User manual COREL PAINTER IX - ACADEMIC COURSEWARE

Academic Courseware Animation by Joyce Ryan Copyright 2001-2004 Corel Corporation. All rights reserved. The content of this document and the associated Corel Painter software are the property of Corel Corporation and its respective licensors, and are protected by copyright. Corel, the Corel logo, Corel Painter, and Corel PHOTO-PAINT are trademarks or registered trademarks of Corel Corporation and/or its subsidiaries in Canada, the U.S. and/or other countries. Adobe and Photoshop are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Apple, Mac OS, and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. QuickTime is a trademark used under license. QuickTime is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Indeo and Intel are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Netscape Navigator is a registered trademark of Netscape Communications Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. TARGA is a registered trademark of Pinnacle Systems, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Cinepak is a registered trademark of Radius, Inc. Wacom is a registered trademark of Wacom Company, Ltd. Other product and company names and logos may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Academic Courseware Table of contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii Jargon 101: The Technical Terms Every Animator Needs to Know1 The Storyboard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Digital Ink and Paint Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 The Background Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 The Write-on . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Saving and Exporting Movies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 Animating with Strokes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65 Rotoscoping with Corel Painter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71 The Power of Scripting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 3-D Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87 Vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Academic Courseware: Joyce Ryan i Academic Courseware: Joyce Ryan ii Foreword In 1972, I got my first taste of "computer art." My husband John and I were students at the Rhode Island School of Design. John got involved in an experiment at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University had started to encourage art students to collaborate with computer science students. John was led into a frigid room that housed gigantic machines that seemed to eat punched cards for fuel. Most of the artists in the program quickly lost interest. The thought of feeding punch cards in, one at a time, to plot out a black-and-white drawing made of alphanumeric characters didn't seem all that appealing. John, who was studying Graphic Design at the time and liked anything to do with turning type into pictures, thought this might have some real potential. He ended up using all of his allotted time and most of the other artists' time as well. In those days it cost several hundred dollars an hour to use the computers. Moving forward to the mid 1980's. I was working with Washington University to develop a program of study that would introduce artists to computers. John and I were the only artists they had ever heard of who had any involvement with computers. I was already going to attend Siggraph, so I kept an eye out for some software that would meet the needs of such an academic program. I saw the big 3-D modeling systems, but was most impressed when I came across the first "paint" system I'd ever seen. It was by a small company called Time Arts, Inc. and it used a pressure-sensitive tablet with a special graphics card that allowed the computer to display 256 colors. Far beyond the punch cards from college, I could now actually draw and paint with the computer, and in color! This was the tool I needed to start my program at Washington University. As excited as I was, that was about how unimpressed the arts faculty were with the idea of drawing and painting on a computer. My program got a lot of criticism for being "unnatural" or superfluous. One or two brave souls came around, but mostly the faculty could not imagine why anyone would want to try to make art with a computer. I threw myself into learning this software inside and out, and was learning even more by teaching my students. This was the beginning of the computer graphics program in the art school at Washington University. The more I learned, the more I wanted to meet the people Academic Courseware: Joyce Ryan iii who had written this wonderful software. I had ideas for tools I wanted them to make especially for animators. My next stop was the Time Arts offices in Santa Rosa, California, where I first met, among many talented artists, programmers and engineers, John Derry, who was destined to become one of the co-creators of Painter. The people I met were pursuing a goal--to replicate natural media with a computer. I fell in love with their work, made some of the best friends of my life, and eventually joined the company in an 8-year relationship, first as a software reseller, then eventually as an animation consultant, software trainer, demo artist and interface designer. I wanted to take what I knew about conventional animation techniques and apply it to the computer. It has been my passion ever since. Jump ahead again and it is now 2004 and I am teaching Digital Ink and Paint at the Art Institute of Atlanta. I am demonstrating Corel® PainterTM to my class. I ask my students how many of them remember seeing the scene in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" where the children are shown lickable wallpaper. Willy Wonka excitedly tells them to lick the wallpaper, that the strawberries taste like strawberries, the pineapple tastes like pineapple, and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries--but the children had never heard of or tasted "snozzberries." The snozzberries had to be magic. I then showed my students the watercolor brushes in Painter that acted like watercolor, the chalk that acted like chalk, and then the brushes that acted like nothing they had ever seen before. The Image Hose that painted with donuts. The brush that painted with metal. And