Colour-Card Node

T-ANIMPA-012-001

The Colour Card allows you to fill the scene's background with a solid colour when there is no background image. If no drawing or colour-card is present to cover the scene's background, the scene will be rendered on a pitch black canvas.

NOTE By default, the Colour Card has a Z ordering value of 12 Backward. This puts the Colour card behind all elements that have a value lower than 12 Backward. Most of the time, the Colour card will appear automatically behind all the scene elements as they are all set to 0 Backward, unless you have changed the Z ordering of the scene components. If so, the Colour Card will be in front of the elements that are pushed back to more than 12 fields backward.

Connection

The Colour Card only needs to be connected to a composite, and does not require an input image.

It is recommended to connect your Colour Card to the right-most port of the Composite for coherence, but because a Colour Card has a default position on the z-axis of 12 Backward, it will appear behind all the elements in your scene regardless of where you connect it on the scene's composite.

Optionally, a Colour Card can also be connected to a matte image. In this case, the Colour Card will only fill the shape of the matte with its colour, rather than the whole scene.

Layer Properties

Parameter Description
Enable/Disable

Allows you to enable or disable the node. When disabled, a node has no visible effect on the rendered image, nor on the preview in the Camera, Perspective, Side and Top views.

Colour Swatch

Sets the colour of the layer in the Timeline view and of the node in the Node view.

Name

The name of the node as it appears in the Node View and the Timeline view. Each node must have a name that is unique to its containing group.

Depth

This parameter can be used to determine whether the colour card displays behind or in front of elements with the same position on the z-axis. Elements and Gradient nodes also have a depth parameter.
Offset Z The position of the Colour Card on the Z-axis. By default, this is set to 12 B to ensure the Colour Card appears behind other elements in the scene. You can set this to 0 F to make the Colour Card respect the order in which nodes are connected to the composite.
Colour

The colour and transparency of the Colour Card. You can also attach these parameters to function columns to change their values over time.

Click the colour swatch to open the Colour Picker window and select a colour.

Colour Swatch

Opens the Colour Picker window in which you can specify the colour.

Invert Matte If an image is connected to the Colour Card's matte port, by default, the colour is only applied on the opaque areas of the matte. If this parameter is enabled, the colour is applied to the transparent areas of the matte instead.