Colors and textures - Harmony Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now we're going to color a character and apply a texture and a gradient, and modify those textures and gradients. And we're going to make different versions of the color so we can switch between them. So let's see where the colors have gone first, because if you've opened the program there's a glitch where sometimes you can't see them. So get the selection arrow and just draw around the character, and they appear as if by magic. Now sometimes when you open the palette, it will look like this. If it does, just right-click and go to Swatch Mode. So you've got Swatch Mode on or off. And I much prefer Swatch Mode because it just gives you more space. If you want to want to change text, you just double-click on the name and rename the color what you like. If you want to change the color, then you can click on the edge and that will give you access to the color picker. Actually, by having this active and then selecting a color, you'll notice that I repainted it, so let's undo all of that. Be very, very careful. If you select an area like this and you click on a color, you've actually repainted it. So that is something to really watch out for. It is easy to color things in a way that you don't want. So it's powerful, but it's very tricky. So let's make a new palette. We're back to our default. I'm going to make a new palette up here and I'm going to call this one Lurid, L-U-R-I-D. It's going to be very bright and ugly. So Lurid will have one, two, three, four colors. One will be Skin. One will be Jumper. One will be Eyes and Teeth, and then Shoes. The trousers are going to be a texture and they're a different kind of way to apply, so we won't do that just yet. So now I'm going to pick these colors. Double-click on the edge of Skin. Now you might see any number of different formats when you open this up. You could see any configuration like this. But Single Wheel Mode is what you want, and I would switch on the H button. Don't bother with these, they're really no good. So H will give you best selection of colors and a nice selection here that you can pick from. So I'm going to choose Skin, click on Jumper. And you can keep this open. You don't have to switch it on and off. So the jumper will be a gradient. Select Gradient, and you can have as many colors in here as you like by clicking. I'm just going to go with two. One will be bright red, the other will be bright blue. And we have this hideous red-to-green gradient. The color for eyes and teeth, you know what? We can make them yellow. There's no reason why he can't be a little unhealthy. And the shoes will be a dark brown. So I'm going to color it in now, so select Skin. Now if you ever have a problem where the paint doesn't quite fill properly, then go to Tools, Properties and select this horseshoe shape, and go Close Small Gap, or medium or large. In this case we don't really have to because it's pretty good and everything is filling nicely. So I'll fill the jumper. I'm going to paint in the yellow eyes. He looks really ill now. And then the shoes, which will be this, oh! I accidentally clicked on the lines. Be very careful not to do that. It'll mess you up. Okay, and we want one more thing, and that's to make a texture. So we click on this Add Texture button. And in the Exercise Files folder we have a pre-made file called Texture Hide Skin. Open that, click on that, and we can paint trousers. Now we've done the basic first pass. There is something wrong and that is texture has been applied differently, and we want it to be the same. So under the Contour Editor, select Edit Gradient Texture. Select that. Click on the area that you want to be consistent and go Edit, Copy Drawing Object. Select the area that went wrong and go Edit, Paste Drawing Object, and you're good. You can also modify this by moving this widget. And of course you have to copy and paste again to make it consistent, but you get the idea. Now let's make a modification to the gradient. So what if we want to change the gradient? Let's click on that and go to Jumper. We can make it a radial gradient and we can make all kinds of modifications here. Click OK. So if I click off here and on again, now we have the wheel to control it and we can place it up here, we can spin it around, we can do all our transforms, et cetera. But then the arm is slightly wrong so click on here, Edit, Copy Drawing Object and then go Edit, Paste Drawing Object into the arm, and now they match. So now we have our 1970's reject, and I'm going to make a second palette because I think the client's going to hate this. So I'm going to right-click on Lurid and go Clone. And I'm going to make the clone called Sensible, so it'll be a different color model of the character. So when I do things like this, remember for this to be mapped onto the character, it should be higher in the stack. So now we're working on the Sensible clone. As a precaution, I'm just going to click on the default palette so that I know I'm working in the right palette swatch. So I have Lurid and Sensible. Sensible is now selected. And if I click on Skin and I make a change here, it will be mapped immediately onto the stage. So Jumper for example. I don't like the gradient, destroy it. Go to a solid color. Maybe make it a green, take it down, close that. I think we'll keep the texture for now but I think we'll just do a new swatch and paint over it. So we'll call this one Trousers. And I'll make it dark jeans, like a dark blue. Paint over that. And so now if I go from the Sensible clone to Lurid, if we click the one button, we can change the colors of the entire character from one to the other. So the beauty of this is, if I had a bunch of different animation frames here, and they're all painted with each relative swatch, I can change all those animation frames with one click, just by moving these up and down the stack. So it's an incredibly powerful way to be able to adjust colors. There's one more thing just to watch out for. Under the Paint, there's a tool called Unpaint. So let's say you want to go into Lurid and let's move him back up, and you want to get rid of some of these things, then you can go out and unpaint away. So that's it. That's how you can modify palettes and swatches to paint characters with extreme flexibility.