboards... I've never given it a thought that in FbF you have to color every frame, consistently! I mean, it's not such a big problem for big studios, but for indie animation... As a viewer, I'd rather see more story than amazing frames, so I hope you FbF people use every shortcut you can.
1:51 Well... Idk if this is toon Boom, but you have to use the close gap tool (the blue lines that appear when you hit K I think? but in the color layer). For anyone who doesn't know: Harmony can transfer you line art into invisible lines that will help you color faster, you just have to close gaps afterwards. @moltenpaper already made a great comment about it. Yes, you can press the button to find and help the process, but I find myself often having to close the gaps manually so it's also the right shape.
can't remember if blender had the feature back when you tried grease pencil but you can fill several layers if the area overlaps, not very helpful in scenes where the character moves around the screen quickly, but for talking shots it seems very handy i used that a while ago
I think when it comes to bucket filling, Toon Boom still does the best job. I can have pretty scratchy lines even with textured vector brushes and still get to bucket fill stuff 80% of the way thanks to the sub-layer system. I guess alternatively, something like Moho let's you draw lines and fills simultaneously, which might be a way forward (sometimes a bit awkward tho).
Depending on the line quality, coloing and filling the shapes can be a fucking painnnn. Tvpaint has a solution like flood filling all the frames you cleaned but yeah... it all depends on the linework.
Y'all may hate Adobe Animate but symbol animation saves your sanity in coloring. Sure, Traditionally animate it and that ten seconds looks amazing but then grow old at your desk with your paint bucket.
Using all the tools in toon boom make the coloring phase a breeze if you are smart about it, using the onion skin with the bucket tool and the tools for closing gaps specially
I will say, I was forced to upgrade to Toon Boom Harmony from Studio, and somehow, Harmony's fill option is WAY worse than Studio. I thought this was supposed to be an upgrade?
I think Clip Studio tackles this in the best way possible way by making the animation mode work as an add-on, rather than a separate beast of its own. You still have access to blend layers and other options to make coporing easier. The only downside is that it can get a bit slow over time.
This is 1000% accurate xD. I use Flipaclip app to animate, and the coloring is a pain in the @$$, especially the more frames you have xD. I use the brush tool to color every individual character. I think that's why I'm too lazy to color shading/composition in my animations LOL, but I really want to get into it. I'm currently creating a 2 minute animation and I'm gonna cry when I start coloring it **Cries looking at 2016 frames total**🥲🥲
I wonder how it might look to do to convert a few inked frames into a flat lineless look via EB Synth. Then recomposite the plain lineart frames back over EB's output. It might have some colorbleed, but since you're recompositing the lines over the result..they might just look like minor coloring errors instead of big glitches. (Emphasis on flat colors, and regular black/monocolor lines)
*reads the tittle* *feels identificated* *watches the video* I created a proyect where I strictly imposed myself to go to black and white for this very reason, it is an enormous amount of time to not only color the frames, but also to investigate color psicology for do it right. Also I made some sceptions on that proyect by turing some characters "full blue" instead of white because I discovered that Photshop has a very handy trick for color an entirely character on a single color. The process const on: go to the lineart layer, select "magic selection", click outside the lineart of the character, invert the selection, make the selection 2 px smaller, create a new layer under the lineart, fill bucket, there you go! A full colored white character whithout any non colored narrow spaces.
Coloring sucks hands down. Blender is a good opinion for it. Wish there was a software similar to it. (Sounds like a useful opportunity that needs to be made)
I can see why a lot of anime will either have none or minimal shadow. Especially when it comes to complex scenes and movement. Add that the industry has been making deadlines even tighter after the shift to digital along with increasing saturation of the market, so yeah it is pretty laborious.
@@GrayD_Fox I don’t think it’s boo, it would genuinely be such a timesaver and actually convenient for artists instead of replacing them, like how 3D interpolation helps animators now.
"I am a professional who has been doing cel painting for four years. The Japanese Retas PaintMan and cel paint techniques are perfect for this task. It takes about 1-3 minutes to fully color one image, depending on the complexity of the drawing. This method is fast, clean, effective, and very convenient. However, to use this technique, a very precise, clean drawing is required. If the drawing isn't clean, cleaning up becomes more challenging than painting itself. If you're interested, I have the free software license and installation link."
