TVP compared to Retas

[slowtiger]

Over there in the AnimeStudio forum somebody started to compare Retas to AS and TVP, and the thread shifted to how to mimick a Retas workflow in TVP:
http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... =7&t=27802

[Elodie]

Hmm, interesting to see how people work, even if some comments are quite disappointing.

Actually, combining Sketch Panel and CTG Layer does the trick pretty easily :
1) On animation layer :
• black lines will stay black
• blue lines for shadows
• red lines for lights
(or any color of your choice)

Retas001.png (76.78 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

(to emulate Japanese style - since they work mainly with full opacity + aliasing, you can use this RGB Sketch panel)

2) On CTG layer : you fill with colors and it won't let any gap between 2 color areas (yeah, 64 bit is not the only reason for using the Pro version )

Retas002.png (168.1 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

nogaps.png (16.26 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

3) Extract colors from CTG layers

Retas005.png (8.42 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

Retas003.png (177.68 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

4) Hide CTG layer and disable "apply changes"
5) Erase Blue and red lines

Retas004.png (175.67 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

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And for the ones who still prefer animating on paper, they can even use the Scan cleaner with colors :

Original Image

scancleaner001.png (269.61 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

Scan cleaner color (check "post-processing" and "saturate colors" to get full opaque pixels)

scancleaner002.png (21.57 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

Result (no transparency)

scancleaner003.png (164.69 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

Then uncheck "post-processing" and re-apply to get transparency

scancleaner004.png (217.89 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

Use Paint Bucket and uncheck "Contiguous", "AAliasing" and "Range" to change all pixels from a color to another.

scancleaner005.png (13.79 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

scancleaner006.png (219.58 KiB) Viewed 57134 times

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Regarding Retas, it's a software made for Japanim industry, exclusively. It does not change or evolve significantly because Japanim industry evolves slowly as well.

[NathanOtano]

Personally i even put my red/blue lines on another layer than my cleanup and just add it as a source on my ctg layer (that way it's easier to erase it afterward). So you can have the line quality you want for your cleanup, with the brush you want, that means a lot more expressivity and possibilities than vector drawing apps.
And i use another layer above that is a "correction layer" for my cleanup also listed as a source, in case the CTG layer doesn't do what i want. It permits me to keep the cleanup I drew and add contour lines to be sure the color works as i want it to work, it's sometimes painful to use CTG layers with a weird cleanup style.

And on my school films me often used the line colorize FX, that is doing a pretty great job.

Anyway the animation tools and scripts in TVPaint are also onderful, doing a great job having a "traditional animation feel" and ease of use that is hard to find elsewhere (lightable, off the peg, image marks and bookmarks, flips, scripts etc...)

I discovered Cacani some weeks ago and in fact i found it really rich and clever, but for cleanup coloring and inbeetweening only.

[Elodie]

Personally i even put my red/blue lines on another layer than my cleanup and just add it as a source on my ctg layer (that way it's easier to erase it afterward). So you can have the line quality you want for your cleanup, with the brush you want, that means a lot more expressivity and possibilities than vector drawing apps.

Sure, your method is what I advise when I give trainings. But Japanese are not used to work that way (all lines on the same level).

And on my school films me often used the line colorize FX, that is doing a pretty great job.

This FX was made after a request from students in Gobelins

Thanks for the other kind words

[D.T. Nethery]

This is a good tutorial. I hope this makes it into the User Manual or on the Tutorials page.

[Elodie]

For the video tutorials : I could not do anything regarding the Scan Cleaner Color, since we didn't have the right to use the gengas (key images in Japanim) we found on the web.

[slowtiger]

Surely somebody here could whip up something in that fashion?

[Elodie]

There is a trainee in tvpaint offices this summer and she will draw a genga for our guide

[D.T. Nethery]

Something I don't quite understand is why the Japanese system still draws all these color separations on a single layer , with multiple colors ... it is easier to manage with the system Nathan describes: "put my red/blue lines on another layer than my cleanup and just add it as a source on my ctg layer (that way it's easier to erase it afterward). So you can have the line quality you want for your cleanup, with the brush you want, that means a lot more expressivity and possibilities than vector drawing apps. "

I understand this is a hold-over from the old days of using cels , so the inkers and cel painters could look at the color separations drawn on the original drawings as a guide to coloring the cels , but working digitally in TVPaint this makes it more difficult to post-process the scanned drawings.

