Animate a Walk Cycle Frame-By-Frame in Adobe Animate

1. Intro: Hello everyone. Welcome to animating a walk cycle frame-by-frame in Adobe Animate CC. In this course, you'll learn the basics of creating a character from scratch in Adobe Animate, and then taking that character and animating a full hand-drawn walk cycle. In the motion design field, knowing lots of different approaches for how to animate a character is extremely valuable. While you can't get by on rigged characters for most projects, a hand-drawn character can add life, personality, and value to an animation. When it's done well, clients love it. If you don't know where to start with hand-drawn or traditional animation in Adobe Animate, or you're not comfortable with the tools in Adobe Animate, then this class is for you. There's so much to learn with character animation, so boiling it down to a single class is tough. That's why this class is designed to help you do one thing. Make a character walk cycle in only 12 drawings. We'll start with designing a fun character, then we'll go through the steps of making a great walk cycle that you can share with your friends, co-workers, and potential clients. We'll cover a few animation fundamentals like squash and stretch, timing, overlapping action in anticipation, as well as a few tips and tricks in Adobe Animate CC. But most importantly, we will have a polished hand-drawn walk cycle that loops and is ready to share. A little info about me, I'm Joey Judkins and I'm a freelance 2D and 3D animator, art director, and motion designer. I've been primarily in the motion design field for about 10 years. The thing you're going to find that when you dive into Adobe Animate it's not as intimidating as you might think, and also it's super fun. There's something really exciting about creating something by hand and animating it. It gives us so much life and so much personality. I think you're going to have a lot of fun with this. I'm excited to see what you create and I can't wait to see what you share. Let's get started. 2. Canvas Prep: Before we get started, there are a few things that you will need to do this course, one is a drawing tablet of some kind. I recommend Wacom, but if you have Astropad on the iPad, that's fine. If you have some other third-party drawing tablet that is fine as well, but it does need to be a digital drawing tablet so that you can follow along with, inside of Adobe Animate. Of course, you'll also need Adobe Animate, which you can find on Adobe's website. If you don't own Adobe's Creative Suite, which Adobe Animate comes with, there's a free trial available on their website. The first thing we're doing is opening up the program. When you open up Adobe Animate, this dialogue box will show up, and you'll have a few options for what size you want the canvas to be. I almost always like to keep my canvas at 1920 by 1080, but you can always change this to be square resolution if you decide that what you want to share on your Instagram or Facebook or something like that. If you want that to be a square ratio, you can make it 1080 by 1080. You can also do this after you are finished with the project. Don't worry too much about what the width and height is here, because you can always resize and crop your animation later. Let's go ahead and click Create. Adobe Animate will open up a canvas for you in that very size that you have. Now the first thing you want to do is check over here on this Properties panel, and see where it says 24 frames per second, that's exactly what we'd like it to be because most animations work inside of 24p. If you don't see this layout exactly the way I have it, where I have this timeline on top and I have the Properties panel over here, and Library and a few other things, the toolbar, you can change your layout from classic to debug, designer, but we're just going to click on Animator. That should bring up the key components that you're going to need for this project, which are the timeline, and the canvas, and the toolbar. We're not going to worry too much about all these other options because we're really just going to be focusing on the classical animation aspect of this. Now that we have Adobe Animate open and our canvas is all set up, we're ready to start designing our character. 3. Character Design: So we've got our canvas here. If you don't see all of your Canvas, you can press "Z" to zoom in and out. Just like in Photoshop. You can change your framing to fit in window Show Fame or Show All. I like to do Fit In Window, or sometimes if I don't want to see more of it, I'll press the "Z" button and I'll "alt" "Zoom Out" or "In". Press the "Spacebar" and hold it down to get the Hand Tool and get it nice and centered. Just a brief overview of this window here. This is where we're going to be working in our layers. We have one layer right now, and we have a timeline here which is showing us how many seconds and how many frames we have to work with. This first layer is called layer one right now, but I can double tap it with my handy little Wacom pen and I can choose this to Sketch. Now we can start working inside of this Canvas. If I click the "B" button for brush, it brings up my little Brush icon. If I click this "Pressure", use pressure at the very end of this Toolbar. You can see that the harder I press, the thicker the line is, and the lighter I pressed, the thinner the line is a kind of nice way to do that. You can even change the Smoothing settings. There's a Size buttons over here. Smoothing is high right now. I'm just going go ahead and delete these by pressing "Command Z" or" Control Z" which are on Windows. We're going to work on this layer called Sketch to come up with our character. For this project, you can make any character you want, but if this is your first time animating in Adobe Animate, I would highly recommend making something as simple as you can with the following body parts. A head, a body, two legs, two arms, two feet, and two hands. We don't need to make the face or hair really complex, and we don't need to add a bunch of details to the hands or feet. This can be a really simple character. We're not going get too deep into character design because that's a full course in itself. But when you're making your character, just keep in mind that the simpler it is, the easier it will be to animate. We're going to use simple shapes to make up all the parts of the body. For instance, in my case you saw that I just have a circle, I