Can't delete a selection for some reason!

[David_Fine]

Here I am again with one my bizarre "why is this happening?" moments. I have one project (or scene) in particular which has this problem. No others. Opened the scene on three different stations and no different. Here's the issue:

I select an area using the freehand lasso or the box selection. Any layer, doesn't matter. I want to delete the contents of that selection so I hit the delete key on my keyboard. Nothing happens. Why? I notice that when I select the selection tool, the stencil icon button at the top lights up. Is it supposed to? In any other project, it also lights up, but the content is deleted as one would expect. No layers are locked or have any attribute I can see that should cause this in this one and only scene.

Further, if I use the selection tool and after selecting, go and switch off the stencil, the selection line disappears. Not the content, but the line. So in this one scene, there is no way to select and area and delete it. I have to manually erase the area I want cut out. Any idea why this mysterious behaviour?

[Elodie]

You're message is quite confusing to me

You mention sélection and stencil : in tvpaint, stencils (masks) and sélection act at the same time.

I mean, if you turn a layer into a stencil / mask + use à selection tool, both will be in use. You must disable either the mask or the selection.

Plus, a stencil stay active, even if the layer is switched off.

So, if a layer is turned into à stencil and you use à sélection tool, if sélection area does not match with the stencil, you cannot do anything.

[David_Fine]

Sorry, I'm trying to use the terms which make sense to me. Let me explain more clearly. When I say, "stencil" I am referring to icon up top that looks like a mask. It lights up when I use what I called the "selection tool". When I select that tool, the Tool Window displays the word "Select" and give me options to invert, clear, etc... So that's why I call it the "selection tool", because TVPaint seems to call it "select" as well.

So, my layer is on. I use the select tool to select an area I want to delete. In any other project file, I can select the area and then hit delete and the contents are cleared. In this particular project, nothing happens. This behaviour is unique to this one and only project. It does not matter which layer I choose to work on in this project, same thing happens. I copied one of the layers from that project into a new blank project and in there, I could delete, so it seems to be in the project, not the layer itself.

Any ideas would be much appreciated. If need be, I could provide a copy of the scene, but would prefer not to put that out here. I could email a link to you.

[Peter Wassink]

you did check if no layers have a stencil active or have the alphalock active?
I can't think of much else,

could you maybe post a screenshot, maybe we can spot something?

[David_Fine]

Aha! Peter's suggestion led me to the answer, which I still don't understand, but it did. There are about 20 levels in the scene and way down, in a collapsed layer, I noticed this:

screenshot_137.png (12.34 KiB) Viewed 18722 times

There's that little dot, the stencil button, that must have got switched on by mistake. Turning it off fixed the problem. So there is something I don't understand about how this stencil works. I never use it. Why would I? Anyway, switching it on, on a layer way down there, stops anything from being deleted from any other layer. Why? What is the purpose of this?

Thanks for solving something which was driving me crazy!!

[Peter Wassink]

...There's that little dot, the stencil button, that must have got switched on by mistake. Turning it off fixed the problem. So there is something I don't understand about how this stencil works. I never use it. Why would I? Anyway, switching it on, on a layer way down there, stops anything from being deleted from any other layer. Why? What is the purpose of this?...

I can understand your puzzlement, but actually this is a very powerfull function.
the stencil button can turn the pixels of any layer into a mask. so when you activate it on an animlayer you get an animated mask.

to just mention one example of how you could apply this function:
You could activate the stencil on the layer that contains the coloring of a character, then on a new layer you can paint shadows on the character but, you can do this quite roughly because the stencil won't allow pixels outside of the area defined by the stencillayer (in this case the character colorlayer) so there wont be any spills.
so this allows a much faster way of shadowing

[David_Fine]

Right, so if the character is painted solid and you turn mask on for that layer and then draw on a layer above, where you draw will be limited to the solid character area only. Also, if you draw a character line in black and then decide to make it a different colour line, say blue, you could make that black line a mask and then add a layer above which is solid blue. The blue would only show up where it intercepts with the black line below, thus giving you a blue line. I notice also that if you turn on mask, do as I mention and then turn off the mask, you end up with a fixed blue line layer. That is, the mask does not need to remain on and you get two layers, one original black and one now blue.

Thanks for the mask lesson. I love learning new stuff about TVPaint as I go along. So far, only animating, but when I get to colour and real compositing, it will open up a whole new area of stuff to learn. Excited to know that I can clean up in black and then later, decide the colour of the line.

[Svengali]

Dave,

"Layer Finder Plus Button" is a handy way to check the status of all layers' settings and includes an option to RESET all layers' settings to OFF with one click.

Sven

[Peter Wassink]

Thanks for the mask lesson. I love learning new stuff about TVPaint as I go along. So far, only animating, but when I get to colour and real compositing, it will open up a whole new area of stuff to learn. Excited to know that I can clean up in black and then later, decide the colour of the line.

your welcome,
in addition to this... for the purpose of recoloring linework the preserve transparency column in the layer panel (left from the stencil column) is even better suited.
What this does is it locks the alpha (= transparency) information of all pixels on this layer only. This limits you to only alter the color of the pixels already put down, which makes it perfect for recoloring linework
without the need to create a new layer.
When recoloring lines you don't really need a new layer because lines usually are one color and you can easily recolor all frames automatically.
But when adding a shadow color to a colorlayer its better to use the stencil in combination with a new layer (in the case of shadows maybe using a blendmode like multiply) because the color layer usually contains multiple colors and you cannot easily revert changes.

So the fundamental difference between stencil and preserve transparency is that the stencil also influences other layers whereas the preserve transparency only affects the layer on which it is activated.

[David_Fine]

Hey, great tip about "preserve transparency". Thank you again! What I was liking about the stencil is that you keep the original layer, but I suppose I could copy the layer and then use Preserve Trans. I notice also that PT keeps the line quality pretty much exactly as it was. Stencil does distort it a little bit, so Preserve Transparency is definitely the way to go. Fantastic! This is huge!!! Thank you.

Thanks also, Sven, for the Layer panel. That looks very handy.