The fill tool won't work on ONE PART of the pic

[Brian B]

Hi guys!

It's been awhile since I last posted. I had some time so I thought I would try to vectorize and then attempt to color an animation I recently finished. I vectorized all 24 frames (one by one), and then dragged them all into 1 column, even though importing them actually made 24 columns originally. The images were png, but saved as single color transparent. So, just the black lines, no white.

Anyway, long story short, I got to about Frame 12, and for some reason, the fill tool STOPPED working whenever I tried to Fill the oceans. However it worked fine for filling the land, the poles, and even the bodies of water contained within the land's borders.

I'm using the "nightly build" from... I think it's the version from 9/28/2016. I noticed there's a newer one out now. But I'm not using that one. lol OS is Windows 8.1, etc. etc.

The blue splotch in the middle of the ocean (in the attached screenshot), I was able to add by using the paintbrush to outline the area, and then filled the inside. I don't understand why it's not filling the entire ocean-area. Or why it's just this frame so far that is giving me some sort of trouble.

Thanks in advance for any advice guys! :)

Brian

[Jesus Gardea]

Hi Brian, I see you are working with a vector level, It could be hidden gaps that won't let you color the rest of the ocean, Phil Ray Art explains about it in his videos on this thread:   https://groups.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/opentoonz_en/tips--tricks/Jzterk0VLt4 

 I hope this should help you out with the filling problem on vector in opentoonz :)

[Brian B]

Thanks Jesus! While there was no visible break between lines. I did bulk up 2 areas near Antarctica that looked suspicious. Anyway, it's all colored now. But when I render, it's going REALLY fast, like an entire rotation in about a second.

I've tried fiddling with the output render settings.under the file menu. But I can't tell what, if anything in that section, is for slowing the frame rate down. Maybe to half the speed it's going now, maybe a little slower.

One last question, how do I duplicate frames so that it plays several times after I render it? (24frames, doubled or tripled for 2-3 rotations in the vid.)

Thanks again!
Brian

[Rodney]

Glad to see you got your other problem resolved.

The best way to retime your animation would be to move your frames around in the xsheet BUT... there is a fast way to get that done in the Render Options panel.

Crack open the Other Settings option at the bottom and look for "FPS" (frames per second).  It should be set to 25.  If you double this to 50 you should get a rendered animation that is twice as long... so if it ran for one second on 25 FPS it will now run for two seconcs with a setting of 50FPS.

[Brian B]

Hi Rodney!

Yeah, for vectorizing this time I tried just black lines and transparent negative space PNG files.

I looked into the other settings. I ended up slowing it down to 10 in the Frame Rate. For the Stretch from FPS I changed that 24 to 48.

I don't know if the "Stretch from FPS" does anything for speed. But I thought I'd try. I'm not sure about the other options. Gamma is, brightness I think, right? I don't know what Dominant Field is, but that's already set at None.  Multiple Rendering is at None. What is Stereocopy? (It's not checked) And Camera shift is faded so I must have to click something else to activate it.

One last question, I rendered it as an AVI video file, but it's HUGE. 379 megabytes. Is there a way to render it so it's still got good quality but a smaller file size? Or would I be better off rendering it as an AVI and then converting it to a different format with a program like Format Factory?

Sorry for the questions. I have made some progress, but it still slow learning for me. ^^; And there's so much left to figure out.
Thanks in advance,
Brian

[Brian B]

Here's how it turned out. Surprisingly it still spins pretty fast, despite playing around with those settings in the render > other settings section.At least I found out how to save as an avi that was so enormous. XD

https://youtu.be/kKQpp5-SUTo

[Rodney]

it's HUGE. 379 megabytes

Yes, yikes... that is huge.

If you click on the options button next to the file type (in the Output settings) there should be some options to compress the file.

But it looks like you've discovered that already.  :)

My own personal preference would be to render out to MPEG but you'll need to download FFMPEG and then point OpenToonz to it in the Preferences (on the Import/Export tab).

There are several file type that we can use but only if we use FFMPEG.

FFMPEG will also grant use of the GIF animation file format...which is my personal favorite for posting on the internet.

You can set the animation to loop as well.

It's definitely worth the effort to download so if you are interested please let me know if you need any assistance.

FFMPEG integration in OpenToonz is primarily courtesy of the every prolific Turtletooth who I can't thank enough for making the OpenToonz experience even better.

[Brian B]

Yep, I figured out where the compression thingie was for the video. :)

Where can I get FFMPEG? And where do I need to download or install it to, on my computer so I can direct OpenToonz to it?

