Doodle

What is it?

The Doodle Tool is a collaboration / annotation tool designed so that one user can physically draw in the viewport with a virtual pen and make notes / sketches etc so that another user loading and working on the same scene can see those notes or sketches and make changes. The Doodle Tool can be animated over time and has a range of options and associated tools for managing your Doodle sketches and annotations. The Doodle tool can work with a pressure sensitive graphics tablet and these options can be toggled on and off. The What´s New documentation in Release 11 includes a few short videos on how to use the Doodle. Like the BodyPaint videos these were produced by yours truly - 3DKiwi. Below is the Doodle tool palette.

Doodle Tool Palette.

Getting started with Doodle

For basic use just select the Doodle Tool from the Tools main menu and start drawing in the viewport. A Doodle object will be automatically created and named according to the viewport currently active view. If you have a 4 view layout open and use the Doodle Tool in each view, you will get 4 Doodle objects, 1 for each view. The following video demonstrates simple usage of the Doodle tool. Notice that the initial resolution is set to 320 x 240. Increasing this makes the paint finer and sharper but also increase the scene file size. If you make a mistake then you can use the Doodle Eraser to erase part of the Doodle or to clear entire Doodle frame you can press the Clear Doodle Frame button. You can constrain the Doodle Paint brush to straight lines by holding down the Shift key.

The following short video demonstrates how to get started using the Doodle tool. Note that I sometimes use a red pen tool to annotate this video and following videos. This tool is part of the screen recording software and not me using the Doodle Tool. It looks like the image on the LEFT.

Click here or on the image to view animation (QT 3min 4sec 7.2mb H.264)

Notice in the Perspective view that you cannot draw outside the safe frames area. If you were to render your scene the Doodle paint will show up in the render. You can prevent this by hiding the object like any other object by using the visibility dots.

Animating Doodle

Although the Doodle Tool can be used in still image scenes it really comes into its own when used for collaborative animation projects. You can manually add a Doodle frame by pressing the Add Doodle Frame button or by enabling the Auto-Add Frames option in the Doodle Tool´s options. You can also duplicate a Doodle frame by pressing the Duplicate Doodle Frame button. Like other animated objects the keyframes for the Doodle objects appear above the Powerslider and can be re-timed by dragging the keys left or right. If you are using a layout with multiple view windows when you use Doodle in each one, each window is assigned its own Doodle object. This means for example that you can have different and independent annotations in each window at the same frame number. The following video shows briefly animating several Doodle frames and using the description field.

Click here or on the image to view animation (QT 7min 13sec 14.0mb H.264)

Not shown in the video but to make the Description field update as the animation is played back using the Play button, the Realtime Manager Update During Animation option in the Preferences need to be enabled. The Description field will however update if you scrub through the frames by dragging the Time Slider.

Doodle Object - Object Properties

Although the Doodle tool is for hand drawing sketches and annotations in the viewport the Doodle object has a Description field in the Attributes Manager. Each Doodle frame can have a unique description in this field. The description field can be dragged into the viewport as a HUD element and will update on every change of the Doodle frame.

Doodle Object - Object Tab.

Each Doodle frame can be titled. This is optional but it helps if you want to select the thumbnail versions in the Attributes Manager by name when you click on a Doodle keyframe above the Powerslider or in the Timeline. Once you have a Doodle keyframe visible in the Attributes Manager you can select other Doodle frames and their thumbnail along with their description by clicking on the small button (shown by the red arrow).

Doodle Attribute Manager settings.

Doodle Object - Options

Doodle tool options.

When you have a Doodle object selected there are number of options in the Attribute Manager. Some of them are:

• Load bitmap - allows you to load a bitmap image file. Tip: If you are going to be increasing the Doodle viewport resolution on the Options Tab do this prior to importing the bitmap image. This will then display the bitmap much sharper.
• New Frame - Add a new Doodle frame
• Delete Frame - Delete a Doodle frame
• Import & Export - Doodles themselves can be imported and exported apart from saving them with the scene.
• Ghost Previous / Next - When you add a Doodle frame the default behaviour is for the previous drawing / annotations to completely disappear. This isn´t always desirable so the Ghost Previous option shows a ghosted version of the previous Doodle frame. Similarly the Ghost Next option shows a ghosted version of the next Doodle frame. This option like a few others can be animated on and off.
• Size - This is the resolution of the Doodle overlay. The default is 320 x 240 pixels. This size is independent of the render settings. Be careful increasing this as the scene file will increase dramatically with higher resolutions.
• Draw Smoothly - This anitialiases the lines of all Doodle frames for the selected Doodle object.

Doodle Powerslider Keyframes

If you click on a Doodle keyframe above the Powerslider (or in the Timeline) you will see a thumbnail of the Doodle in the Attributes Manager. If the Doodle frame has a description then you will also see that. Additionally in the Attributes Manager you can click on the small button and select the thumbnail of each Doodle frame.

Conclusion

So as you´ve seen Doodle is a really great addition to CINEMA 4D. It works well and is easy to use. I immediately felt very comfortable with it as members who watch some of my tutorials may have noticed I often use an annotation tool as part of the video recording software to annotate the video. Doodle is something similar except it does more. As far as I know, no other 3D application as an annotation tool similar to Doodle so well done to Maxon for being innovative.