Tools

To understand paperless animation, you must first discover the tools available. There are, of course, drawing tools, but also practical features such as setting a drawing as a key, breakdown or in-between.

When you create hand-drawn animation digitally, there are certain tools you require in order to work efficiently, as you would with an animation table, paper and pencils.

The onion skin and light table are used to preview previous and next drawings, cells, elements and frames. When designing or animating, it is very useful to see your previous drawings. Just as if you were building a cut-out puppet, you want to view other drawing elements to know where to draw the new element.

This topic is divided as follows:

Onion Skin
Light Table
Rotate View Tool
Create Empty Drawing
Reposition All Drawings

Onion Skin

Onion skinning in the Drawing View

The Onion Skin tool lets you preview the previous and next drawings. By default, the previous drawings appear in a shade of red and the next drawings are displayed with a shade of green. You can change these colours in the Preferences dialog box. 

Light Table

Light table

The light table is used to preview the previous and subsequent active layers in washed-out colours. It is useful for seeing the other layers when designing, animating or cleaning up your animation.

Only the currently selected drawing is displayed by default in the Drawing view. When enabling the light table, the other layers appear as a washed-out display and are used as a reference. You can not select or manipulate them.

In the Camera view, when the light table is activated, all layers but the currently selected one are shown washed-out. The display returns to the normal mode when an animation tool is selected.

Rotate View Tool

Use the Rotate View tool (animation disk) to rotate your Camera or Drawing view while you draw for increased flexibility. The rotary tables in each view are independent; if you rotate the Drawing view 25 degrees, if you switch to the Camera view, you can use the rotary table in that view and rotate it to a different angle without affecting the settings in the other view.

Create Empty Drawing

The Create Empty Drawing command automatically creates a drawing in the selected cell, replacing any drawing that may already be exposed in that cell and the following ones until it meets another drawing, key exposure or a blank cell.

Reposition All Drawings

The Reposition All Drawings option is used to reposition, scale, rotate or skew all drawing strokes on every drawing included in a layer.