have a basic kind of circle shape for the head and sort of a rectangle or a cylinder shape for the neck. I've sort of a cylinder shape or cube shaped plus a little ball at the bottom for the tarsal. I have these nice long cylinders for the legs, small little feet, just a style I'm just going to try to go with this time. I've got these long cylinders that ended the legs, landed the feet, I mean, and then these thinner cylinders and with balls for the hands. That's about as detailed as you need to be for this animation. However, I am going to add a little bit more detail in this next phase of the Sketch, which is going to be sort of finalizing the character and getting it ready to start Keyframing. I hope you had some fun sort of sketching out a nice, really rough Sketch for your character. But let's go in and make a new layer to start finalizing our initial Sketch. If you click this little button up here, it creates a new layer right on top of your first layer. It allows you to draw inside of this Frame, which is the information that's going to be sitting on that layer. You can see how you can start to build animation layers using this Layer panel and timeline. But for now, we're just going to worry about this first frame just to get us a nice Sketch. If you right-click this "Sketch" button or the "Sketch Layer" and go down to "Properties". You can change the visibility of it. This is basically the opacity and works a little bit backwards from standard opacity in that when you click this "Transparent" option, the more transparent it is, the less it shows inside of your panel. So for instance, if I want it to be less opaque, I'd need to make this number higher. If I make it about an 87, everything gets really, really light. It's a little bit backwards from Photoshop or any other program for that matter. But once you know, it's a lot easier. I'm going to go into the Sketch Layer and I'm going to delete anything that's not part of my character just by selecting it and pressing the "Backspace" button. Now I'm going to start sketching in or layering in a little more precise lines. With that, I'm going to use the Pen tool or the Pencil tool. Both of them do a very similar thing in that it creates a precise line. But if you're familiar with the Illustrator Pen tool, this will be a lot of fun for you. First, before I do that, I'm going to click this "Lock" button on this Sketch Layer and I'm going to make sure I'm in layer two. I will also change my "Fill" to "None" and I'll make sure I'm on the pencil line is going to be black. The idea here is we're just trying to make more refined lines to allow ourselves to understand where the characters, limbs, and stuff begin. We're going do up here. It doesn't need to be very clean and just needs to be refined more than our Sketch Layer. Now that we have a character, a clearly defined character with arms, legs, head, and all the limbs, then we're ready to add a Ground Layer, which we're going to do right here. We're just going use the Pen tool. It doesn't really matter where we put it. We can always move it hold shift as you drag that line out and you can actually press your "V" button to grab your Selection tool. Double-click on that, move it up and down to wherever you want. I'll put it about right there. That'll just be where the ground sits for our reference. I'm not sure I like how big he is, so I'm actually going to turn off the Sketch Layer. I'm going make sure I rename this too so that I know which layer is my character. I'm going to call it character rough. It gives me a warning that let me know that it needs to put an underscore in between my spaces. I think that has something to do with the way that SVG graphics work. Now in order to scale this whole thing down, all I have to do is make sure the whole layer is selected by clicking on the actual dot inside of the timeline. Press the "Q" button to bring up our transform hold "Shift" to drag it down and I'm going to move him as well. Now I have them centered up and I'm ready to start doing a rough paths for our walking cycle. 4. Animation Fundamentals: At this point in the project is probably a good chance to talk to you a little bit about animation basics and fundamentals. This is something that they cover in almost every animation course. Try to breeze through real quick and ease you into the idea of animation. The idea of animation is pretty simple, which is that you're bringing something to life, but in execution and actually trying to do that, you may find that, man, something is wrong, not quite right about this. It doesn't actually look lifelike. The reason for that is some of these fundamentals and concepts. If you want to go super in depth on these animation fundamentals, you can pick up a book called The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, which goes through every single one of these fundamentals in great detail. They were the ones who came up with these. But it can be boiled down to two very simple concepts which are timing and spacing. The more you understand about timing and spacing, the more lifelike your animations will become. Take this bouncing ball, for example. This is only about 10 drawings, but they're arranged in such a way on the timeline to give you a sense that it's bouncing, it has weight and gravity is affecting its motion. You can even imagine what ball it might be because of the way it squashes and stretches up. It feels like it could be a beach ball or some other bouncy looking ball. There are 10 frames that make up this bouncing ball cycle, and they are spaced evenly across the timeline. But if I put all those 10 frames on the screen all at once so you can see where each frame is in space at each point in time, see how there are more drawings at the top of the bounce and fewer drawings as it nears the ground, that's called spacing. If we were to space these out evenly across all the frames, see what it does to the animation. It removes the light from it, or at the very least makes it look a lot worse. Let's take a quick look at timing. In most cases, animation is done in 24 frames per second, where every drawing takes up two frames, which is really 12 frames per second. Another word for this is called drawing on 2's. Timing wise, it's pretty simple, one drawing every two frames. But what if we took those well-timed and well spaced drawings and did them on 4's or on 1's, something doesn't look quite right, or it's either too fast or too slow. Sometimes