CompuServe Thread

Hi Paul; Okay, here's the entire process of doing onionskinning in Animator Pro. It make seem a little awkward at first, but then, using BOX with OPAQUE seemed awkward once, right? This technique actually works very well, it extrememly quick, and lends itself to traditional manual animation methods very easily. Animator Pro can onionskin up to 256 frames at a time. It requires three phases. The first is to create your animation "pencilguides" using a unique color for each frame. The second is to clear each frame of previous frame pencilguides. The third is to make all frames one color and one palette. Let's use a 5-frame animation as an example. Start a brand new session at 320×200. Notice that the gradient bar is already set up with 31 colors to work with. If we needed to see more than 31 frames back, we could change the size of the cluster. 31 colors will be more than enough for this animation, but the formula is to have as many colors in the gradient bar as frames in the segment you are working on. Pick on the "C" (color cycling toggle) to set the current color to the first color in your gradient bar. This will be our pencil color for this frame. (your flic should only be one frame big). Draw a character in this color. Remember, like pencilguides, we don't color in the character, we simply draw the outlines of the character in the current color. When finished with the frame, the following process is the same per frame. Type the following keystrokes: Ins (insert key to create a frame duplicate) -> (right arrow key to advance to next frame) @ (bring up palette menu) A (Arrange pulldown) C (Cycle) ESC (escape key) What this does is shift the current color to the next color in the gradient bar (cluster). You can now see the last frame, but you will be drawing with the next color in the cluster/gradient bar. Draw the next animation for frame 2. When done, use the same steps: Ins -> A C ESC These keystrokes become quick to type after a few practices. Continue using each new color until you've drawn the animation for frame 5. Alright, step 2… SAVE THIS FLIC as TEMP!! That way you always have a record of the transitions. Now, to clear out each frame of backframe outlines. I was going to upload a POCO routine, but for those of you who don't program in C, the Macro Language is equally powerful and capable of doing this. Here's how we write the macro, and you may wish to save this macro as CLRONION.MCR since you can use it anytime. Go to frame 1. Set the current color to the background color (usually black). Set the key color to the pencil color of the frame (since frame one only uses one color (not back frames), set the key color to it. The total frame count for this flic is 5. Make sure you know this figure on larger segments. Select BOX tool, OPAQUE ink, and toggle the MASK button ON. Now, very carefully, create the macro exactly with these keystrokes: E (Extra menu) R (Record) 1 (Start Macro) E (Extra menu) M (Mask) 3 (Clip) ENTER (return to menu) 4 (Invert mask) ENTER (return to menu) 0 (exit Macro menu) SPACEBAR (make Home Panel dissappear) <pick upper left corner of screen> <pick lower right corner of screen> SPACEBAR (restore Home Panel) -> (right arrow key) E (Extra menu) R (Record) 2 (End Macro) 0 (exit) You might wish to save this now as CLRONION.MCR. Now make sure you're on frame 1, and use the sequence: E (Extra menu) R (Record) 4 (repeat macro) and enter a value of the framecount, 5 in this case. And watch the magic! All frames clip the current color of each frame, invert the mask and clear the frame of all but the current color. It's fast too. That was easy. Last step is to make all pencil colors in the flic the same color and to make sure the cycled palette is the same in all frames. Toggle MASK button off, set the key color to the background color (black again), toggle the Time button "T", go to frame 1, and then go to TRACE pulldown, pick on Blue Frame, and when the Time Panel appears, pick Render. Because the palette FIT toggle is on by default, the current color of each frame is changed to blue. When all frame outlines are blue, go to frame 1 again, go to the palette panel, make sure to pick on ALL (so that clusters are treated, we want all colors in the palette treated), and make sure FIT is on too. make sure "T" is still on (Time Panel), then go to the Value pulldown, pick on CUT (which loads all 256 colors into the palette Value buffer), and finally, use Value pulldown and pick on PASTE. When the time panel appears, pick Render. Now all frames have the same original palette as frame one, all outlines are blue, and no onionskins show. Whole process takes about 1 minute when you get comfortable with it, which is a heck of a lot faster than most programs with an onionskin-like feature. Once that's done, you can now proceed with typical color fills, background scrapes and such. Piece of cake. Proof again that program features are no substitute for technique! Enjoy. This technique has been around for years, and works like a charm. -dave / Toxic Frog Multimedia