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MATTES (WHITE SHAPES OVER BLACK BACKGROUND)

To generate a matte of your animation for later compositing on some other external equipment follow these steps:

  1. Choose the frames and activate the layers of the colored animation we require.
  2. Make a copy and paste of this data to some other empty layers.
  3. Set a black repeated cel on a lower layer to get a full black background.
  4. Select the previously copied cels.
  5. Select the Brightness function and set it to its maximum value.
  6. Approve the operation by pressing OK.
  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 until the shape of the selected animation is totally white.

INVERTED MATTES (BLACK SHAPES OVER WHITE BACKGROUND)

Follow the same process as above, but replace skip step 3 and replace steps 5 through 7 with the following:

5.  Select the Brightness function and set it to its minimum value.
6.  Approve the operation by pressing OK.
7.  Repeat steps 5 and 6 until the shape of the selected animation is totally black.

HOWTO: clip shadows using mattes:

  1. If the shadows are scanned separately from the drawings, and are bigger than the actual character (in order to apply a huge blur to shadows and still obtain a sharp shadow border at character borders (clipped)), then the user needs to follow those steps:
  2. 1. Copy and unlink character cels and put those unlinked copies in a layer left of the shadow layer
  3. 2. Remove the fill color from those cels
  4. 3. Remove the line art from the shadow cels
  5. 4. Apply a blur + opacity change on the fill color of the shadow cels
  6. 5. Merge both layers (remember to always check that the shadow layer comes AFTER the character layer) and make sure the resulting layer is activated
  7. 6. Paint outside of the character (just the Fill part of the cels) using a fill color that has a 0 Alpha value (change it in the Paint toolbar)
  8. 7. Remove the line art for all the cels in the layer