Tell me you never had to paint physical cels, without telling me you never painted physical cels. Listen here, sonny --- (insert old man animator rant about you kids today don't know how good you have it) .
I thought the AI Cadmium App (@CadmiumAnimation) worked pretty good , but I'm so used to TVPaint that I tend to stick with TVPaint , a combination of using Flood Fill tools for some things or the Color and Texture Generator (CTG) . Depends on the scene . Again, my old-timer perspective is formed by how much faster and easier digital ink & paint is than painting actual cels (which was the standard in animation when I was a Sheridan College in the 80's, starting to work professionally in 1984, and well into the mid-90's at many smaller studios, before all had finally switched over to digital ink & paint with ANIMO, TOONZ, etc.)
That's where AI would be extremely helpful as a tool. Coloring or turning lineart into vectors. At least doing the boring tedious part and letting you take care of the stuff that matters.
It is quite tedious. Personally, I use Blender and make a matte by inverted filling and using frame range to color multiple drawings, then just correct the frames that fill completely or didn’t even fill. Still using the frame range, just color the poses that are the closest.
[Q: Why not color with basic 24 count animation pencil colors before all that fun 3D coloring? Finding the right shape for character design makes for competitive processes to be explored, right???]
** Non-photo blue pencils are probably not always the best 'color' to use, because of movement lines/ 'shutter speeds'.[ So on a computer, texturing and rendering projects could be as painful.]
Remember: on the "golden age" of disney all this had to be done BY HAND. And who did it?? Underpaid, uncredited women who werent allowed to be animators cause of patriarchy and stuff. Neat!
ever since AI became free to use for general public, I've been using it for out of focus backgrounds. That helped me save a lot of time and focus on coloring animation instead.
Don't get mad when you find out the AI you've been using has been stealing the artwork you're painting. People have been telling you idiots AI steals work but I guess you're willing to let scumbags make money off ur work just for some convenience.
Fill bucket: unreliable
Manually filling in colors: time-consuming
No color: hard to make appealing
You can never win
FR!
adobe flash color bucket 1 layer symbol
only really reliable fill bucket ive ever found was a modified version of csps one and its ruined my life cus im constantly wishing it was in animation software 😭
🔴Hey people, I'll give you some advice. I mostly do my animations inside Toon Boom Harmony, and the coloring stage Is the fastest for me. Of course the cleaner the line the easier it is, but I streamlined a simple process to color even messier lines. You just need to, after transfering the vector lines to the color art sublayer, go to Drawing /Cleanup /Close gap and choose an amount that you see closes most of your drawings. After that you can use the 'apply to all frames' option to cover the first flat colored matte to avoid getting transparencies. Once you do that you just change to the 'repaint' option as well as to 'apply to onion skin Range'. And that's it, remember you can circle the areas you want to fill, or you can just 'draw' with the paint bucket. If you want to I could record a tutorial only if you are interested.
This is great! I think a video tutorial would be great for us visual learners too!
I would love a recorded tutorial! Thank you for this info!
Yes I would love a tutorial!
I would absolutely owe my soul to you if you recorded a tutorial
Please respond to me when/if you record one so that I see it!!
It would be awesome if you made video tutorial ❤❤❤
Coloring is an absolute pain, I would certainly agree with that.
True. I try to think that coloring is the fun part of the animation, but it ends up being a pain due to little streaks that aren’t colored in. Not to mention composition (which can be fun at times a bit; at least from my perspective).
At least you guys get to animate in a software right?
@ Well…………………………..…I animate in Procreate, and I often use reference layer to color. However, some stray marks get away, and I have to color them in and go back through frames just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
especially if you are using a software like krita, the fill tool doesn't really have intensity (unless it does and i'm unaware)
It wastes so much timeee for real! Especially when you don’t close lines and it fills everything and you have to redo it. The only good thing is consuming podcasts and music and shows during the process like you said 😭
0:38 "It feels like I took a huge dump only to have that huge dump shoved back in me"
Damn 😂💀
this is why I use opentoonz (it is free if you wonder)
draw with clip studio (there is export option to opentoonz)
color cell animations with opentoonz
saved sooo many hours of my time
That's an excellent idea - what is it about opentoonz that makes it easier for coloring?
