Smart Palette

did you know that if you choose a color from your palette and “paint” it on a Vector layer you’ll now have the ability to change your paint color by changing your palette? Let’s say you draw a ball on a Vector layer, during 12 frames, and then fill it with the blue color from your palette, if you want to change the ball color to green, you don’t have to go frame-by-frame re-filling the ball with green, instead, by just changing the “blue” color on your palette to “green” will do that!!

It’s called “Smart Palette” and it’s one of the things softwares like ToonBoom be announcing in their newest realese…And Pencil have it! :wink:

@zzdas : I didn’t know Pencil had already the feature (before the Pencil2D fork) but I suggested it to Matt and he worked on it ! It’s a great feature which I’ve always missed in Flash. However, I think it is implemented in Toon Boom since several years ? I have the impression I already used it. Anyway, killer feature !

Hi @ZZDas

It is not working here… perhaps because there is still a bug concerning to the fill tool under vector layers.
Nevertheless, it IS really really a nice feature.
@admin, yeah it is already implemented in ToonBoon (it is one of the things that GOT ones´s attention :slight_smile: )

That’s groovy! This is the sort of feature that should be promoted when describing what pencil can do =o)

There was an initial redraw issue on Windows, when i was on a different layer and changed the palette, but i seem to have a lot of redraw issues in various programs in virtualbox =oP

@kaiko: It seems weird that it doesn’t work for you…i checked it out on all of my builds, back to the 0.5 Morevna, and it was working on all of them. The only windows version i have is the july 30 nightly, but it worked there, too.

@Admin

Just like Mikshaw said, all version i’ve used have it.

Yes ToonBoom did have it but the point was that they still announcing it on their new releases proofing that it still a hot feature! and we got here [insert proud smile here]

@Kaiko try it on a new project, i don’t remember having any issues on Windows…

Back in the indexed color palette video game days, the hardware could only show a subset of all colors at once. On DOS PCs of the time, VGA Mode 13h (and Mode X, its slightly weirder cousin) could only show 256 colors at once. Artists picked their colors carefully, and techniques like dithering were applied to give the impression of more colors where there were actually fewer, but some enterprising programmers realized that if they designed their sprites carefully, they could create animation by changing which color was in each slot of the palette.

Someone put together a series of demos that run in modern HTML 5-capable browsers, thanks to the canvas element: Old School Color Cycling with HTML 5. Check it out! Click on the “Show options” button so you can see the palette as it cycles through setups. Pretty amazing, right?

I think it’d be cool to have a Pencil2D Community Color Cycling Contest :slight_smile:

@oluseyi_s

wow…that’s amazing O_O

@mikshaw

Pretty cool, eh? What’s really interesting is that the GIF format maps almost perfectly onto the constraints I was describing: 256-color palette, 8 bits per pixel, 24-bit colorspace (RGB), separate palette per frame. So a color cycling competition would only require people to submit GIFs, and they could simply be judged based on how smoothly the colors in the palette cycle. If you see random palette cycling, then clearly it’s just a rendered image, but if you see smooth transitions—the color of entry N at frame F is the color of entry N+1 at frame F+1—then it’s properly color cycled. And the longer the chain of cycled entries, or the more chains used, the better the score.

Hmm… I’d write the judging program this weekend (for the web!), but I’m out of town. Maybe next week :slight_smile:

That’s really cool…

But in order to do that with Pencil, one should use bitmap layer since changing the color palette on a vector layer cause the whole animation frames to change accordingly, right?

Damn, that’s some serious stuff going on there

@zzdas: Or you’d end up with a LOT of layers… :stuck_out_tongue:

@mikshaw,
[I almost didn’t recognize you… new avatar!.. how did you manage to keep the same avatar here and on the Issues´s site?]

@mikshaw, @ZZDas,
How can I step the SmartPalette? I just did as follow but without result
Open Pencil. Select vector layer. Draw a ball on the first frame. Filled with a colour. Copy and past it along 10 frames (the easy way :)). From this point I am not sure what to do to get it right.
Any help step?

I have tried a New project. Using build 31July

@oluseyi_s
Nice information.
How can I get the “Show options” you mentioned above? Are you talking abut the image with the waterfall, on the link?

About the Contest, is this done in Pencil?
it sounds really nice!

Ohhh!.. I saw by your comment to @ZZDas that it is not done inside Pencil

@kaiko

After filling your shapes, make sure the fill color you used is selected in the palette, then adjust the color sliders above the palette to change the selected color.

re avatar: I just uploaded the same image to both here and gravatar (I find gravatar to be somewhat overly complicated, but i hate having a generic avatar)

@mikshaw,
Thank you. I was no even close to that :slight_smile: I was trying to change the colour by selecting the swatches of colour!.. No wonder how…

Everything OK now. Fantastic save-time feature!

(I was tented to get the same avatar on both sites, but as you mentioned it was a bit of overworking for so little thing…but thanks anyway)