Animation Clean-up

When your rough animation is ready, it is time to clean it up and ink it. The clean-up is also called tracing. It consists of tracing solid and clean lines over the rough animation to get closed zones. This is the final paperless animation step before the ink and paint step.

You will need to add a new drawing layer to create your cleaned up drawing. This is the equivalent of adding a sheet of paper and tracing the rough using the animation disk.

Tracing in a New Layer

If you plan on tracing your animation in the Drawing view, enable the light table to display all the layers in your project.

Tracing Directly Over

Tracing or cleaning directly over means to clean your drawing in the same cell. This method avoids adding too many layers to your scene or demanding too much power from a low performance graphics card when using the light table or onion skinning. However, the rough animation has to be removed.

This technique is the equivalent of sketching on paper with a blue animator pencil and then inking directly onto it in black. Harmony allows you to select all the zones using a certain colour from your palette. Then you can trace over your sketch with a different colour. Once you are done, you can select all the zones painted with the sketch colour and delete them, keeping only the clean drawing.