@@MicBain the reason made me use Opentoonz is the auto-paint option for lines such as red, blue, green lines
@@ZCoreStudio ahh, sounds like I need to do some research I guess.
@@MicBain It not only auto fills lines with color, it can also change color to drawings automatically by adjusting it in the palette section if you change your mind about it. The fill bucket can also paint multiple frames at once instead of one at a time (if the drawings aren't too far apart from each other.)
@@inca3749 damn that's so good! I'm sold. Does it have any shortcuts for shading/shadows?
I love using MOHO for animating painterly stuff, also so i dont need to colour so much. Its like 2D rigs and Vector based, but in a handdrawn way? Victor Paredes did an amazing job on their channel, specifically the wolf animation he did based on a watercolor drawing!!!!!!!! 10/10 Recommend it.
i do feel bad for cel animation coloring back in he day XD
Just a tip for the matte layer, for the TVpaint users… instead of filling the inside of the image, fill the outside instead with the paint bucket tool (with gap closer jic), do some strokes of exclusion if the color seeps into big patches. Rasterize and duplicate the layer, clear all without auto instance on the copied layer, open reverse stencil on the original layer, highlight the entire copied layer and right click on the clear icon to fill the entire sequence with color B. Then delete original layer and do touchups. Way faster than manually colouring the matte into the color layer directly.
... WUT
@ Yes 👀
Also just to add on, pressing enter on TVPaint allows you to repeat your last action. So if you have 60 frames of sequence that you need to fill the outside for, just paint bucket on a spot that none of the drawings will touch, highlight the entire layer, turn off auto instance, and press enter. Entirely filled without manual input.
Thats why it was called "The coloring department" in the old days. A bunch of people just focusing on coloring cels and blending paints all day long. I think ai can be used for faster raster coloring. Autofill frames at a certain point on screen was available in Digicel flipbook. I think Opentoonz has this feature also. But yeah closing raster lines properly takes time even if its done with separate line color. Vector is different since you work with shapes that can be autoinbetweened including fills on separate layer.
I just clicked on this video because I like coloring, all the hard work has been done and it's like desert.
I agree coloring is annoying especially when the software doesn’t work as intended but what I really despise is lip syncing. It’s just so repetitive
Most people refer to "lip syncing" as "acting" and it's usually what separates good and bad animation. It's like the core of the whole thing.
And then there's anime, where the mouth just switches between open and closed while nothing else is moving in the frame.
Trying to frame by frame animate with a complicated shading style like mine is a nightmare. Though good layer management makes things a whole lot more manageable. Separating the elements into groups so you can focus on the head, body, hands and other elements separately instead of all at once. This really helps with a very complicated shading style though you have to be an OCD freak like me to tolerate doing this.
Also making it so things are onion skinable helps a whole lot. On my last animation project I thought I could save a whole lot of time by making each frame a folder of shading layers. Well in Clip when you do that it onion skins the whole folder and not the shading layer you want to focus on making onion skinning completely useless. That was fun to deal with for just 8 frames of animation that took me a bit more than a week to do. Though I learned my lesson and will be making each shading layer it's own animation folder so it can be onion sinkable. Putting those animation folders into a group with the element I'm working on should work with onion skinning a whole lot better for me next time.
Also I prefer doing a hybrid approach of doing both frame by frame and motion tweening. If an element is closeup to the camera I usually do frame by frame, and if it's far away I do motion tweening. Now if I could figure out how to make the motion tweened parts only animate on specific frames instead of it animating on ones the whole time this approach would look a lot better. Motion tweening also mostly works for simpler scenes and doesn't work for more complicated animations at all. So it's not exactly a crutch to save you time in many instances.
