Shift and Trace
When hand drawing animation, it is very important to stay on model as it is easy to lose the proportions or features of a character. The Shift and Trace feature lets you temporarily move a drawing so you can trace it on a new drawing. This is similar to animators working on an animation light table and using an entire character or cut-out pieces of a character and moving it underneath the new drawing to trace it.
Your drawings will not be modified. It will only be moved, rotated or scaled in the Shift and Trace mode. When you turn off this mode, the repositioned drawing returns to its normal state.
- Go to the Drawing view.
- In the Tools toolbar, click the Show Onion Skin button—see Onion Skin.
- Send the selected drawings to the drawing desk—see Drawing Desk.
- In the Drawing Desk toolbar, click the Shift and Trace Enable button.
Registration marks appear at the bottom of your drawings.
Using the shift and trace manipulator, you can move the registration marks to reposition selected drawings while you work.
- In the Drawing Desk toolbar, click the Shift and Trace Manipulator button.
At the bottom of the Drawing view, a window displays a zoomed in view of the manipulator. You can move the dividing line between the manipulator and the Drawing view to resize the area.
- In the Drawing view, transform the drawing as needed, positioning it between your two key poses.
‣ | To reposition, click and drag the drawing to a new area. |
‣ | To rotate from the centre peg, click the flat peg hole and rotate. |
‣ | To scale, pull or push on the triangle control. |
‣ | To show the pivot point, hold Alt. The pivot point is in the middle of your current drawing view. To rotate from the pivot point, hold Alt and rotate. |
‣ | To scale from the pivot point, hold Shift and move your cursor. |
‣ | Click and drag the pivot point to move it to a new position. Once the pivot point is moved, you can hold Alt and move your drawing to show it again. |
- To select another drawing and reposition it, hold down Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ (Mac OS X).
- If necessary, click the Shift and Trace Reset button to reset the position of the modified drawing.
- In the drawing desk, select the drawing into which you want to trace.
- Select the check box next to the drawing you want to allow to be temporarily transformed. By default, all drawings are enabled for Shift and Trace operations.
- Select the drawing you want to move.
- If you want to trace more than one drawing at the same time, you can link them together. In the drawing desk, select several drawings and click the Link Drawings button to lock their position together—see How to link your shift and trace drawings.
- In the Tools toolbar, select a drawing tool.
- In the Drawing view, trace your drawing.
When using the Shift and Trace feature, you can link different drawings from the drawing desk, so they move together when dragging or scaling. These drawings can be from different columns in the Xsheet view.
- In the drawing desk, display the drawings you want to use for the Shift and Trace operation.
- Hold down Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ (Mac OS X) and select the drawings you want to link together.
- In the Drawing Desk toolbar, click the Link Drawings button to enable linking.
Coloured boxes appear beside drawing thumbnails to identify different linked drawing groups.
A link icon appears beside the currently selected drawing and all drawings linked to it.
- Shift your linked drawings.
- To unlink your drawings, select one of the linked drawings and click the Link Drawing button again to disable it.
- You can shift your drawings independently.
- To unlink your drawings, select one of the linked drawings and click the Link Drawing button again to disable it.
You may end up with a lot of drawings in your onion skin display while working with the Shift and Trace feature. You can disable individual drawings from the onion skin display without deactivating them.
- In the Tools toolbar, click the Onion Skin button.
- In the drawing desk, click on the drawing’s Onion Skin button to enable or disable it.When enabled, the icon turns black .
If you use the Shift and Trace feature frequently, you can assign custom shortcuts for Shift and Trace operations in the Preferences dialog box—see the Preferences guide.