how it could all be used to make animation. For that moment we were all as excited as children tasting "snozzberries" for the first time. The fruit not from a bush or a tree, but from an inventor's imagination! I wish to thank my husband John for contributing so much of his artwork and support while I was writing these chapters. I want to thank my son Lucas for his comments and insight. I want to thank my students at the Art Institute of Atlanta for letting me test my tutorials on them. I want especially to thank all the good people at Corel who supported this book and who continue to develop Painter, pushing the envelope of what it can do. They just keep making it better--it must be magic. Joyce N. Ryan, 2004 Academic Courseware: Joyce Ryan iv Chapter 1 Jargon 101: The Technical Terms Every Animator Needs to Know Always check to make sure you are working at the right size before starting any project. Check the preset sizes in your editing software, or talk with your video editor, film editor, Web developer or service bureau. Before beginning an animation project, you must consider the final format your work will be displayed in. Are you working for film, video, or the Web? Will any of the animation frames ever need to be resized for print? Setting the correct size, shape, and resolution for your project from the start is critical to its success. Typically, if you are working for film and video, you might work at 720 x 486 pixels (standard NTSC video). If you are making an animated comp in QuickTime®, or an AVI to run on your computer, 320 x 240 usually works well. Storyboard panel formatted for television. TV cut-off and safe titling If you are creating animation for television or film, you must make sure that your type is not cropped by the shape of the screen, and that nothing vital in your image is lost. The rule of thumb for layout purposes is to crop a 12-field layout, 1.5 inches all around for TV cutoff, and 2 inches around for title safe. Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 1 A field guide or "graticule" helps the animator plan a layout. 35mm film layout is based on a proportion of 1:1.376 (known as the Academy Ratio). This typically yields a size of 12 x 8.72 inches. For television, this format varies slightly. Typically, an aspect ratio of 4:3 corresponds to the NTSC standard. The degree to which TV cut-off crops the field depends on the make, model, and age of the TV set. TV layout based on a 4:3 aspect ratio indicating TV cut-off and title safe for a standard NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) television broadcast. Scanning for animation If you draw your animation by hand, you will have to scan it into Corel Painter. Your drawing should be created at the correct dimensions (width to height) for your animation. Ten seconds of animation at 30 frames per second can translate into 300 drawings if you create one drawing for every frame of video. It is critical to scan efficiently to handle that volume of artwork. If you are scanning in art to use as final renderings in your animation, you will scan at 72 dpi in RGB at 720 x 486 for NTSC video. However, if you are scanning in to trace, reference, or make a rough pencil test of your motion, get into the habit of scanning at 72 dpi in grayscale, so that your files are small and scan quickly. Depending on your drawings, you may even scan them in as black-and-white line art; the drawings will look jaggy, but if you are only using them as reference to trace from in Corel Painter, that is all you need. This will give you files that take up the least amount of storage space on your computer. Tape an animation peg bar to your scanner, so that all your drawings are scanned in perfect alignment (registration) to one another. Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 2 Each scanner has a different interface, so you may have to explore a little to find the settings you need. If you have to increase the size of an image, the best place to do that is on the scanner; blowing up a bitmap in a software program is always a bad idea. "Paint" = Bitmaps, "Draw" = Vectors Computers handle images in two ways: as bitmaps, or as vector images (also known as object-oriented graphics). When working with objects and vectors, the computer keeps a "display list" that describes a series of points in space and their attributes. What size should you work at? That depends on your finished product. Will the artwork ever be used for other purposes? Remember, it is always easy to make the image smaller, but it is very difficult to make it bigger. The rough draft for the fish was done in Corel PHOTO-PAINT®. Once the client approved it, the image was recreated with shapes so it could easily be resized for various uses. Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 3 The finished design created with vectors. Unlike vector images, bitmaps cannot always be easily resized without loss of quality. Bitmaps are resolutiondependent. If you blow up pixels, they just look more obvious. Note what happens to the letters when they are blown up. It is all right to reduce a bitmap, but it is almost never acceptable to enlarge one. Understanding vectors A vector is a mathematical description of a location in space; as such, it has no actual size. Images described by vectors are resolutionindependent. They can be rendered at any size and maintain their image quality. The image file only contains a list of vectors and display properties, making vector-based (object-oriented) files very small compared to bitmaps. Eventually, the file has to be converted to a bitmap output. When it is sent to a printer, the raster image processor Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 4 (RIP) usually handles that task. The display adapter in your computer interprets the image as a bitmap of pixels on your monitor. Some "Paint" programs like Corel Painter and Adobe® Photoshop® let you import vector graphics and turn them into bitmaps ("rasterize" them) so they can be embellished with paint effects. Corel Painter combines the best of both worlds by letting the artist work with both bitmaps and vectorbased objects. Vector-based graphics are easy to resize with no loss of quality. However, they tend to have a somewhat flat graphic style to them. If you want a painterly look, you