User Guide

Academic Courseware: Chapter 4
Joyce Ryan
43
The importance of backgrounds
Creating beautiful backgrounds for animation is a career path in itself.
The background fills most of the screen. In many cases it does not move
(unlike our car window example), so your audience has plenty of time to
appreciate the quality of the background painting. In creating an
effective background, the mood, lighting and texture are critical.
The background painting sets the mood for the animation. What type
of emotional climate does the scene take place in? Is the setting bleak,
mysterious, joyful, cheery? How do you express that in your painting?
One way to express the mood is through lighting. Corel Painter gives
you several options for lighting your scene.
Apply lighting
Open Fields.rif. This scene shows a landscape in mid-afternoon
on a slightly hazy day.
You can choose different
lighting effects from the Corel Painter
library, or you can create your own
effects by defining brightness, distance,
color, and other characteristics. Once
you’ve produced a lighting effect you
like, you can save it in a library for
use with other images. Your computer
must have a math coprocessor to use the
Apply Lighting effect.