cell swapping: Toon Boom Studio has an excellent cell swapping function. For any drawing element you can use the Cells tab on the Properties panel to select and swap cells. (V4.0 Note: the various panels which were grouped together under the Properties panel in previous versions of TBS can now be seperated. Their functionality has not changed but your screen appearance may differ from the screen shots used in this article.) You can use a slider to scan through all the cells of that element until you find the desired cell or you can enter a cell's name in the text box to select your cell. The selected cell is swapped in place of the current cell for the selected frame or range of frames in the time line and exposure sheet. If you drag the slider all the way to your far left it will place an "empty" cell in that frame or range of frames.

As stated above the Cells tab is great for doing cell swapping but, it has a couple of drawbacks that need to be observed. First, when you are on a specific frame and you scan through your existing element's cells, it automatically swaps the current cell in that frame for the cell that is visible in the Cells tab preview window. That's good and bad. Good because it is fast and bad because it loses track of the cell that was previously there, and if you change your mind, you have to go and find that previous cell. If you have a large number of cells in your element the search process can be slow. Also if you created your cells using a fairly random numbering scheme then knowing where to look in the list, which is numerically ordered, is more difficult. But the swapping capabilities are excellent otherwise.

Here is a great tip for an alternative way to do cell swapping: Open the Library panel and navigate to Animation>Scene for your current scene and select the element you want to utilize. Then in the Library display window you can view all the cells for that element at once. Turn on the View>Thumbnails and you have a fast easy visual way to pick your desired cell. Then when you go to the Cells tab of the Properties window you just type in the cell number of that cell to place it on your desired frame or frame range in the time line. This works extremely well for elements which contain more than a few cells.



Or an even easier way is to use the copy to current frame context menu command directly from the Library display window. Select the desired frame in the time line, select the desired cell in the Library display window, right clicking to open that context menu and select copy to current frame. To save time in this process you can assign a keyboard short cut to this Library menu command.

So for things like swapping mouth positions, for example, you can use the Cells tab on the Properties panel, or for the selecting and placing of cells for reuse the Library panel may be even easier.

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