I find that once I have run the Color Scan Cleaner on the drawings and get them to this state, the areas shaded in yellow and green are difficult to fill and it is difficult to cleanly eliminate the yellow and green areas (getting rid of the red and blue lines is easier with Sketch Panel red X and blue X . ).




.

[Elodie]

Something I don't quite understand is why the Japanese system still draws all these color separations on a single layer

Well, I think you just cannot imagine how hard it is to change their habits.
During my last trip in Japan, a very nice guy explained me why :

In Japan, there is a very strong hierarchy to follow, which depends on your age and your experience (especially in old studios).
A young person will never be a key animator, even if (s)he is very talented. (S)he will always start with the most annoying tasks (like in-betweens) and years after years, (s)he will have more responsibilities and can become a key animator, 10 or 20 years later.

Current key animators in Japan usually have 40, 50 years and are so used to work with such a method, that changing it is hardly imaginable.
The new generation, more used to digital process (or not... actually, I even met a 19-old guy who could barely use a computer), have to wait their turn to be old and influent enough to change it.

An example : since storyboard artist generation has changed, many storyboards are now made digitally (and so does lay out). But, since animators want to work on paper, lay outs have to be printed.

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Of course, this explanation works for very old and traditional studios, but it's not an absolute rule
There are fairly new studios, made by young people who are more keen to change their habits, and there are also old traditional studios which are not so "freezed" in their workflow.

[Paul Fierlinger]

This sounds like people in the West who can't stop using the other side of the stylus to erase with. I often wonder if they still chew on that end.

[slowtiger]

Habits are hard to break. I see this every time with my students.

[Jet]

Hi, I took part in that thread and a long time user of Retas. Unfortunately your method described here is far from being a solution and I hope you will take the time to understand why. This isn’t to do with traditions, this is now part of a much more modern process.

The way Retas works is it includes the color separation lines as part OF the color fill rather than using the line to approximate a color boundary under the line. I used your drawing above to demonstrate. In this gif below you can clearly see the level of control we have over those lines. This makes the process not only incredibly fast but also reliably accurate because we know which color will take the lines place.



Now in the gif below I paint some sharp angles using CTG in TVP. The first problem is we have no idea which side of the color will take the place of the color separation line. Will it be the base or the shadow? The second problem is that CTG doesn’t handle sharp angles very well. You'll see those a lot in anime, especially on the hair.



I know this may appear trivial to some people but whether it is me, colleagues or other animators that talk about this coloring method it is often not taken seriously. I've had people from Toon Boom tell me "Harmony can do this if you do XYZ" when it doesn't get close. For a long time where I worked we were using a script created by someone from Adobe that replicated this method in Photoshop. When I spoke to someone from CACANi before the software launch I was told they have already spoken to Japanese studios and this method is a key feature. It would be a huge step forward if it was also added to TVP.

My Solution (a feature request)

I have a way of achieving the same level of accuracy as Retas that is able to replace and include color separation lines in TVP as part of the fill action, the only downside is it takes on average twice as long as Retas, but you could remedy that quite simply I think as I describe below.

So instead of using CTG we use the Fill Tool. Draw your blue separation lines on a separate layer, this layer will become the shadow color layer later.



Take the Fill Tool and grab the same color blue as the separation line and fill as if you were coloring your shadows like normal (on the blue separation line layer). You’ll end up with this:



As you can see compared to CTG we have maintained all our extreme angles and we have achieved the same accuracy as Retas by including the separation line as part of the fill. The next step is to Preserve Transparency to the shadow layer, set the Fill Tools Gap Closer number to 0 and click on the Blue Area to fill with your intended shadow color, since the area is now all the same color it will be easy for TVP to replace. You will end up with this:



Perfect! All TVP needs to do is automate this process. For example by adding this to the Fill Tool Settings:



Those three colors should correspond to the same colors in the RGB Sketch Panel. The way it would function is like this:

> Select your intended Shadow Color in the A/BPen [Skin Shadow for example]
> Tick the Blue Box under Include Color Line
> Click the area you want to fill
> TVP will fill with blue FIRST which combines the fill area and the lines as one shape [Using Normal Settings]
> Then it turns ON Preserve Transparency to the layer
> Forces Gap Closer to 0
> Then it Fills with the A/BPen Color using the Expand setting in the Include Color Line box (or a forced value)
> Then it turns OFF Preserve Transparency to the Layer
> END

If you could nail that down to a single click then that would be it. All you need to do is select the shadow layer or highlight layer when you tick those boxes and you have exactly what Retas gives as a result, to the pixel.

Please consider it.

[Elodie]

Thanks for this very, very interesting feedback.

This isn’t to do with traditions, this is now part of a much more modern process.

Sorry, I did a digression.
Actually, I was mainly answering David about "put yellow scribbles on gengas to say "shadow here"".

In Japanim, there are things done by habits and habits are hard to change (and I don't have the pretension to say -or even think- the way TVPaint works is better than other software : I had the opportunity to see how Retas works and it's, indeed, an amazing software for ink and paint !)

As you can see compared to CTG we have maintained all our extreme angles and we have achieved the same accuracy as Retas by including the separation line as part of the fill. The next step is to Preserve Transparency to the shadow layer, set the Fill Tools Gap Closer number to 0 and click on the Blue Area to fill with your intended shadow color, since the area is now all the same color it will be easy for TVP to replace. You will end up with this:

Yes, CTG is not perfect since in the algorithm, there are some mistakes due to a simple thing : it was not imagined to work in this or that case. (For example, with 1px aliased lines)
We cannot fix it easily, since it brings bugs elsewhere. We did not give up, but it will need more time than a simple "bug fix"

Perfect! All TVP needs to do is automate this process. For example by adding this to the Fill Tool Settings:

That's an interesting feature request. There is definitely something to think about.

Oh, and welcome here by the way

[ten_zero]

00.jpg

Excuse me to explain about Scan Creaner with Shadow/Shade line hand drawing in Japanese language.
I challenged to translate in English language for few weeks but I could not by my study skill ( poorly ).

Spoiler : written in Japanese :

以下、このトピックに投稿されていたサンプルを加工して説明します。

a.jpg

影指定は作画用紙の「表」と「裏」、両面から行います。
紙の両面に描かれた情報をスキャニングすることは出来ても、スキャナーに紙の「裏表」まで認識させるのは無理があります。
そこでSCANMANは予め登録された「影指定色」を色域選択・分離することでデジタル化します。

b01.jpg

紙の表面

b02.jpg

紙の裏面

b03.jpg

レイヤーに「裏表」の概念がないフルデジタル作画ではどうするのでしょう？
一例として、特定のソフトに依存しない、デジタル漫画やイラスト向けのマスク（選択範囲）切りをとりあげましょう：

c01.jpg

c02.jpg

c03.jpg

c04.jpg

以上のレイヤーは全て32bitモード・２値に変換されています。
RETAS STUDIO英語版に関する記事を検索すると「主線・彩色レイヤーを２値化する事に意味はあるのか？」「無駄手間じゃないかなぁ…」等々、皆さん疑問を持たれてますね。ここではっきりお答えしましょう。「２値変換は必須事項です」。

日本のスタジオでは、作画のアナログ・デジタル作業を問わず、あらゆる素材をAdobe After Effects上にまとめてから仕上げ・撮影・編集を行います。AfterEffectsには数多くの専用プラグインが追加されており、その大半が主線・彩色レイヤーの２値情報を元に計算されます。何故でしょう？
何十階調ものアンチエイリアス情報を解析しながらポストエフェクトを行うよりも、「０か１か」単純・明解な２値データをソースとして一括処理した方が速いからです。長篇・大作・フルアニメーション作品相手になれば、何倍・何十倍もの差になるのですよ。

プラグインの一例（OLM Digital R&D products / OLM Open Tools free edition）：
　http://www.olm.co.jp/rd/technology/tools/?lang=en
　http://www.olm.co.jp/opentools/olmlogin.php?lang=en

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