Oh and when motion tweening you want the elements you're tweening to have a very small footprint. Flatten you layers and don't try to animate layer groups if you can you're computer will thank you. In the instance of eyes where I want the pupils to move independently from the shading I can't do this and I used to have masked shading layers where the non visible color of the shading layer was the size of the canvas. Even though it wasn't visible due to the mask Clip was still animating the non visible parts.
Since I animate at pretty much 4K just the eye shading layers caused my computer to chug really bad and in some instances crashed the program. The solution to this was to make a selection around the eyes invert the selection and delete all the non visible parts of the shading layers. This way it wasn't animating 8 or so layers the size of the canvas and it was just animating the shading around the eyes. This made things so much easier on my computer.
coloring due to those gaps has always been a struggle. I usually go in with a color pen to close the gap and then fill it.
Sometimes I use lasso fill tool and liquify tool just to push the color when its outside the line.
I also color with hard pixel edges because it kinda does better job at covering all those micro gaps.
I think it would work for you to combine frame by frame with cutout animations for parts that dont change much and just deform them slightly to skip a ton of recoloring
I want to underline that we don't see "AI" and immediately jump the seat looking to start a crusade. We know there's stuff AI is useful and definitely made to *assist* the user rather than doing the whole work for them. Cascadeur's AI secondary movements for 3D model animations for me is one of them. It helps the knowledgeable user into improving own craft without having to do everything manually, instead of being an instrument to bypassi it completely the process, in the attempt to make people who didn't bother to learn into thinking they're professionists out of the blue.
I'm still looking forward for an AI that flat colors stuff while keeping a somewhat reliable layer hierarchy. Unfortunately at this point I doubt any company will ever bother. All they want seems to be to get rid of any human creator, rather than a way to improve their workflow.
That moan was a jumpscare
I dread coloring more than lines these days. Constantly changing the range value in tvpaint because some frames just don't want to cooperate. To make things worse I lost all my character pallet windows recently so that's another layer of bullshit I have to worry about
this is at least part of why I do everything kinda... "backwards" when I draw. Admittedly, I don't really do much 2D animation tbh, but when drawing concept art for the game I've been working on for the past couple of years, I always try to start with big swaths of color, blocking out all the major foreground and mid-plane shapes while deciding on the basic composition and color palette, really focusing more on where light is and isn't present in the scene rather than the features/curves/anatomy of the subject matter. I usually start with a dark grey background and work with about 15-30% opacity on a large brush at around 40% hardness. Once I'm happy with the more gross foreground work, I shrink the brush size by half or more and start working on establishing subtler shapes in the background. I then lighten up my canvas to a light or medium grey, and repeat the afformentioned process one or two more times with progressively smaller brushes, switching to contrasting and complimentary tones in which to define the highest level of true details I can manage and imply anything further I wish the viewer to see in the final piece, and only after that do I switch to a pen, pencil, or harder brush to begin drawing the linework. I intentionally avoid doing so "to completion," which is to say I leave gaps all over the place because I don't usually want a harsh, crisp outline around everything. The lines I draw mostly just tend to serve as the darkest shadows and brightest highlights caused by the Fresnel effect, and particularly fine elements such as wires and strings and fly-away hairs; everything else I leave softer edges on. I'll admit working this way can be fairly un-intuitive at times, but it far more consistently and thoroughly engages my creativity throughout the entire process, completely side-steps the kinds of dead-end road blocks of frustration I always encountered trying to work more traditionally, and it results in a wonderfully distinct, somewhat airy aesthetic that I feel suits me and my current project well.
Interesting. I am currently animating a 2d-animated Intro-Cutscene in Krita, and I find that coloring via Fill-Bucket works really well, I don't have any Issues with it. Also tried Krita's Colorizing-Mask Tool, but just using the Fill-Bucket generally works much better for me. Coloring is one of the quickest and simplest Parts of the whole Process for me. So this Video took me by Surprize. Maybe it just depends on the Brush one uses for Lineart.
i luv Kritr
CSP and Krita magic wand tool and colorize mask tool are actually godsend tools. Toonboom, Animate CC and several other animation software lack this tools which makes the coloring process a bit more time consuming than coloring your animation in CSP and Krita.