you can play with that timing. You can maybe, if you want something to look a little smoother, you can put it on 1's through that section or if you want something to be a little choppier, you can put it on 4's or even on 6's through that section and make it feel a little bit more stylized. This walk cycle, for instance, is on 4's. The trick is to try to find that sweet spot where the timing and the spacing work together to make a nice smooth animation that's very lifelike. Let's get back to walk cycles. What does a bouncing ball has to do with walk cycles? Well, take a look at this bouncing ball again, and now look at this walk cycle animation. Notice anything? There are two circle shapes that make up different parts of the body on this character, the lower torso and the head. In this walking animation, they each have an up and down motion, like a bouncing ball, where the peak of the animation curve has more drawings and the lower part of the curve has less drawings. Hopefully, this helps you understand how those fundamentals of spacing and timing and squash and stretch will help make all of your animations better, even the more complicated ones like walk cycles. 5. Rough Blocking - Torso and Head: Now that we have a character established, we need to create the four main key poses. Key poses are the core building blocks of any animation. In a walk cycle, the four key poses that we're going to need to create across this timeline that we will animate in-between are the left leg pass, the right leg pass, the left leg extension, and the right leg extension. With our Character Rough selected, we're going to click on this frame around frame 24. It doesn't really matter where we put our selection, but as long as we've hit Shift to select both the ground layer and the Character Rough layer. I'm going to teach you how to use your hotkeys to create more time to work with on your timeline. F5 will add frames up to the point that you have selected on your timeline. So there I have it. I've pressed F5, and now we have a whole lot of frames. It's all the same key frame though. A dot on the timeline signifies the first frame of a key frame, and then a square on the timeline in this same block indicates the end of that particular key frame. All the information in-between is just the same information, and it just indicates that this is a single key frame that extends all the way from frame one to frame 25. So now, if we were to go around right here in the timeline, and we made sure we have both this one and this one selected, and I hit F7, it will create a new blank key frame. You can see that it's not filled in and it even has a little bit of a different color on the timeline. I hit Control Z to undo that. If you hit F6, that creates a new key frame that has the same information as the key frame that was already selected. So it just depends on how you like to work. If you want to hit F6 and then select the information inside it and just delete it., you can. That it creates a blank key frame. You can hit F7 to create a new blank key frame. A lot of times, I'll just do this and create new blank key frames all across the board. Another really important couple of keys to know while you're working in the timeline is your comma key and your period key. If you hit comma, you'll go back a frame, if you go period, it will go forward a frame. This is a great way to do a flip book while you're working. This is also how I sometimes will just go forward two frames, hit F7, go forward two frames, hit F7. That way, I'm adding blank key frames as I move through the timeline. Now, let's create our key poses using our knowledge of the bouncing ball. We're going to turn our Character Rough down in opacity by turning to the transparency up. I'm going to turn it up to about 80, so we can still see that pretty clearly through that. This is just to have our design there. Then I'm going to make the ground layer locked. We'll also lock down our Character Rough layer and we'll add a new layer in our timeline. So I created a new layer called torso_rough. That's because I want to break up this body into multiple shapes while I'm doing the roughs. It allows me to later on be able to offset those key frames if I want to have the head bounce at a different rate than the body bounces. let's just start by roughing in the body. I'm using the brush tool, which is the B on your keyboard. You can change the color of the brush inside the fill here. Not the line, it's actually a fill when you use a brush. So how many frames are going to be in between each of these keys? If we're doing four different poses, a stepped pose, a passing pose, another step pose, and then a passing pose. A lot of times walk cycles can take one second. Sometimes they can take a second-and-a-half. You can decide the length of your walk cycle. In our case, we should try to stick to a one-second walk cycle. A single walk cycle is two steps. Which means if we're using 24 frames to create a whole walk cycle, then each step needs to take about 12 frames. If we're drawing on twos, then each step is going to take six drawings. The math gets a lot easier the more times you do this. For instance, if you wanted to make the steps a little faster, say an 18 frame walk cycle, then the character would take more steps per second. For this project, let's just stick to the one-second walk cycle, which is one step every 12 frames. Let's do our step poses and our passing poses on every sixth frame. So we're going to skip six frames: one, two, three, four, five, six. Because our timeline starts on frame 1, not on framed 0, then it's going to be on frame 7 that our next key frame is. So let's just hit F7, and that creates a new key frame, a blank key frame. Since this is the extension pose, this is going to be our passing pose. So how do we know where to put this stuff? Well, we need to turn on what's called onion skinning. So that's up here on this main toolbar inside of the timeline. So now that we have onion skin turned on, you can actually see that we have a couple more options inside of our timeline. On the left side and the right side of our playhead, we have a couple of frames of onion skin. On the left side, basically before our playhead, anything that we can see through to, it's a little bit less opaque, would have a little bit of a red tint to it. Anything after our playhead is going to have a green tint to it. So let's try that and add something over here on this side. No