Images and backgrounds

Every picture a tab owns, and what each one is for. This is what turns a grid of buttons into something that looks like the character.

Window → Image Manager

The three jobs an image can have

An image's usage decides what it is:

Usage	Where it appears	Typical content
Canvas Background	Behind the picker items	A model sheet, a concept drawing, a viewport capture
Avatar	The portrait frame in the canvas's top-left corner	A headshot, so an animator knows which character this is
(unused)	Nowhere	Imported but not assigned yet

One tab can hold several images with different jobs — a background and an avatar — and switching usage is a dropdown, not a re-import.

Getting images in

Button	Does
+	Import a file from disk
Image	Import and place as a canvas background
Camera	Capture the Maya viewport
Item	Use an image as an item's fill
Bin	Remove

Capturing the viewport

The camera button grabs the Maya viewport and brings it in as an image. This is the fastest way to get a picker that looks like the actual rig, without anybody drawing anything.

The Screenshot filters section decides what is in the grab:

Grid, curves, mesh, surfaces, deformers, IK handles, handles, locators, cameras, joints — each is a toggle, plus Transparent background so the capture drops onto the canvas without a grey box around it.

Turn everything off except Mesh, frame the character, and you get a clean silhouette to build a picker over.

Adjusting an image

Crop

The crop tool is the toolbar button at bottom-left, with a ratio dropdown (Free, or a fixed aspect). Drag the handles, and the red frame is what you keep.

Colour correction

Slider	Range
Contrast	Punch, for a washed-out reference
Lightness	Push a background down so buttons read on top of it
Saturation	Usually down — see below
Hue	Shift the whole image
Opacity	How strongly it shows through

Fade the background hard

A background is reference, not content. Take saturation down and opacity to somewhere around 30–50% and the picker items sit clearly on top of it. A full-strength model sheet competes with the buttons and wins, and then nobody can find anything.

The screenshot above shows the opposite extreme deliberately — that is a source image being prepared, not a background in use.

Avatar Property

How the corner portrait frame is drawn, per picker:

Setting	What it does
Stroke and Width	The frame's border
Font	Shared by the header and footer text
Header	Text above the portrait, with size and colour
Footer	Text below it — commonly the character name, as in Kamal

A picker that does not set its own colours here falls back to the defaults in Preferences → General → Character avatar frame.

Placing a background

Once an image is a canvas background, the transform tool moves, scales and rotates it on the canvas like any other object. The grid / folder selectors at the top of the Image Manager say which grid and group the image belongs to, so a background can travel with the region it belongs to.

Backgrounds are per tab. A body tab and a face tab can have completely different art.

Packing images into a file

When you export an .ampkr, Pack images into the file copies the images inside the package. The file then works on a machine that has never seen your project — which is what you want when handing a picker to somebody outside your pipeline.

Leave it off and the package references the images by path, which keeps the file small but means it only works where those paths resolve.

A workable order

1. Capture or import the art first, before drawing a single item. Building buttons and then trying to fit a background under them is backwards.
2. Crop it, fade it, and place it.
3. Draw the picker over the top — or hand the image to Image to Picker and let it trace the shapes for you.
4. Set an avatar last, so the tab is identifiable at a glance.