Toonboom Tip #5 - TIME AND HASSLE SAVER - How to best use Onion Skinning: with a Palette Clone!

Ok, I've got to post about this. I've just figured out a solution to a horrible problem that I've always had in Toonboom. It's got to do with the onion skinning feature. Here it is; in Toonboom the onion skinning feature is frustrating as hell since the previous and next frames look like green or red fills when you have a fully painted rig. This can be nearly useless when you need functioning onion skin. Behold:

Ok, it's not SO bad for something as simple as the above example, but when you want to make sure your arcs are working between poses; you're effed. Also, when you want to set pivot points on layers that are behind the top layers, you can forget about that without the run around of hiding/locking top layers after you hunt for them in the timeline. Now... look what I've done here:

Say whaaaaat, right?? It's witchcraft. You can now see through the painted model just as you can with the onion skinning feature in Flash.

So all I've done here, it's really easy I promise, is make a clone palette of the one currently in place. To do this, select the palette to be cloned in the colour view. Then in the colour view menu select Palettes > Clone.

Then name your new cloned palette. Make it clear and easy to remember.

So now you just need to take the transparency way down on the fills in the new palette. I made my fills %25.

*This is also a perfect way to create new palettes for your painted character rig, such as a night time palette!

*If there is more than one palette loaded, the system will use the one highest in the palette list.

Magical!