As many of u know I'm the developer of of Toon Titan a pretty popular cel shading, ink & paint, and color management plugin for Flash. Its sort of become an industry standard for anyone working with Flash. Anyhee, I finally had some time to sit down and do a little more work on the next release (version 5)... until i started thinking back about all those posts about CTA's inability to let you work with color in a reasonable manor. It's pretty nutty that you can't just mix colors and go. Instead you have to tweak around brightness, contrast, hue, at random until you hopefully land on a color that more or less could be the one that looks closest to what you want.

I did post a fairly decent workaround to this problem, which involves the creation of a prop item outside of CTA, using something like flash or drawplus... but again as decent as a workaround goes, its still relies on people having those more expensive tools.

Anyhee, so i got sidetracked again and started tinkering with a new app, inspired by Toon Titan, which allows you to mix the exact colors you want. Its more of a proof of concept, I'm not sure if I'm gonna finish it, but I wanted to show what I have. It certainly does the trick though.




Ibis Fernandez   |   (available for hire)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professional Animator, Filmmaker | Creator of the highest quality (modular) G2 rigs for cartoon animator and developer of Toon Titan and Puppet Producer 
Author of Flash Animation and Cartooning: A Creative Guide
>>> be sure to check out http://toontitan.com for professional grade assets, templates, and custom tools for Cartoon Animator and more.

Lot of steps but better than what is thee now to get the color you want.

I would be interested for sure..

WendallB

Almost as old as dirt
Hey!! I said almost..

It definitely helps get the color you want much easier than what CTA currently has.

It would be a useful tool.

I agree that if you could create a prop with the different groups already selected it would be tremendously helpful and save many steps.

Jeff


Get my Plugin Manager and TaskNotes plugins for iClone.
Check out EZColors and Other products for CTA/CA. EZColors: the easy way to change Render Styled (RS) colors!
See my CTA Tutorials on the YouTube channel CTAStepByStep

Found this in my trash bin.

By the time I was able to afford the license to Zinc (which allows to convert flash programs into standalone apps) the company went out of business so I'm unable to take it any further. This tool is provided here without any additional promises, warranties or support of any kind. Use at your own risk. No there's no Mac version.

Instructions:
Run the SwatchMaker executable
Use the color picker to create a color of your choice. You can also type in the Hex value directly. (typing in hex value will not update the preview but still works)
Press the checkmark to run the process.
Look in the folder, you'll find an swf named CLR_XXXXXX (whre X is the hex value of the color)

Drag and drop the SWF file into CTA2
Go into prop composer and assign a Render Style to the main color. For example if you want to use that color to change a characters Skin Color, then assign it Skin 1.
Go to the main scene and use the "Apply Selected Renderstyle" option to take that color and apply it to any character or prop on the stage.

You can easily create entire reusable color libraries this way, just save the swatches as custom props.

Download: http://www.filedropper.com/swatchmaker  
Video:




Ibis Fernandez   |   (available for hire)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professional Animator, Filmmaker | Creator of the highest quality (modular) G2 rigs for cartoon animator and developer of Toon Titan and Puppet Producer 
Author of Flash Animation and Cartooning: A Creative Guide
>>> be sure to check out http://toontitan.com for professional grade assets, templates, and custom tools for Cartoon Animator and more.

Ibis,

The only problem is that when you assign an RS color group to the colored item the color of that item will change due to a bug in CTA 2.
The change is different for each color group and group number and usually gets worse the higher a group number is (i.e. Shoes 01 is not changed as much as Shoes 04).
The changes are also dependent upon the starting color. Some colors are changed more than others.
You would have to adjust the color back to the original color using the RS Advanced controls (i.e. Brightness, Contrast, Hue and Saturation sliders).
Even using the sliders you can't always get the exact color but usually close.
If you don't care that the color is not exactly what you started with then it should work.
If you expect the exact color then it will not work well.

Jeff



Get my Plugin Manager and TaskNotes plugins for iClone.
Check out EZColors and Other products for CTA/CA. EZColors: the easy way to change Render Styled (RS) colors!
See my CTA Tutorials on the YouTube channel CTAStepByStep

Nah... It actually works 99.9% of the time. And doest matter the original color. Only some colors for some reason change when u apply the renderstyle. But that's a cta bug. 


Ibis Fernandez   |   (available for hire)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professional Animator, Filmmaker | Creator of the highest quality (modular) G2 rigs for cartoon animator and developer of Toon Titan and Puppet Producer 
Author of Flash Animation and Cartooning: A Creative Guide
>>> be sure to check out http://toontitan.com for professional grade assets, templates, and custom tools for Cartoon Animator and more.

Not for me it hasn't.
Any RS 01 and 02 group is usually very close but others can be farther off.
See the example below:


As you can see the color gets worse the higher the group number.
Some colors have even worse changes.
As I said, If you want the exact color it doesn't work well but if close is good enough then it could work.

Jeff


Get my Plugin Manager and TaskNotes plugins for iClone.
Check out EZColors and Other products for CTA/CA. EZColors: the easy way to change Render Styled (RS) colors!
See my CTA Tutorials on the YouTube channel CTAStepByStep

You get the exact color if your base color is white or a neutral shade of grey. Only on some cases I had issues where the color jumps a few degrees.




Ibis Fernandez   |   (available for hire)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professional Animator, Filmmaker | Creator of the highest quality (modular) G2 rigs for cartoon animator and developer of Toon Titan and Puppet Producer 
Author of Flash Animation and Cartooning: A Creative Guide
>>> be sure to check out http://toontitan.com for professional grade assets, templates, and custom tools for Cartoon Animator and more.

Yes, certain colors are not affected (like White, Black, and Gray and a few others).
The point was that most colors are affected and not to expect the color to remain the same after assigning it to an RS color group.

Jeff


Get my Plugin Manager and TaskNotes plugins for iClone.
Check out EZColors and Other products for CTA/CA. EZColors: the easy way to change Render Styled (RS) colors!
See my CTA Tutorials on the YouTube channel CTAStepByStep

thanks for sharing, keep up the good work!