I just found a 100% working way to fill out shapes without having to worry about gaps. You use vector shapes to interpolate different parts of the character, based on the keyframes (as vectors are used, then there is no worry about gaps in the lines). But that way shapes overlap - you send every single part on a new layer, so that it overlaps the correct way. The extend of the parts that doesn't have to be shown will be covered by the part layered above, so that way you have 100% assurance that you'll fill everything without facing gap issiues
I don’t really animate much, (I just draw) but I love to work in black and white. It helps when I do animate, and just focus on the feel and structure rather then the color scheme
great video. when i first started dabbling in 2d animation i was thinking "is this really the way you go about coloring the frames? ?". when i found out "yeah- this is actually how you color the frames" i was a little shocked lol. to your point, you can still find enjoyment in it!
Uuuuuu, i wish more programs had opentoonz options for coloring.
If you have an object within an area for a couple of frames, you can select a point in the image and a beginning and end frame so it colors it for ya, this is done with normal bucket and lasso tool. I also believe you can manage gaps with the color bucket, so gaps in lines are not as disastrous
I'm not in the 2d space a lot but I remember when Blender added multi-frame coloring to grease pencil that was a big deal at the time, not sure if that ended up being as useful as it sounded or not
this was helpful. as a self taught animator in process, I thought I was doing something wrong. glad this is just the nature of it, a little comforting haha
If AI could streamline this process for animation, I don't think a lot ot people would be so mad
What I do is I skip steps... after I get my Rough with all the frames I am willing to make, I just export it and then do line and coloring at the same time on Procreate, although, that is like also adding a whole other multi step of having to export from Blender to Photo Shop to make folders for each frame, and then exporting that to my Google drive to then open the file in procreate, and then after I'm finished with it in procreate I save it as a PSD file, and send it to Photoshop again I think?(it's been a while) and then I send it to After affects, and I had to create a whole Mathematical formula in order to make sure that the frames are consistent, like you would think you could just export 24 frames throughout the whole project, and you would be right! but because after affects is in seconds and not in frame number I have to use equations to convert frames into seconds. AND because I use stills for some stuff, I make the project smaller by just using a PNG image for the stills, so that means I have to use two more equations to find out where I place my scenes in after affects, I don't even remember how I came up with the math for it but it works. and at least I have a script that will folder up to 75 layers in Photoshop
Personally, tiedown is worse.
Art community dont like Ai but one day AI will do all that shit for us, all the colors, all the in betweens. I am telling you, you dont have to look only at all the bad stuff
I could see an AI tool designed for this task being a big help.
did you watch the video or no?
OMG... I mostly do vector/puppet animation, and I only do frame-by-frame for VFX and animated storyboards... I've never given it a thought that in FbF you have to color every frame, consistently! I mean, it's not such a big problem for big studios, but for indie animation... As a viewer, I'd rather see more story than amazing frames, so I hope you FbF people use every shortcut you can.
1:51 Well... Idk if this is toon Boom, but you have to use the close gap tool (the blue lines that appear when you hit K I think? but in the color layer). For anyone who doesn't know: Harmony can transfer you line art into invisible lines that will help you color faster, you just have to close gaps afterwards. @moltenpaper already made a great comment about it.
Yes, you can press the button to find and help the process, but I find myself often having to close the gaps manually so it's also the right shape.
can't remember if blender had the feature back when you tried grease pencil but
you can fill several layers if the area overlaps, not very helpful in scenes where the character moves around the screen quickly, but for talking shots it seems very handy
i used that a while ago
Cute dog character!
I like your work! ♥
I think when it comes to bucket filling, Toon Boom still does the best job. I can have pretty scratchy lines even with textured vector brushes and still get to bucket fill stuff 80% of the way thanks to the sub-layer system. I guess alternatively, something like Moho let's you draw lines and fills simultaneously, which might be a way forward (sometimes a bit awkward tho).
Depending on the line quality, coloing and filling the shapes can be a fucking painnnn. Tvpaint has a solution like flood filling all the frames you cleaned but yeah... it all depends on the linework.
