Grouping in Open Toonz

[The Quiet Artist]

A short time ago I became interested when I saw the video discussing grouping elements in a single level to save time and to streamline animation.  

Here's the video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wvaLnyYk_w

In his response to one of the commenters,  he mentioned the following: 

"Compositing like this allows you to stack colors with lowered alpha to produce realtime shadowing effects that can be animated smoothly on the actual drawing without the use of "autopaint for lines", additional shadow colors for every color in your palette, or the schematic and effects that require making another level exclusively for shadows that, again, has to be animated individually."

I am experimenting grouping elements, and I am curious if anyone knows how to create shadows to be grouped to the elements in a single level without having to use schematic and effects? Particularly when the characters has jointed arms and legs.

Thanks~

[joshua shute]

You posted this up 3 months ago but I'm only seeing it now, sorry, I hope you've got it all figured out; most of the info you need is there in the video and the comments.

1)draw your stuff and group

2)draw your shadow and group. for more complex shapes or if i'm lazy, I copy and paste the complex shape, draw one line that defines the shadow as you would with "auto paint for lines", drop the line thickness of the duplicated shape to zero, and fill with transparency (style 0) and whatever color you set as your shadow (make a new style).

3)group your shadow to it's corresponding body part.

I make multiple shadows to correspond to multiple elements of a character. you could just as easily use one shadow shape for the whole character but this typically adds more work down the road as the auto inbetweened shadow likely won't follow the character's contour nicely.

 I'll put up a time-lapse of a character design and a few seconds of animation today or tomorrow, perhaps that will help.

I believe I said in the comments or in the description that this works best in conjunction with other techniques (i.e. multiple levels and compositing with subsheets) so don't feel like you have to be tied down to one level. components of a character that do heavy rotation like arms, will be easier animated if the rotation is done with the edit tool instead of auto inbetweening which will likely leave you with an undesirable result. Achieving secondary motion would also be more easily done on a different level. and if, at the end of it, you still want everything on one level for some reason, merging levels will "bake" the animation from your edit tool into your drawing strip.

It's about learning what will work best in which situation and use that.

[joshua shute]

https://youtu.be/Zz3m6skKxrk

[The Quiet Artist]

Thank you very much, Joshua Shute! 

Yeah, I kinda figured out some of the grouping stuff, so thanks again.

Just one tiny question.  In your new video, you drew a black shape in a new level around the character and then added the mesh to it, but I didn't catch on how you removed it and still apply the mesh to the character.  Or did you merge the black shape with the character and just lowered the opacity to zero, leaving the character visible? 

EDIT:  Oh, looks like I indeed just need to merger the level with the black shape (new color style) with the other level with character, and then lower the opacity on the black shape.  Guess that is all it needs - a merger, lol.   Thanks again~

[joshua shute]

there's no need to merge.

1)create a frame in a new level that extends the full length of the animation and draw a shape that will encompass the entire animation; you got that part.

2) with the shape fully encompassing the animation, click and drag that frame (you only need one frame) to the column with the animation (I always put it on the bottom/ the empty frame just after my animation) and with that frame selected,click create mesh which both creates the deformation mesh based off the shape you created and parents the column with the animation to the column with the newly created mesh. 

3)Now that the deformation mesh is created, the shape used to make that mesh is no longer needed so you can just delete that frame.

However, that's not something you have to do. Something I really like about opentoonz is that if you select the whole level or whole column and click create mesh, opentoonz Will create a new mesh frame to fit whatever frames you have selected. there are pros and cons to having a deformation mesh that changes and in most cases I really only need one general mesh with one general skeleton. 

at any rate, the technique of creating a broad general deformation mesh is very handy when deforming arms with lots of hand movements and changes. Just a tip.