Elements: All animation is created by rendering a series of pictures in a sequence and displaying those pictures at a sufficient rate of speed so as to generate the phenomena called “persistence of vision”. One of a cartoon animator’s goals is to optically blend sequential images together to create the visual effect of continuous motion.
The individual pictures themselves can consist of a single visual element or a combination of many visual elements. In most animations, the pictures in the sequence, also referred to as the frames in the sequence, are constructed as compositions of many layered picture elements. It is totally logical therefore that 2D software applications like Toon Boom Studio use the concept of “layers” to compose frames. Layers are just a way of describing a stacking or overlapping order. In Toon Boom these layers are called elements. Also, in Toon Boom Studio, our picture elements containing collections of cells become our drawing elements or image elements, etc. as represented by the columns in the TBS exposure sheet.

TBS lets you hide or display elements both in the exposure sheet and the timeline but when you hide an element in the timeline, you also remove it from the rendering process. Yes, you read that correctly, TBS gives you selective rendering control. You can also do that with individual scenes. So you can selectively render any subset of your scenes without deleting unwanted scenes before the final render of your movie.

One interesting difference in TBS is that you can designate a “positioning” type for an element that will establish it as a “foreground” or “background” element or just a “normal” element. (Elements are “normal” by default.) Foreground elements are automatically seen in front of other elements and background elements are automatically behind other elements, although there can still be hierarchical layering in the foreground “group” of elements and in the background “group” of elements. Again this hierarchy is based on each group member element’s relative position with respect to other member elements of the same “positioning” type in the timeline and the exposure sheet. So some foreground elements can be positioned to display in front of other foreground elements and the same for background elements overlapping other background elements. Normal elements fall in between foreground elements and background elements for viewing. For more insight go to Layering Elements.

Another really nice feature is that you can custom select the display color for each element. That lets you organize and visually group elements to make it easier to track and identify them during your workflow. Even elements of the same type like different drawing elements can have different color codes for their track bars in the time line or their element column in the exposure sheet.


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