Y'all may hate Adobe Animate but symbol animation saves your sanity in coloring. Sure, Traditionally animate it and that ten seconds looks amazing but then grow old at your desk with your paint bucket.
We dont even have to color animation; we could paint it. Color is one style.
Using all the tools in toon boom make the coloring phase a breeze if you are smart about it, using the onion skin with the bucket tool and the tools for closing gaps specially
I will say, I was forced to upgrade to Toon Boom Harmony from Studio, and somehow, Harmony's fill option is WAY worse than Studio. I thought this was supposed to be an upgrade?
OpentToonz has Autopaint.
If only a certain highly contentious technological breakthrough could somehow be made more helpful for this.
That's one area where I would love some AI magic
this is why I thoroughly enjoy working with toon boom puppets :p that and no cleanup, I suuuck at staying on model.
Bro I’m coloring my short film on procreate dreams and it’s KILLING me
Auto actions in clip studio help out a lot!!
Mind to explain how? There's ways for autoactions to improve the flat coloring workflow? o.o
I think Clip Studio tackles this in the best way possible way by making the animation mode work as an add-on, rather than a separate beast of its own.
You still have access to blend layers and other options to make coporing easier. The only downside is that it can get a bit slow over time.
This is 1000% accurate xD. I use Flipaclip app to animate, and the coloring is a pain in the @$$, especially the more frames you have xD. I use the brush tool to color every individual character. I think that's why I'm too lazy to color shading/composition in my animations LOL, but I really want to get into it. I'm currently creating a 2 minute animation and I'm gonna cry when I start coloring it **Cries looking at 2016 frames total**🥲🥲
I wonder how it might look to do to convert a few inked frames into a flat lineless look via EB Synth. Then recomposite the plain lineart frames back over EB's output.
It might have some colorbleed, but since you're recompositing the lines over the result..they might just look like minor coloring errors instead of big glitches.
(Emphasis on flat colors, and regular black/monocolor lines)
*reads the tittle*
*feels identificated*
*watches the video*
I created a proyect where I strictly imposed myself to go to black and white for this very reason, it is an enormous amount of time to not only color the frames, but also to investigate color psicology for do it right.
Also I made some sceptions on that proyect by turing some characters "full blue" instead of white because I discovered that Photshop has a very handy trick for color an entirely character on a single color. The process const on: go to the lineart layer, select "magic selection", click outside the lineart of the character, invert the selection, make the selection 2 px smaller, create a new layer under the lineart, fill bucket, there you go! A full colored white character whithout any non colored narrow spaces.
Coloring sucks hands down. Blender is a good opinion for it. Wish there was a software similar to it.
(Sounds like a useful opportunity that needs to be made)
I can see why a lot of anime will either have none or minimal shadow. Especially when it comes to complex scenes and movement. Add that the industry has been making deadlines even tighter after the shift to digital along with increasing saturation of the market, so yeah it is pretty laborious.
The only thing I would allow AI to gladly take over XD
Boo 👎
@@GrayD_Fox I don’t think it’s boo, it would genuinely be such a timesaver and actually convenient for artists instead of replacing them, like how 3D interpolation helps animators now.
NO YOURE SO RIGHT I HAVE NO IDEA WHY TOON BOOM TELLS YOU THERES NO GAP AND THEN IT FILLS IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT AREA????? I HATE IT SO MUCH
This is news to me!
Coloring is much fun for me
I... actually wouldn't mind a PS5 as payment. Least I don't have to save up for the console.
I found coloring to be the most fun part of the workflow
Colo layers are pretty amazing though. I gotta say.
Clip studio... i can't even get it to play back at full speed. Unusable.
"I am a professional who has been doing cel painting for four years. The Japanese Retas PaintMan and cel paint techniques are perfect for this task. It takes about 1-3 minutes to fully color one image, depending on the complexity of the drawing. This method is fast, clean, effective, and very convenient. However, to use this technique, a very precise, clean drawing is required. If the drawing isn't clean, cleaning up becomes more challenging than painting itself. If you're interested, I have the free software license and installation link."
imagine using a textured brush and not being able to use the fill bucket couldn't be me
toniko is such a productive youtuber
Oh your not fooling anyone, you know you love it;)
I like coloring because it's brainless. But yeah, haven't found a way to truly automate it because there's always manual cleanup required.
