Colour Styling: Creating a Night Palette
A character usually has one colour palette, but sometimes, you might want to have a set of different colour shades for different ambiances, such as: night, sunny, rainy or cold. It is time-consuming to repaint everything and having two independent palettes is not really efficient. As an alternative, Toon Boom Digital Pro provides the clone palettes.
The clone palette is a special copy of the master palette. The colours in each palette have the same identification number pointing to the same colour zones, but the names and RGBA values can be modified. Depending on the active palette (master or clone), the drawing’s colours will automatically update in consequence. So there is no need to repaint the animation, but simply to load the right clone palette (palette style).
The night palette is a popular choice when a scene or sequence changes from day to night. In this article, you will learn how to create a night colour style from a character’s master palette, using the Clone Palette feature.
Refer to the Basic Concepts chapter of the Toon Boom Digital Pro Introduction and Basic book to learn more about Colours and Palettes.
What Do You Need to Create a Night Palette Style?
You need the following:
- A Colour Model
- A Master Palette
Colour Model and Master Palette
Before starting to create a night palette style for a character, you need to have a colour model, which is a representative drawing of your character painted with its master palette. You will also need the character’s master palette to apply the Clone Palette feature on it to create the new style palette.
Refer to the Colour Styling and Colour Model chapter of the Toon Boom Digital Pro User Guide to learn more about Colour Models and Master Palettes.
Creating a Night Colour Style
You are now ready to create a night colour style from your character’s master palette.
To create a night colour style:
- Display your drawing in the Camera view.
- In the palette list, select your character’s master palette.
- Click on the Colour view Menu button and select Palettes > Clone.
The Palette Browser: Clone Palette dialog box opens.
- In the Palette Name field, enter a name for your palette. It is recommended to keep the ″-clone″ in the name.
- Click on the OK button.
- In the palette list, select your clone palette.
- In the Colour view, click on the Menu button and select Palette > Tint Panel.
The Blend/Offset Tint Panel dialog box opens.
- In the colour list, click on a colour and select all your colours swatches with the keyboard shortcut [Ctrl] + [A] (Windows) or [CMD KEY] + [A] (Mac OS X).
- Make sure the mode is set to Blend.
- In order to see the changes on your drawing in the Camera view as you adjust the different sliders, you
must make sure that the Preview option is enabled.
- Adjust the Amount slider, to select the desired intensity of the colour blending.
- Adjust the HSV/RGB sliders to select the desired colour to be blended in. The colour swatch at the top
right of the dialog box, shows the selected colour.
- Click on the Apply button.
Your character’s night palette is now ready to use.
By default, Toon Boom Digital Pro uses the first palette in the list for the scene. To switch from day to
night palette, simply change the ordering of the Palette list using the Move Up / Move Down buttons.
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