5.1 2D Materials

Hi, in this chapter, we'll be learning how to use the materials window. And in this lesson we'll be focusing on the 2D aspect. So open you materials library. All you have to do is click on Window, go to Material, and then choose any one of these sub settings. Once you do that, we have the Material window open. So, as I've mentioned in a previous lesson, the Material window is basically a library of all the assets you have installed in Manga studio. So if we click on All Materials, we have absolutely every asset installed in no particular order that we can go through. If we want to refine that, we have these different sub settings. So if I choose on Color pattern, you'll see this library's become much smaller, because it's only showing our Color patterns. If we want to be even more specific, we have a few keywords, so each one of these assets has a few keywords tied to it. We can type in this search window here, and then we'll be able to show only assets that match our keyword. So if I just show you the Color patterns now, the Color patterns work by going through your library, choosing one you want to use and dragging it onto your canvas. That then fills your whole canvas. And you may notice that this bounding box here doesn't go around the whole texture. It's only going around this small part here, and that's because it's actually tiling through a whole canvas. And that's good because we can change the aspect of this on the fly. So, I can scale it up and I can rotate it. I can then scale it down again. And we can manipulate it however we like. So, this also works within selections. If I choose the lasso tool, create a selection, drag that same texture in there, you'll see it's only filled in our selection, and I can still scale up and rotate, and it'll stay within this selection. Just get rid of that. And we can move on to the monochrome patterns. So this acts in a similar way to our previous patterns. But if I drag that onto the canvas, so I'll just choose this noise monochrome node here, that will fill our canvas. But you'll notice that we don't actually have any way to manipulate this. And that's because this is generated as we've dragged it in. So once we drag it onto our canvas we can't then change that. If we undo, you'll see at the bottom here we have a little preview window and we have a small button that says Settings or Toning. So we actually need to change this one before we drag onto our canvas, because we don't have that level of flexibility that we did with the Color pattern layer. So once we go to Settings or Toning, you'll see some different settings here. We can change the density of that. So the more we drag upwards, the more dense the black becomes and vice versa. We can even change the type of noise. So at the moment it's random noise, but we can have certain patterns or shapes. We can change the angle of it, so that we can generate random noise all the time. And we can change the size, so we can scale it up and down. Once we're happy with that, we can click OK. Drag it to our canvas. And you'll see some different noise has been generated. As well as patterns, we have different page setups. So if we go to the Manga materials, you'll see we have some different page setups. So rather than drawing all our frames on our page and splitting them every time, if we have the page setup we like, we can save it to our library and then just keep dragging it out if we want to use it over and over. So you'll see if I just drag that out we have all of our comic panels there and under our layers we have them all broken down into separate panels. Under Image materials, this is almost like having some props. So these ones work by dragging it again. Drag out some stones, you can scale them. You can rotate them. And you can just keep dragging different assets. Out like that. If you want to create your own assets, what you can do is load an image, so I've loaded this previous image we were using before, and we can go to edit and then choose register image as material. Once we do that, this pop up box comes up. We can name our material. And we can even dictate how our material acts. So we can use it as a paper texture. We can use it as a brush tip, so every time we create. A brush, we could choose this as an actual tip for our brush. And we can choose the way it acts when we track it from our materials library. So, if we tick Scale up, scale down, it'll say adjust after pasting. So that means that when we drag it out of that library, we'll then have that bounding box that we can change and rotate. We can also change the tiling behavior. So when you drag it of the material library, you can choose how it automatically tiles. So we've go the same tiling setting we had as when we were using our paste tool. Lastly, we can change the tiling direction. So at the moment, you can see it's tiling vertical and horizontal, which means that it will completely fill our canvas. We can change that to only horizontal, so it will just draw a line horizontally. Or we can tile them vertically. In the next lesson, I'll be showing you how to use all the 3D materials.