Moho Forum

Is it possible to darken the contents of an entire layer within Anime Studio?

For example: I have a car that is to be used in both night and day scenes. It would be great if I didn't have to remake it for each scene.

It seems weird that I can alter the opacity, but not the brightness, unless I am missing something.....

The best way to do this in AS is to use styles for the coloring.

In a real production workflow, one would keep track of everything and plan this in advance. For colour models I'd recommend to write down the RGB values of all colours of your car neatly in a spreadsheet, one column for "day", one column for "night" (and put a line rendering of the car in there too, for reference where which colour is going to be). Then build your car in its own file and color it using styles only. Name your styles. Save the file and duplicate it, name one "car_day" and one "car_night". Open the night version and edit only the styles to the RGB values you already have decided upon.

To use one version of the car in a scene, open the scene and import the car folder from one of the colour model files.

This is nearly the same procedure as colour models are done in bigger production systems like Toonz or Animo, only that in those the "colour model" is a seperate file type which automatically is linked to scenes or layers.

As a side note, even in those big systems it's not done with just darkening the whole character (at least it wasn't when I worked there). All colours are changed one by one, allowing for special colour effects: make the night version a bit more blueish, make a separate indoor night version and so on.

(Note to self: think of writing an article about setting up AS for an effectice production workflow.)

slowtiger wrote:(Note to self: think of writing an article about setting up AS for an effectice production workflow.)

Do it! Dozens of people are waiting!!

Try making a new layer on top of everything, make a rectangle that covers the whole thing. Give it a fill of a dark blue or grey, or bluish gray color, and make it some percent of transparent (you'll have to play with this a bit). This might save you the trouble of having to change all your colors. Just a quick fix.

Jack

Why not simply put a vector layer on top, with a shape in it. colored dark blue, and have the Layer Blending be Multiply and the Layer Opacity 50%.


Click on the image to open a test animation on YouTube

If you want a darker scene, simply increase the Layer Opacity.

Thank you all, the vector method worked a treat.