matter what it is, I just want to give it for the sake of this. You can see that it has a little bit of a green tint to it because it's ahead of our playhead. I'm going to undo that. So where should the torso be when the character is in its passing pose? Well, when the legs are extended, the character should be at one of its lowest points, which means he would come up for the passing pose. I'm just going to make his body come up to about right here. It's going to be a little bit straighter as well. If you want to adjust where you've drawn it, you can actually select the entire key frame just by clicking on that dot, and you can press up and down to adjust it like this. I think right about there is good. Since we already have this body blocked in for this leg extension pose, we can actually use that exact same key frame on the next extension pose, which we're going to start on frame 7 here. We're going to skip six frames: one, two, three, four, five, six, using that period button to skip ahead. Then I'm hit F7 again to get a nice blank key frame, go ahead and click that dot. Hit Control C, click on this blank dot for our next leg extension pose, and press Control Shift V to paste that in place. We'll just use this as our next leg extension and maybe I'll move it to the right a little bit. I'm sorry, to his right. Let's do the same thing for this key frame. Alternatively, it gets a little tricky if you want to try to do this, but you can actually grab the key frame and hold Alt and drag it out to where you'd like to have it in your timeline, and that makes a duplicate of that key frame. So from this one, I'm just going to count six frames: one, two, three, four, five, six. Got it right on the money. I'm going to make sure that we duplicate this pose as well for the last one. Here we go. I'm just going to make sure there's six frames in between each of these: one, two, three, four five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four five six and one two, three, four, five, six. So now we have our key poses for our body. Let's do the same thing for the head. For the head, I'm going to change the color to something else besides blue, so that I know which one is which. I'm going to do the same thing, I'm just going to block in some shapes. Since we already have this framework laid down on our timeline, and it makes it a lot easier to know which frame to do our key poses for our head. We'll do the same thing for the legs in just a minute. We'll talk about offsetting key frames and a little bit, but for now, let's just keep it like this. Now, let's go ahead and start blocking in the legs. I'm going to lock these two layers in while I add this leg layer. This first pose is the left leg extension. I'm going to do a right leg extension next. As you can see, the other leg extension is pretty much the same thing, maybe a little bit of variation to give it some depth. Now that we have those two leg extensions, what we're going to try to do is in-between those using our onion skins for the passing poses. I'm going to drag this right one out, and drag this left one out so that we can see in between those, we can see there's two poses as we work on our passing pose. So this first one is the left leg extension, which means as it passes, as the right leg passes, that's the one that we need to have behind this leg. So let's make sure that the waist comes up just to match where the torso is. That gives us a good base to work with as we're starting to figure out where our legs should go. I'm going to go ahead and mark where the arc goes, where this left leg is going to be. Just block in where that left leg, really rough sketch in where that left leg will follow that arc of motion. Then the right leg will be passing here, so let's make that happen. So it's like a knee comes up. Not too bad. We'll do the same thing for right here, we'll add a little blank key frame by pressing F7. This will be where the right leg, we'll make sure the torso comes up to here. The right leg will be the one that passes on that same arc right through here. When you're doing rough drawings like this, it's not a bad idea to just draw in lines to indicate where the arc of motion should be happening. This is where the left leg passes. So that's what I want to make sure I indicate very clearly with where my lines are overlapping. There you go. Just like that, we have our four key poses that we can start Inbetweening on our next phase. 6. Rough In-Betweens: Now that we have the main key poses blocked in using four keyframes with the same keyframe from the beginning, repeated at the end, making it a loop, what we can do is start in-between in these keyframes. Which means adding drawings in-between the keys that follow the motion. The reason we're waiting to add the arms is because in a later lesson we're going to go over something called overlapping action and secondary movement. That's because we want the arms to be a little bit offset from the actual passing and extension animations. That's just gives a little bit more life when we add that secondary animation or overlapping action. We'll go ahead and lock this head and legs, rough animations. I'm going to keep this one unlocked to the torso. We're just going to make sure our brush color is the same as what our torso is. I'm going to go ahead and turn down the opacity of these legs and the head by right-clicking, going down to "Properties" and clicking "Transparent". You can see that drops it back in opacity. Now we're going to start adding keyframes. I'm going to teach you a fun little trick for in-betweening. Because we'll be animating on twos, meaning there will be a drawing here like this, drawing here like this, and then another drawing. That means we'll have three drawings in-between each keyframe. That makes it complicated to do in-betweens. For instance, if you've got a keyframe here, this is our first keyframe, and this is our second keyframe. Splitting the difference between those keyframes for the very center would be easy right there. But because we have two drawings in-between each key frame, where are we supposed to space those out? You can eyeball it and you can just do what you can. But we're going to do something interesting where we are going to go ahead and split it right at the third frame. So 1, 2, 3 using your period button to go forward three frames. Let's go ahead and just add a keyframe, a blank one using "F7". Make sure our onion skin is on by clicking