slowtiger wrote:You can always change the BG colour to something not used in your colouring so you see the holes clearly.
To get all the little holes inside I can also select the transparent area outside, invert the selection, and draw a rectangle in colour mode "Behind".
slowtiger wrote: I know that any flood fill might fail in hair tips and the like. So I habitually get a big brush with the hair color, set to "behind", do one stroke, next frame, re-apply, and so on (or do a stroke on each frame when movement is fast). Repeat with 2 more colours and I'm done. Only takes me some 5 min more with 100 frames or so.
To avoid this I do my colouring on a separate layer with a good value for expand - 2 or 3 normally.
This is what I do. As discussed in the
other thread started by Zetariver , the character's line art and the colors are kept on separate layers. While doing the fill coloring the BG color may be changed to a color (such as
hot pink or
green ) which makes it easy to see gaps .
I also use the Filled Stroke tool set to Behind mode to make quick corrections to fill any noticeable gaps.
- Filled Stroke Tool.png (28.27 KiB) Viewed 33028 times
slowtiger wrote:
I've noticed that rough lines on a lively (heavily detailed/textured) BG don't need to have all holes filled in animation.
This is a good point. Even with not so rough lines , if the character is moving and the background has an average amount of detail (i.e. with variety of textures and colors , not just a flat color card or gradient) it is unlikely that anyone will notice very small gaps that may have occurred when using the Flood Fill tool. Or if on the occasional frame the "Expand" value has caused a bit of color to leak outside the edge of the lines , if this is only for a few frames out of several dozen or hundred frames the average viewer will not be able to spot the frame where the leak occurs, when watching the scene at 24 FPS. This was also true of the old hand-painted cels, even in the classic Disney feature films which are still the gold standard for high-quality production values. If you ever had the opportunity to examine some of those hand-painted cels carefully you would sometimes find gaps in small areas , such as the areas that typically cause gaps for digital flood filling (the tapered end of a strand of hair , for example) . Also the occasional air bubble in the paint that causes a small "hole" in the cel color (usually only visible if back-lit) . These imperfections are visible if you stop to examine the cels with a sharp eye , one-by-one , but are in most cases not visible when the animation cels are combined with a BG and the scene is running at 24 FPS.
The following screen captures show an example of a student's clean-up and paint test (original rough animation by Eric Goldberg , from his book "Character Animation Crash Course" ) . The student cleaned-up and inbetweened the drawings and then the drawings were colored in TVPaint.
Character level over green BG layer to help spot any gaps .
When it is enlarged 250% we can see there are in fact some small gaps that the Flood Fill did not completely fill :
But these are not visible in motion when the character layer is combined with the BG. (this is one frame with small gaps . The preceding frames and following frames have no gaps. This one drawing with small gaps is not going to be perceived when the scene is played at 24 FPS.)
Zetariver, I mention this not to in any way suggest that "sloppy", poor quality flood filling (with obvious visible gaps or leaks) should be considered acceptable , but simply to point out that in actual production you may find that certain small imperfections slip through on a regular basis and the average viewer never notices it. So don't worry about it more than you need to.
I think that the more limited the animation is , the more important it is to be sure there are no color gaps or leaks on individual frames, because those frames are likely to be repeated many times , so any gaps may cause noticeable "flashing" as those elements are repeated over and over, whereas with full animation if there are a handful of frames with small painting imperfections out of hundreds of frames that make up the entire scene it is much less likely that those minor imperfections will be noticed when the scene plays at full speed.
