In this video we are going to focus on some of the basics of the paint tool located in the tools tab.
The first point you need to understand is that this is one of two paint tools available in Smoke.
The other paint tool is located in Connect FX and can perform different operations depending on what you are doing.
The second point is that the method of painting in this tool, is technically referred to as raster-based or bit-map based.
When you go into the tool and start painting, this means that you are painting with pixels in the same basic way,
as a paint packages such as Photoshop.
Your results are instant and no rendering is required.
Upon exiting the paint module, the frame is already available in the thumbnail view and media library to be used in your sequence.
As you have just seen, you can go into the paint tool with nothing selected and just paint on a black canvas.
This can be useful for a variety of tasks from creating quick sketches all the way up to creating complex graphic designs.
You can also load in various input media for other tasks such as wire-removal, image cleanup and even image extensions.
To learn more about using the tools tab and the image inputs, please refer to the video on using the Tools tab in Autodesk Smoke.
For the first example, I am going to load in a texture image as my front image,
and I’ll place the result over here in the thumbnail view.
The paint interface has a similar layout to other menus in Smoke but the functions differently in certain ways
due to the specific nature of the tool.
I’ll try highlighting these areas as we move through this tutorial.
Now the easiest way to navigate the paint interface is to always start on the left and work your way over to the right.
Starting on the left you will see that the paint tool is divided up into three sections.
Paint represents the standard toolset. As you paint on the image, your strokes are committed directly to the frame you are painting.
Graphics allows you to create editable shapes where brush strokes are applied.
This is almost like vector painting but not quite.
And finally CutOut, allows you to cut out a section of your frame and apply effects to the affected section.
For these videos, we will be focusing on the tools in the Paint and Graphics menus.
Let’s look at some basic functionality in the canvas menu.
The canvas menu is for freehand painting.
Here you scroll through the brush shapes and simply select a brush.
Beneath the brush shapes, you can set the brush size by adjusting the value or pressing the + and – buttons.
A more interactive way to adjust the brush size, is to hold down the keyboard shortcut,
and click and drag the cursor and you can resize the brush to your liking.
At the bottom of the screen, you can also click on the colour pots to choose a colour.
Or you can click in the main colour pot to call up the colour menu, if you were manually setting a colour.
You can now start drawing on the image.
The paint tool is pressure sensitive.
If you are using a pen and tablet, the pressure is controlled by how hard you press on the tablet.
However, if you are using a mouse, squeezing the mouse buttons will not increase the pressure.
The left and middle mouse buttons will apply different pressure levels.
A better way to control the applied brush pressure is to go to the brush attributes
and change the pressure pull-down menu from PRESSURE mode to CONSTANT mode.
This means that by using a mouse, you will always have full pressure of the brush
and you can manually adjust the pressure when you need to.
One unique feature when painting with the canvas menu is that you can shrink the interface to have a larger painting area.
Swiping to the left edge or right edge of the screen will shrink the paint menus to give you more room to paint.
Swiping the side edges again will return the paint menu to its regular height.
For working in more detail, you will find the navigation controls located to the right of the interface.
You can zoom as well as pan the image as you work.
A few more points before we move on to the next video.
You only have one UNDO when you are working with the Paint tool.
There is a way around this, which I’ll show you in a later lesson, but it’s an important point to remember.
Finally you have two reset buttons.
The button that just says RESET will only reset the tools and not clear the paint strokes.
The RESET ALL button will reset all the menus and any uncommitted painted strokes on the current frame.
