About Paint

Paint is an interactive, vector-based and object-oriented drawing operator that you apply to a layer as you would other operators. It allows you to perform a wide range of painting tasks from simple retouching, to motion tracking, to full cartoon animation. As with other painting-type software packages, there are tools for creating paint strokes, geometric shapes, text, selections, and masks.

With Paint, however, you create projects for painting on changing video frames, not on a still. Therefore, you need to make your Paint objects move to follow the action in a scene.

For instance, if you want to change the color of a subject's eyes by drawing over them with light-blue brush strokes, it is not enough to change them on one image only. You have to change the eye color on each frame, and the brush strokes have to follow the movement of the eyes from frame to frame.

You could manually apply paint strokes to each frame, but, thanks to the object-based nature of brush strokes in Paint, you can create the strokes for one frame, then move them (or track them!) for the successive frames so they follow the eye's motion. Only when the subject blinks do you need to actually change the brush strokes, and even then, you could make the brush stroke objects transparent for the "blink" frames.

You apply the Paint operator to a selected layer (or group of layers) in a similar manner as you would apply a plug-in. The Paint operator can be accessed through the Operators menu and Operators panel.

As with all other operators in combustion, you can go back into the Paint operator at any point in the compositing process and modify the objects.

Although the Paint operator gives you access to all the drawing tools, there are two other drawing operators from which you can access specific drawing tools: the selection operator and the mask operator.

Choose the various selection operators to use selection tools only. For information on selection tools and the selection operators, see Paint: Drawing Selections.

Choose the mask operators to access a simplified version of Paint from which you can only use mask tools. For information on mask tools and the mask operators, see Using Masks.