Drawing Fills

[mystd]

Is it possible to draw my own fills? I have all these different brushes but it seems I can only use them for Strokes, I'd rather use them for the fills.

[slowtiger]

Just create some strokes on top of your fill area.

I think this tutorial covers that approach: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=27899#p167166

[hayasidist]

another approach I use is to make a "texture" from the brush strokes and overlay the colour on that: Exactly how depends on how "inside the lines" / total coverage I need but (for example)

group: masking hide all
> vector3 block of base colour(s) I want the brush - blend mode overlay - mask this layer
> vector2 strokes from my brush - set line width / curvatures as needed - stroke colour around mid grey - mask this layer
> vector1 (maybe copy be ref of vector3; or other shape as required) - add to mask - maybe keep invisible

In vector2 stroke grey 808080 leaves the colour in vector3 unchanged; towards white (e.g. 909090) makes the stroke lighter; towards black (e.g. 707070) makes the stroke darker

hope that helps

[mystd]

Hmm looks complicated and doing complicated workarounds is not my thing, maybe when I get better with AS. I'll just have to go with bitmaps for now then.

Hope drawing fills with brushes will become a feature soon. It's kinda wasted on the strokes it would be much better to draw fills with the brushes.

[Greenlaw]

I would render out a a pattern and just use the Image Texture fill effect. If you make it seamless, Image Texture can take advantage of that, so you can keep the size smaller.

The only 'drawback' is that you can't deform an Image Texture. You can, however, transform it and link the transformations to a Smart Bone. I does this routinely for characters and rigs I make at work, and it's great for cheating 3D movement with detailed character 'pelts'.

Alternatively, you can make or import a textured image and mask it. This works well enough and you can even deform the texture with bones. The downside here is that it can block direct Workspace access to a Switch Layers list using the Ctrl-Alt Shift-Right click shortcut. For this reason, I usually prefer using the Image Texture effect instead.

I guess the next question is vector or bitmap for the fills. If you go the layer masking route, you can use either, but vector may possibly be more efficient if you need to cover a large area--it really depends on the complexity of the fill art. Personally, I'd go for bitmap--the downside may be that you'll need a very large bitmap but I find that ASP handles large bitmaps very efficiently--better than most other animation programs I use. In fact, many of the characters I work with these days have several 3k textures as fills and I can still animate them smoothly with full interactivity.

For Image Texture, you must to use bitmap. If you have a vector image you wish to use, be sure to render it out at the appropriate resolutions. Also, Image Texture works best with a full image, so if you have an image with a lot of empty transparent space around it, you should probably crop it. If you want transparency in the fill image, be sure use PNG.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Whoa! Wait, correction: I just re-read what I wrote above and Image Texture can most certainly be deformed. I don't why I wrote that because I actually deform Image Texture all the time.

To clarify, textures can be deformed by bones. However, textures cannot be deformed using point animation by itself (i.e., not using bones.) This is true when using either fill method described above. That said, using basic transforms with a texture is still a good way to simulate 3D qualities.

Sorry, that's what happens when I start typing in the morning before drinking coffee.

[mystd]

Thanks for all the tips I'll need a while to try out everything.