Floodgate

Floodgate 1.0

Type: Plug-ins

Updated: April 13, 2009

Availability: Unreleased

Compatibility

Host Applications: After Effects CS3, After Effects CS4, After Effects CS5 and Nuke

Operating Systems: Windows

Architecture: 32-bit

Overview

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.

Usage

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.