Automatically Filling Drawings with a Matte

T-SBFND-008-019

When sketching scenes in Storyboard Pro, you might find that the background sketch lines interfere with the sketch lines of the characters. To make the panels more legible, you can apply a solid colour behind the character sketches.

The Generate Auto-Matte dialog box allows you to quickly create a colour matte for any sketch isolated on a given layer. The solid matte will obscure from view any background elements directly behind, giving the character more prominence, legibility and a sense of behaving like a solid-real world object. The shape of the matte generated is based on the outlines of your artwork, and will fill your drawing even if there are gaps in the sketch and even if the drawing extends beyond the camera frame.

You can generate a matte on one or several layers in a single panel at a time.

NOTE For more information about the options in this dialog, see Generate Auto-Matte Dialog Box.

How to fill drawing layers with a matte

In the layer panel or the Layers view, select the layers for which you want to generate a matte by doing one of the following:
- To select a single layer, simply click on it.
- To select several non-contiguous layers, press and hold Ctrl (Windows) or ⌘ (macOS) and click on each layer you want to select.
- To select several contiguous layers, press and hold Shift and click on the first layer you want to select, then on the last layer you want to select.
If you want your matte to be filled with one of the colours in your colour palette, select the desired colour in the Colour view. Otherwise, you can also pick a colour for the matte later.
Do one of the following:
- In the top menu, select Layer > Generate Auto-Matte.
- Right-click on the selected layer(s) and select Generate Auto-Matte.
The Generate Auto-Matte dialog appears.

If you want a precise matte or a matte for a small drawing, reduce the Radius setting. If you want to generate a very rough or approximate matte, increase the Radius setting.
If you want the matte to be filled with the currently selected colour, leave the Matte Colour setting to Current. Otherwise, set it to Custom, then click on the colour swatch to the right to open a colour picker dialog and select a colour for your matte.
If you want the matte to be generated in the layer containing your outlines, uncheck the Create Matte on New Layer option. Otherwise, a new layer will be created underneath the layer containing your outlines, and the matte will be generated in that new layer.

NOTE In both cases, the generated matte will appear behind the outlines in your artwork.
If you chose to generate the matte in a new layer, but you want to be able to fill the different sections of the matte in different colours, check the Copy Strokes to Destination option. This will copy your artwork onto the matte, but as invisible outlines (referred to as strokes). You will be able to fill those outlines with different colours.
Click on OK.

A coloured matte is generated for each selected layer, and is placed behind the artwork in each selected layer.

NOTE
If you chose to create the matte in a new layer, and a matte layer already exists for one of the selected layers, you will be prompted to either Replace the existing matte, to Keep Both the old and new mattes or to Cancel.

If this happens for multiple layers, you can check the Apply to All option to either replace the matte, keep both mattes or cancel for all layers.

If you need to generate the matte for all the drawings in your storyboard, you can add the Generate Auto-Matte button to the Layers toolbar—see Customizing Toolbars

or assign a keyboard shortcut to the Generate Auto-Matte dialog to streamline the procedure.