TELL ME ABOUT IT! IT'S SO DAMN TIME CONSUMING!
We need an AI colouring tool for TVPaint
Tell me you never had to paint physical cels, without telling me you never painted physical cels. Listen here, sonny --- (insert old man animator rant about you kids today don't know how good you have it) .
I thought the AI Cadmium App (@CadmiumAnimation) worked pretty good , but I'm so used to TVPaint that I tend to stick with TVPaint , a combination of using Flood Fill tools for some things or the Color and Texture Generator (CTG) . Depends on the scene . Again, my old-timer perspective is formed by how much faster and easier digital ink & paint is than painting actual cels (which was the standard in animation when I was a Sheridan College in the 80's, starting to work professionally in 1984, and well into the mid-90's at many smaller studios, before all had finally switched over to digital ink & paint with ANIMO, TOONZ, etc.)
Idouno I think that letting AI do the heavy lifting here (and then manually validate its output) is the only way to go to not go insane...
Seeing title: I AGREE HUUGHHHHHHHHH COLOURING WHACK Surely AI could help with colouring in TVPaint?
2:08
With those tools comes *WHAT?!*
What do you mean "gap closing option"?! Why Photoshop doesn't have it?! \*breaks down crying*
It would be nice if the layers could behave like celluloid
That's where AI would be extremely helpful as a tool. Coloring or turning lineart into vectors. At least doing the boring tedious part and letting you take care of the stuff that matters.
how much is your paint bucket tolerance does it have the settings?
It is quite tedious. Personally, I use Blender and make a matte by inverted filling and using frame range to color multiple drawings, then just correct the frames that fill completely or didn’t even fill. Still using the frame range, just color the poses that are the closest.
Is not that bad, just the time consuming part is bad. Saying that because of experience. (Clip studio paint user)
So everything about animation is painful I guess, I’ll just stick with drawing illustrations then
IN THIS CASE, AI would help a lot, because IT’S NOT a creative process, it’s just repetitive and boring most of the time
Coloring also has a somewhat consistent logic to it... which is something AI is really good at nowadays.
yeah but how do you use ai for that in a program
@@3deltaanglemusic time will respond this question itself
probably the one thing i WOULD let AI do for us 😂
It does 😢
Why not animate outlines and color at the same time, changing what you need as you need it?
[Q: Why not color with basic 24 count animation pencil colors before all that fun 3D coloring? Finding the right shape for character design makes for competitive processes to be explored, right???]
*Q:what kind of artwork/ effects on 3D computer would you get if you re-discovered the 3 additive light colors?
** Non-photo blue pencils are probably not always the best 'color' to use, because of movement lines/ 'shutter speeds'.[ So on a computer, texturing and rendering projects could be as painful.]
so true that!
YESHO
Have you tried ToonSquid on iPad?
Don’t I know it…
i know
yes
Someday soon, AI will take care of this for you.
33s posted in😂, first!
AI should do this instead of doing the fun part that nobody wants AI to do
Both clean-up and coloring are the worst to me ;_;
Remember: on the "golden age" of disney all this had to be done BY HAND. And who did it?? Underpaid, uncredited women who werent allowed to be animators cause of patriarchy and stuff.
Neat!
I *hate* coloring oml
I genuinely feel suicidal when i do colouring no lie
ever since AI became free to use for general public, I've been using it for out of focus backgrounds. That helped me save a lot of time and focus on coloring animation instead.
Don't get mad when you find out the AI you've been using has been stealing the artwork you're painting. People have been telling you idiots AI steals work but I guess you're willing to let scumbags make money off ur work just for some convenience.
@@KhayJayArt Chill dude.
almost third
I never color my work lol, double it and give it to the next person 😂
Ai bros when it comes to making useless horrifying images: 🏆🎉🫡
Ai bros when it comes to make a simple ai fill in tool: 🤮🫥