I am REALLY excited about the animated gif feature you talked about! I enjoy animation and animated gifs have been my main way of doing animation for years. :D Heck, most of the music/poem videos on my youtube channel, the "video" for the vids are just a bunch of animated gifs strung together that I made in Jasc's animation shop. XD I'd imported them into Windows Movie Maker when I had Windows XP and then Magix Movie Edit Pro 2014, the last program I found that had limited animated gif support. I never figured out the limits, but it seemed to accept about 30-40 frames max, and a length for the animated gif of under a minute. My video for a song my Dad and family once performed called, "All God's Creatures Got a Place in the Choir" was done under those limited conditions in Magix Movie Edit Pro 2014. Since I had 2014, I got an offer for a from Magix for a discount on the 2015 version, but that has zero animated gif support. If you load a gif up in the 2015 version, it just plays the first frame for the length of the gif's timing.

Thanks in advance for the info! :)

[Rodney]

Official downloads (for windows) can be found here:

https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

There is a portable version but I don't immediately see where the download for that one is.

That has the plus of being able to be moved anywhere without need for installation.

As for where to put it... I put it in the C:\Program Files directory

Disclaimer: At times I have had some issues with rendering out large projects (containing a lot of frames to the gif format.  In those cases what I do is export first to MP4 and then use that in a new scene setup to render out to gif.  I can only guess that I'm running out of memory or the code doesn't know how to handle a lot of columns/layers...rendering each frame out to disk first and then converting them into the final animation... something like that.  Rendering to another format first resolves that.

[Brian B]

Thanks!

Ok, so I have Windows 8.1 64-bit. Does it matter which one I d/l between the 32 or 64 bit version? And One other question about the different types. Static, Shared, and Dev, which zip should I get?

Sorry to keep peppering you with questions. ^^; I really appreciate all the help! :D

Good disclaimer. One thing I can do with Animation Shop is that I can save all the frames from a strip as they appear without having to run gif optimization, I usually save them as PNGs. Then I can copy the frames into a folder for OpenToonz and paste those into place in OpenToonz with full png goodness. :) But I'll keep your disclaimer advice in-mind for any larger gifs I've already created that I might want to put into OT to test it out a bit. ^_^

Thanks again! :D

[Rodney]

I *think* some of the issues with FFMPEG lengths might have recently been resolved via a nightly update.

I saw some related info on this (more specific to MP4 format I think) that had code merged for inclusion in the next update.

If that changes anything I'll try to remember to update this topic.

Regarding your installaton questions.  I say in your case you want to:

Install the 64bit static release.

You definitely don't need the Dev release.

Shared.. don't know enough to know.

Data from the FFMPEG site suggests:

Static builds provide one self-contained .exe file for each program (ffmpeg, ffprobe, ffplay).
Shared builds provide each library as a separate .dll file (avcodec, avdevice, avfilter, etc.), and .exe files that depend on those libraries for each program
Dev packages provide the headers and .lib/.dll.a files required to use the .dll files in other programs.
If you are confused about what build type you need just download a static build.

Note that all emphasis in bold is theirs and not my own

:)

[Rodney]

I decided I should test what I just suggested so I...

Downloaded the 64bit static release of ffmpeg for Windows and unzipped it to my desktop allowing it to reside in the folder it created.

I then downloaded the latest nightly build of OpenToonz...

Uninstalled my previous version of OpenToonz... (just so I know I'm starting with a pretty clean slate)

Installed the latest nightly build of OpenToonz...

Went into Preferences (on the Import/Export tab) and pointed Opentoonz to the ffmpeg folder on my desktop (specifically I pointed it to the bin folder.  That's where the required convert.exe file is)

I then tested a gif render and it worked... the first time.

Then... it didn't want to work again.

Doh.

So... I renamed the ffmpeg folder on my desktop from its very long name to just 'ffmpeg'. 

This is just in case the program has issues with really long paths and file names (I don't claim this is really an issue... just insurance against running into the issue if it does ever exist)

And... now things appear to be working as intended.

Yay!  Hope the same works for you as well.  :)

[Brian B]

Sorry for the delayed reply Rodney. But thank you, I can now see the GIF support although something kind of ODD happened with the frames.

I used the globe frames I made for that video test to try making a gif in OT. The first 4 frames are centered, the rest of the frames are all touching the bottom and the right sides of the square space they are in.

Any thoughts as to why or how that happened?

[Rodney]

Sorry, I don't have any insight beyond the obvious that something has moved/changed.

There are times when we shouldn't worry so much about what has happened and just dive in and repair the problem.

In your case it sounds like you can select the manipulator icon, make sure "position" is the type selected and then move the image back into position.

Turning onion skin on to get proper alignment can help at this stage.