this button up here. We'll make sure that our drawing is visible for that middle one. We are going to go ahead and split. We're just going to do right in-between these, for this center frame. There you go. That's right in-between. Now what do we do, now that we're drawing on threes. What we're going to do now, is we're going to move this keyframe back, one frame. That way, we can split the difference between these two frames by just pressing "F7" in-between them to make up new blank keyframe. We'll reduce our onion skin so that we can only see what's in between these two. The reason we're doing that is because we're remembering that bouncing ball. It goes faster when it comes up, then it slows down at the top, and then it goes faster on the way down. Because we only have three drawings in-between each keyframe, what we can do is just split the difference between the middle one and the top one to make it seem like it's slowing down toward the top. I'm drawing in between these two just really roughly. Now, you've got that bouncing ball again, where it's faster at the bottom and slower at the top of that arc. Let's do the same thing for the others. I'm going to delete this reference drawing over here again. Do the same thing from this frame here looks like its frame seven. Skip forward, three frames, 1, 2, 3 using that period button on your keyboard, press "F7" and draw a drawing in-between. Maybe a stylistic as you want to be with these in-between drawings, you can stretch it out, you can make it long. Just be aware of your animation curves and your arcs as you're drawing. Let's do the same thing. We'll grab this and we'll move it back one frame. Then for this in-between, pressing "F7". Well, you know what? I'm going to go the other direction. Because I want it to be slower at the top, which is right here, and faster at the bottom, I'm going to move this frame in the other direction, like that. You just going to grab it and drag it and you can move it over. Then I'll make that middle keyframe actually at the front end of that arc. This is what I mean by timing and spacing. You determine where your drawings need to be in order to give it that easing motion that you want. That's not quite the exact same position, this front, step in the right step. I am going to have to do new drawings for these other two. Let's do that right now. When you want to play it back, you can press "Enter" on your keyboard or "Return". Then first one I'm going to do is make sure on control we have it set to loop playback and press "Enter". You can watch your torso just move up and down and it's bobbing and weaving. What we're going to do now is we're going to do the same thing for the head and legs. I'm going to try to do for this head is to keep it in an arc that looks something like this. When he's walking, his head's going to go down this direction and then it's going to go up around this direction. Not all the way up that way, but just the general idea of a figure A so that the head has a little bit of a bob to it. I had to make a few little adjustments to the actual locations of these drawings to give it a little bit more of that figure 8 look that I wanted. But again, this is up to you. Instead of having him go in and it's perfect figure 8, you can have him just bob up and down. You're going to have turn her head left to right. You can have her like shaking the head. It's really up to you, what personality you want to give your character in this walk. But there it is, that's the in-betweens for the head. Now, I'm going to move on to the legs. Let's talk about the legs for a second. We already have these really nice key poses for the passing pose and the extension pose. Now, it's just a matter of remembering where the leg joints go when you are moving the legs in space and time. What you're going to want to do for these leg poses is just make sure that you're following the motion of the torso. With this waistline, make sure with each drawing that goes up on the torso drawings, the waist goes up with it. You keep the volume of the leg the same, but then just follow the motion of the foot as it goes. When there's only going to be two drawings in between each key pose, so between this pose here and this pose, we're going to make two drawings where the foot lands here. It's going to corral and land, then we're going to have one more drawing right before it hits this one. Don't be too hard on yourself. Allow yourself the chance to just be rough with it. These are the rough drawings. This is where you can mess up. This is where you can make mistakes. If you don't like the way that the poses look, go back in and just make adjustments if you want. We're just going to go through one at a time. For this leg poses, we're going to do a little bit of what's called straight ahead animation, which is where you improvise where the legs should be. Just be sketchy with it. Let's bring these legs back up to full visibility. We're going to turn down the torso and the head. Go to your "Properties", make it transparency, turn it up to 80. We can still see it. We're going to go ahead and do two drawings in-between each of these leg poses. I'll just talk through my thought process for each of these drawings as I'm doing them. Make sure it's unlocked and make sure we've got the right color for our legs. I'm going to press "F7" to add a new blank keyframe and make sure this other key is visible. Now remember what we said about splitting the difference between where this line and this line should be. We're not going to do that because we're actually doing what's called straight ahead animation. We're not going to just fully, just completely in-between right there. What I'm going to try to do split this into threes. If this is the first key frame and this is the second keyframe, there are going to be two drawings in-between. This first one should be right here. This is where the waist should be on that one. That's going to try to do right now, just eyeball it. Then with this leg, he is going to be pulling it up from the back and the foot should be between here and here, but by threes. Right about here. We'll add another key frame right here by pressing "F7". I'm going to reduce, make sure that this onion skin is only showing the frame right before, and the frame right after. This is easy because we're just going in between these two. The knee can be a little bit bent here because we do bend our knees when we walk. This is where again, a