minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

Flood­gate can be con­sid­ered an advanced paint bucket or fill tool specif­i­cally designed to work effi­ciently with cel animation.

Where the afore­men­tioned tools only fill a sin­gle area with one color at a time, Flood­gate floods up to 64 dis­tinct areas with up to 8 dif­fer­ent col­ors, enough to color an entire char­ac­ter in After Effects with a sin­gle instance of the fil­ter.

This fil­ter is squarely aimed at col­or­ing in toon and cel ani­ma­tion and out­line draw­ings, which is a real pain to do in AE otherwise.

Flood­gate lets you fill sep­a­rate areas with a sin­gle color, which is often a require­ment when col­or­ing out­lines — for exam­ple areas that are bro­ken up by another area of a dif­fer­ent color. Flood­gate cur­rently offers up to 8 col­ors per instance, but of course you can stack sev­eral instances of the plug-​​in to use as many col­ors as you need.

As it is aimed at aid­ing the pro­duc­tion of cel ani­ma­tion, being able to han­dle ani­mated sequences is a neces­sity: Flood­gate fills areas accord­ing to their spe­cific loca­tors on-​​screen, so you can ani­mate them any way that After Effects offers, be it auto­mated track­ing, script­ing or sim­ple, man­ual ani­ma­tion by set­ting key-​​frames.

The plug-​​in works well in com­bi­na­tion with Celu­light.