Autodesk 62205-051408-9001 User Guide - Page 420

16 Introduction to Paint Combustion vector-based Paint has dozens of applications: for drawing, rotoscoping, cloning, and revealing; for emulation of 2D cel animation. It's easy to use on its own, on top of a single image, or over a composite clip. About Paint Paint is an interactive, vector-based and objectoriented drawing operator that you apply to a layer as you would apply other operators to a layer. It enables you to perform a wide range of painting tasks from simple retouching, to motion tracking, to full cartoon animation. As with other painting-type software packages, there are tools for creating paint strokes, geometric shapes, text, selections, and masks. The Paint module also enables you to create a variety of custom brushes from Paint, particles, or from footage. With Paint, however, you typically create projects for painting on changing video frames, not on a still. Therefore, you need to make your Paint objects move to follow the action in a scene. For instance, if you want to change the color of a subject's eyes by drawing over them with light-blue brush strokes, it is not enough to change them on one image only. You have to change the eye color on each frame, and the brush strokes have to follow the movement of the eyes from frame to frame. You could manually apply paint strokes to each frame, but, thanks to the object-based nature of brush strokes in Paint, you can create the strokes for one frame, then move them (or track them!) for the successive frames so they follow the motion of the eyes. Only when the subject blinks do you need to actually change the brush strokes, and even then, you could make the brush stroke objects transparent for the "blink" frames. You apply the Paint operator to a selected layer (or group of layers) in a similar manner as you would apply a plug-in. You can access the Paint operator via the Operators menu and Operators panel. You can also access the Paint operator via the Workspace panel, the Timeline, and the Schematic view through a contextual menu. As with all other operators in Combustion, you can go back into the Paint operator at any point in the compositing process and modify the objects. Although the Paint operator gives you access to all the drawing tools, there are three other drawing operators from which you can access specific drawing tools: the selection operator, the mask operator, and the Text operator. Choose the various selection operators to use selection tools only. For information on selection tools and the selection operators, see Chapter 19, "Paint: Drawing Selections''. Choose the mask operators to access a simplified version of Paint from which you can only use mask tools. For information on mask tools and the mask operators, see Chapter 10, "Using Masks''. Choose the Text operator to create text objects and group all your objects under the same operator. If you do not want your text object to be a mask or a selection object, if you do not want to use your text object for cloning or to export it as . swf file format, choose the Text operator. For information, see Chapter 20, "Animating Text''. 404