lot of the personality and your own style of how you want to animate this can come out. You can make them bend their knees super, like a whole lot when they land. You can decide how you want your legs to move. Now, we're going to do the same thing for this other leg pass. Let's just do a quick few frames. I'm going to fast-forward through this. As this leg extends backward, it's going to stretch this back calf a little bit. As this comes forward, it's going to extend. This foot arc can start to move all the way out to here in a nice sweeping motion. These passing frames are going to feel really awkward. But when they're in motion, they actually make a lot of sense. Again, we can make as many adjustments as you want during this rough stage. We're just going to repeat that process for these last two keyframes. By now, you should be feeling more comfortable with moving this play head forward, making sure you're on the right layer, pressing "F7" to get yourself a new blank keyframe and using that brush tool to make rough drawings, and then just going in and erasing if you want or you can press "V" to select things and erase them if you want. But just feeling a little bit more comfortable with scrubbing forward and backward with your period and comma keys. These are the tools. The rest is just you animating with your heart. What you'll notice is if you actually start to watch this over and over again, you're going to see that the last frame is actually repeating, when the first frame starts. You're getting a little bit of a doubling up and you're just like, "Wait, why isn't moving smoothly?" That's because we needed that drawing. We needed that first drawing to be able to loop ourselves back to it. In this case, now that we have it blocked in and we can just delete that frame by pressing "Shift F5". That completely removes a frame. It doesn't delete the keyframe or, or empty the keyframe like some of our "Shift F6" or "F7" those buttons do different things. "F5" just literally adds frames, and "Shift F5" just deletes the frame entirely. Now that it only goes to write to that one second mark, let's watch it again. It should feel a lot smoother. Now we have some really fun in-betweens. It looks super rough, but you get a sense of the life of the animation, you get to play around with the tools inside of Adobe Animate. Hopefully, this has gotten you a lot more comfortable with just the act of animating inside of Adobe Animate. We're going to get to the clean up stage in a little while. But first, I want to talk about the rough animation for the overlapping action and secondary movement. That's our hands, our arms, and a little bit of our hair. 7. Overlapping Action - Arms: Really quick I just want to talk on camera about secondary animation and overlapping action. You've heard me say it a few times, what does it mean? Basically, it's anytime something moves after or before the actual animation in order to give it a little bit of extra life. If someone has a ponytail and they're running, where does that ponytail go when the body goes up and down? Does the ponytail follow the body's motion so that when the body goes up, the ponytail is all the way up, and then when the head goes down, body goes down, the ponytail goes down? No, it's actually the opposite. When the body goes up, the ponytail is following a secondary path of motion. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about secondary animation. Anything that happens before or after the animation to give it a little bit of extra life a lot of times just like a head following the path of the body but a little bit after, or sometimes it's fingers as a hand sliding off of a table. There's a little bit of extra action that happens with the fingers. That's the stuff we need to think about as animators to give our animations extra life. In this animation, we're going to give the hair a little bit of a bob, so when the head comes down we're going to actually allow the hair to follow a little bit after. Then with the arms, this is going to be our overlapping action. It's following the same path of motion as the body, but it's going to be a little bit delayed and so it's not going to be a full and it's not going to be step, step, step, step. That gives it a feeling like they're just marching. Instead as they step, we're going to let it swing and then come back. That's what we're doing with our secondary animation and overlapping action. Let's get started with the actual drawing process. For the arms let's go ahead and make a new layer. We'll call this arm draf. Let's just start because that's the best way to start anything, is to just start. I got a new color for this arm, it's a cyan color. I'm going to start block in shapes here. It can be as rough as we want to be, totally cool to be very rough with this. Then where's the swing pose? Right here. It should be exactly 12 frames so let's see, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. Where's that pass going to be? Should be right here. Here we go. That's all I'm going to have it for now. If I don't feel like I that, when we actually do the animation then I might change it. Then we'll be back to that first keyframe again so we can just alt and click that "Frame" itself and then drag it all the way over here. Let's go ahead and do some in-betweens. Remember that bouncing ball. Where do we want the ball to slow down? Where do we want to speed up? In between these that swing is where I want to be faster. That's what I have right here. The arm is just going to follow this path of motion where it swings back like this. The shoulders actually up here now though, and I keep this smeary looking for now. I just want to have that path of motion in my mind. The hand's going to come up and then come back down and around back to here. Let's go ahead and start doing that. Interestingly, this shoulder is actually a bouncing ball again. We see it actually looks like a ball. It's following the path of the torso. It's going to feel a little bit like a bouncing ball. I'm having this arm swing back, this elbow's coming back in towards the body, as this comes up, and then the hands follows as it goes. There's another keyframe here. Maybe a little bit too many hanging skin frames because I want to just see the beginning and end of that. There is going to be about here, shoulder looks like it's about right here, and then just draw the elbow coming back towards the body and foreshorten that arm some. You