will not be satisfied with working only with vectors. An image like this one would be impossible to create with vectors. Understanding bitmaps Everything in graphics output eventually becomes a bitmap. Bitmap files are large! They have to be--the computer must keep track of the color values of every pixel that makes up the image, not just vectors and attributes. Bitmaps are also resolution-dependent. If you blow up pixels, they just look more obvious. To make a bitmapped image large and smooth, you have to have a finer grid of pixels defining the image. For best results, you must create your image at the correct resolution, or higher. A bitmap is a rectangular grid of dots used to describe an image. It has four basic characteristics: · Dimension · Resolution · Bit depth · Color model Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 5 Resolution The word "resolution" can be used to describe different things. Spatial resolution -- describes the dimensions of an image in width and height. Color resolution -- often referred to as "color depth" or "bit depth"; refers to how many colors are available to define the image. Scanner resolution -- refers to the number of dots per inch (DPI). If you have to enlarge an image, it should be done on the scanner and not in Corel Painter. DPI is also used for the resolution of printers, describing how many dots per inch the printer can apply to the paper. Screen resolution -- refers to the number of pixels per inch (PPI). Computer monitors can be set for different screen resolutions. The setting determines how many pixels the monitor can display. A large monitor can accommodate a high setting. A small monitor may be easier to see at a lower setting. Line frequency -- also known as "screen frequency"; refers to the number of lines per inch (LPI) that a halftone screen uses to break down a continuous tone image into printable dots for reproduction on a printing press. Low line frequency (large dots) is used for porous papers like newsprint. Coated stock can hold more detail and can take a higher line frequency. Always ask your service bureau what LPI you should be working at. So how do we understand all these different references to resolution? It's all about dots--the dots just come in different flavors! Whenever people are talking about "resolution," they are talking about a grid of dots that are assigned or mapped to a given space, usually measured in inches or centimeters. The more dots you put in an inch, the more detailed the image will be--it will have a "higher rez." Some software, games, and Web sites will stipulate the ideal settings for your monitor, so that you can see the images as they were intended. An image must be broken into dots with a halftone screen to print on a commercial printing press. When you are creating an animation with Corel Painter, consider · the type of animation you are producing, Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 6 · the requirements of any systems that will process the animation when you are finished with it in Corel Painter, · the final delivery medium of the animation (video, film, Web, CD, QuickTime, AVI, etc.). Dimensions or spatial resolution Bitmaps have two dimensions. They are grids containing picture elements (pixels). The dimensions of a bitmap are described by the number of pixels the bitmap is high and the number of pixels the bitmap is wide. spatial resolution = width x height The spatial resolution of a bitmapped image is based on how many pixels in the grid make up each unit of measurement. In Corel Painter, you are working in pixels per inch (PPI). In other words, if you have a one-inch grid, how many pixels is this grid broken up into: 72, 96, or maybe 300? Which would look sharper and have more detail, the 1" grid described by 76 pixels or the 1" grid described by 300 pixels? The PPI doesn't tell you anything about the actual size of the grid. Compare resolution and zooming Look at an image file and note its resolution. Let's say it is 720 x 486 pixels and has a resolution of 72 ppi. Zoom in on it 200%. It looks twice as big, but it is still only 720 x 486 pixels. You have made the pixels of the grid look bigger, but you have not added more pixels to the grid, so the resolution has not increased. PC's typically default to 96 ppi, and Macintosh® computers default to 72 ppi. Television sets default to 72 ppi. A liquid crystal display (LCD) screen may be set brighter than a cathode ray tube (CRT) one. Apple® computers typically default to a brighter screen gamma than PC's. When designing for the Web, developers typically test their work on both platforms. If you are working in video, you will also want to look at your work on a video monitor. Increase screen resolution Increase the resolution of your monitor to see what happens. The icons on your desktop look smaller. Why? Color resolution A bit (binary digit) can describe two states: on and off, black and white, 0 and 1, etc. If 1 bit = 2 colors, 2 bits give you 4 colors, and 8 bits give you 256 colors. That's 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 = 256, or 2 to the power of 8 (28). At 24 bits of information, you have over 16.7 million colors to work with. Each pixel is made of three components: Red, Green and Blue, or RGB for short. We have 8 bits of color for each component, or 256 levels of Red, 256 levels of Green and 256 levels of Blue. Multiply 256 x 256 x 256, and you get 16,777,216 colors. You now know why Corel Painter and other software programs display RGB in values of 0 to 255. If each of the three RGB colors has 8 bits, the image needs 24 bits Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 7 for all the colors. But what does it mean when you are working with a 32-bit image? What are those other 8 bits for, if they're not needed to display the RGB colors? They are used for transparency. Certain file formats support "alpha channels." Having an 8-bit alpha channel means that you can have 256 levels of transparency in your image. Color resolution, or bit depth, affects not only the file size (fewer colors means fewer bits), but also the smoothness of the color gradations in an image. There is an important difference between displayable and definable color. If you have 24 bits of color, you can define over 16.7 million colors. If your display is set for 1024 x 768, you only have 786,432 pixels, so you can only display 786,432 colors out of a possible 16.7 million. This image has excellent color resolution. Here is the same image using only 60 colors (it has decreased color depth). Look closely at the green boat and the clouds; notice how the colors are simplified. This effect is called "posterization." Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 8 A common trick used to save on file size is to lower the color resolution of an image. Depending on the image, it can be hard to tell the difference between an 8-bit image and a 24-bit image on the screen. This TIFF file takes up 600 KB of storage space. This GIF file takes only 60 KB of storage space. Compare output colors Let's look at an image at different bit depths in Corel Painter using the GIF file format. 1 In Corel Painter, open a new file, 100 x 100 pixels at a resolution of 72 ppi. 2 Set the paper color to pure red in the RGB values by setting the red to 255 and the green and blue to 0. Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 9 NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) is often jokingly referred to as "Never Twice the Same Color." Video can't display the pure bright red you see on a computer monitor. That is why you want to look at your work on an NTSC monitor if you are working for video. Corel Painter has a special filter that ensures your animation will be compatible with both NTSC for the U.S. and Pal (Phase Alternation by Line) for European video systems. 3 Go to Effects > Tonal Control > Video Legal Colors. Choose NTSC. Notice how different the red looks in NTSC. When you have finished making a movie, you can also run a script in Corel Painter that will apply the NTSC filter and convert your movie to video-safe colors. Visually reduce the number of colors in an image 1 Choose File > Save As and name your image file. Choose the GIF file format, and click Save. Click OK to dismiss the layer warning, if displayed. 2 In the Save As GIF Options dialog box, in the Number of Colors area, choose 256 colors. In the preview window, the image appears in 256 colors. 3 Change the number of colors to 128. In the preview window, the image appears in 128 colors. Continue reducing the number of colors Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 10 in the graphic until you find the minimum number of colors necessary for adequate display of your image on a Web page. 4 Choose an Imaging Method. Choose Quantize To Nearest Color if you want Corel Painter to look at each pixel for which it doesn't have the exact color and pick the nearest color for it from the available colors. Choose Dither Colors if you want Corel Painter to apply a pattern to the colors chosen to generate a more accurate, less banded result. In this case, Corel Painter will approximate the color of a larger area of the image, rather than individual pixel colors. 5 You can now either save the graphic to use it on a Web page, or return to Corel Painter to continue working on the image. Resolution for video In Corel Painter, when we start a new file, we see a dialog box that requires us to enter a resolution in pixels per inch (PPI), or pixels per centimeter. These pixels represent the number of blocks per inch making up the grid of the bitmap. In video, the default screen resolution is 72 ppi. In addition, it is critical to know the width and height, or spatial resolution necessary for the format you are working in. Resolution for print The RGB model can describe 256 levels of gray. Remember those gray scales you did? How hard it was to create a gray scale with ten steps, with twenty? Look at this grayscale strip--it is made of 256 levels of gray. Can you tell the difference between all 256 shades of gray? Most job printing presses can't reproduce much more than 100 levels of gray. Fine printers can do better if they use top quality materials and papers, and highly controlled press conditions. Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 11 Create a grayscale gradient In Corel Painter, open a new file, 640 x 100 pixels at a resolution of 72 ppi. Fill it with a grayscale gradation from white to black. How many shades of gray can you see? Zoom in on the gradient and examine it closely. If you have your own printer (ink-jet, laser, etc.), you should know the printer DPI. If you don't, check your printer documentation or the printer properties, or check with the manufacturer. If you are using a service bureau, they should tell you what LPI to work at--ask! If they don't know, use a different service bureau! The rule of sixteen Let's say you want to print out your storyboard for a big client presentation. There will be several people in the room and you want it to look good from a distance and also upon close examination. A highquality look is important to impress the client. You created the storyboard at 72 ppi, and it looked fine on your monitor. When you printed it out, it looked awful! What happened? There weren't enough pixels per printed dot to give you a good-looking print. You need higher resolution for print than you do for video. How do you find out how much higher? You already know it is possible to display 256 levels of gray in RGB. Now you need to know the highest screen frequency (LPI) you should be working at, given the capabilities of your printer. To arrive at the LPI value, divide your printer DPI by 16 and multiply by 2. Here is a simple example. My ink-jet printer has a resolution of 1440 dpi. If I divide that by 16, 1440 ÷ 16 = 90. The rule of thumb is that I need 2 pixels per printed dot to get a nice-looking image from my printer. I multiply 90 x 2, and set my resolution at 180 ppi. This should give me a full range of tones and a beautiful print on photo glossy paper from my ink-jet printer. There is no LPI to worry about in video. Video defaults to 72 pixels per inch. The important thing to know is the spatial resolution--the size of the image as measured by its width and height. The screen resolution is going to default to 72 ppi for video and the Web, but you need to know the spatial resolution of your final output, in order to create your animation at the correct dimensions and aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height). Academic Courseware: Chapter 1 Joyce Ryan 12