can see the elbow is swinging in towards the body as the hand pulls back. That's what you want to be thinking about. Is just using those simple shapes, the bouncing ball, the cylinders. Draw the shapes all the way through and then allow that arm to come back around to the other side of the body. Now it looks okay. Let's do an in-between for these. Bring that shoulder all the way back up. This is where it gets tricky, you have to wing it. How do you get the hand back up to this position? Well, you probably have to do that over the course of a few drawings here, but let's keep it nice and smeary and put the elbow about right here. The hand is going follow this path back up to that, right here. Clean this up just a little bit so I can see what's going on. Let's just try it. Lets see between these and see how it goes. The hand can swing back towards the back of the body now to give it that secondary motion. Now, let's bring that hand up to where it needs to be. The elbow is going to swing up and around. Here we go, lets see how that looks. We'll delete that last keyframe even though we needed that last keyframe for the reference, but for now we can just keep it off for the loop. You can actually see how this arm is just following the path and motion of the body. How do we offset this arm motion so that it's a little bit more off of that body movement and it gives it a little bit more life? Well, it's actually a lot simpler than you might think but it's going to involve us using a little bit of moving things and nudging things around so let's try it. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to grab these first three, or maybe first two keyframes. I'm just going to move them to the very end of this path of action. I'm going to move all of them altogether in the exact same way just by dragging over them, and for this one I'm just going to delete these keyframes. Now, it is moving at a little bit of a slower rate of speed than the body but the shoulder is off. So what do we do about that? Well, it's actually pretty simple. All we need to do is go into each of these frames and make sure that they are nudged in the direction of the shoulder. For this first one we turned off on his skin. This first one I'm just going to grab the keyframe which you just can do by selecting it like this, move it down, pressing "Shift" down. Is the same thing for this make sure the shoulder is where it needs to be on the body, on the torso. That actually looks pretty good. Then we'll move this one up and same thing with this. Go through each frame and just make sure they're all following the motion path of the torso. It's a nice thing about animating in Adobe Animate, digitally is that you can do this really easily. You can't do this with traditional animation quite as easily. Let's watch and see how it looks. Looks a lot better. Now just repeat that process to do the rough animation for the other arm. We'll turn this one off just to keep ourselves from getting confused. Now, we have those arms moving and everything is looking like a nice little walk cycle. I'm going to start doing that hair animation and I'll walk you through it. 8. Secondary Animation - Hair: Go ahead and add another layer called Hair Rough. We're following the head motion, but as it comes up to the top, I wanted to come down and then come back up as it's dropping down. For the hair animation, we do have to use what's called Straight Ahead Animation, which is a little bit of improvisation. Since we have a good solid foundation for our head motion, it'll be a lot easier to just keep the hair at least planted. But as the head comes down, we need to have the hair come up a little bit, and then as it bounces, have the hair drop back down here. This is going to wing it here. But that's where animation who becomes a lot of fun. You don't have to do this. This a more advanced part of the tutorial. But for those of you who want us to learn some of this stuff, this is how we work more adding that last level of polish. Since this is the bottom of the bounce, this is where the hair will be up a little bit. I'm just going to be real rough with this. Actually let me zoom in a little bit too. We'll skip forward two frames, and we'll add another blank keyframe by pressing F7. This is where that bounce will happen. The most pronounced part of the bounce as it's coming all the way up like this. Now for this one we'll start to have it come up. Remember that bouncing ball animation? This top part is where it's going to slow down. It'll be like its normal. The most normal part of this hair is going to be right here. Then as it comes back down, we'll have it stay up in the air a little bit and then bounce as it hits down here. The only issue with straight ahead animation like this is that you may get off of your original model. It doesn't look like we're getting too far off. You just keep going in your mind and you're just drawing from your mind, instead of actually using in-betweens for keyframes, you may get off of your actual first model. Which is why we always like to, for this last couple drawings all copy this keyframe over for the end. We have a reference for when we actually need to come back to it. Let's zoom out and watch. In fact, let's bring everything back up to full visibility. Now everything should be fully visible, we'll turn off this onion skin, and we'll just watch it. You can see how that hair is nice and bouncy now. Let's remove this last frame, it looks like it's still holding on. Let's watch that loop again. We have a nice little rough walk cycle ready to clean up. That's actually for me the most fun part and I think you're going to like it a lot too. Let's get on to the next lesson. 9. Pen and Pencil Tools: Before we get too far into clean up, I'd like to introduce you to the tools that you're going to be using to do that, so far we've been using the brush tool, which looks like this, and you can get thick and thin lines, which is really nice, especially for doing a rough animation. However, when we're doing cell animation and we're using Adobe Animate, it's nice to have a nice clean line that acts more like a stroke. What I mean by that is whenever we do a brush, we're actually making a fill, and you can see that here with your brush, with your color settings, there's a little pencil here, this is a stroke color and then there's a filled square here and that's your fill color. If you press "O" to make like a circle and ellipse, you can actually see what your stroke and fill colors are doing. Right now we've got a fill and a stroke, which you can select separately inside of Adobe Animate. For instance here on the stroke, I can change this thickness just like this, and if I grab this fill, I can change the color. We're not too familiar with either of these tools just yet, but just know that it's a lot like Adobe Illustrator or Aftereffects where you can actually select or you can change the stroke, color and width, and you can apply strokes using pencil and pen tool, and I'll show you how to use those tools here right now. The basic idea is that when you do want to do clean up, in my opinion, the best approach is to use a pen tool or the pencil to make a stroke, which is a lot easier to control and to manipulate later than a fill is, so let me just show you how to use the pencil real quick. With the pencil tool, which I'm going to drop the stroke width down to three. To use the pencil, you can either just grab it right here from the toolbar, or you can press "Shift Y" to get the pencil tool up. It's a really strange hotkey, but once you've done it a few times, it's a lot easier to do, so if I press "V" to get to the selection tool, and then Shift Y it's actually not too hard to do, it's just something you have to get used to. But let me just show you how the pencil tool works. If I do something like that, you can see that actually Adobe Animate tried to smooth a lot of these curves, and that's because we have a smooth setting right here. If I were to set this to straighten, you can actually do things like squares, triangles, circles, perfect circles. You can do this stuff with the straighten tool. However, we're just going to keep it to smooth, and then what you can do is you can adjust the smooth settings to lower high, so if I were to do something like this, it really tries hard to make the stroke have less anchor points. If I go to my direct selection tool, which is actually the A button on your keyboard and select this stroke, you can actually see how it's trying to calculate the stroke using decia points just like what you would do in Illustrator. Let me remove these, and I'm going to reduce that back down to about half, so that it still keeps some of my hand-drawing qualities, but it does smooth out some of my other stuff, so if I direct select this, you can see actually it did a pretty good job of keeping this to as few anchor points as possible. You've already seen me do it a few times but if you do a stroke inside of Adobe Animate, and then you do another one, you can actually select segments of that stroke that have intersected another stroke and deleted, just by grabbing it like this, you can't really see it probably on your screen. But if I zoom in, you can see that there's actually some dots covering this stroke and that's to indicate that it has been selected. Now that it's selected, I can just delete it, and it has created a very clean cut in that stroke, and this is how we're going to do a lot of our clean up. You can even select just a certain segment of your stroke and delete that, I can delete this if I want to make a little gap in my stroke, I can do it just like this or this, so this is how you can add some stylization. But most of the time what we're doing in clean up is, we'll be doing like a hand or a foot, and it might look something like this when we do the cleanup. We see we've got all these overlapping lines, and that's okay when we have a clean line because all we have to do is grab the outweighing segments that we don't want, and we can just select them and delete them. It gets a little bit tedious sometimes. However, when you've got it all done, you've got a very clean line that you can even grab it manipulates, so that's the other thing that I'll show you right now, is that when you start to drag or to hover your mouse over the line, you see that little curves show up next to that mouse cursor arrow. That means you can actually grab and manipulate the line, so without selecting it, I'm just going to hover over it, and just click it and drag it, and see how I can actually manipulate and move that line around. Now the smoother this line is, the easier it is to manipulate that line as a whole, see down here, where it's a little bit smaller, it's a little harder to manipulate that wide. That's why a lot of times what we'll do is instead of making this hand using the pencil tool, the pencil tool is really nice for just doing quick sketching on your drawings to get the quickest clean line possible. However, a lot of times what we'll do, especially motion designers will just use the pen tool, which we're already familiar with if you use Adobe Illustrator, in that way you can already get the smoothest line possible. This is doing the same thing as the pencil, but it's just making it with less points and much smoother. Normally, it makes it very smooth line using only the points that I generated using the pen tool. However, once you start moving this around and starts, or maybe starts add some points in here and didn't do a very good job of reducing the amount of points. If you do see something like this and you want to just reduced the lines, double-click that stroke. It looks like it grabbed the entire stroke, so instead I'm going to go through it, I'm going to manually select just this section of finger, so it looks like it has that whole stroke there and I can test that by just moving it. Definitely moved it, so once you have that stroke selected, if you see little artifacts or little bumps in your line, and you want to smooth it out, what you can do is go up here to your toolbar and hit "Smooth." What it'll do is it'll reduce the amount of points until it becomes this nice smooth curve. That's really helpful in this program to be able to do that, because now I can manipulate that fingertip wherever I want it, and there you have it. That's how you use the pen tool and the pencil tool to make nice straight lines, and when you have these straight lines, again, right here, what I would do in order to make this easy to fill is, I would make a dirty line to cap off the end, grab the ends like this and delete them, and now we have something that's a lot easier to fill. We'll get to filling with color later. But just know that any open shape is going to be much more difficult to fill in unless you have an end to it, and that's a really easy way to just add an end to an open stroke. But just for the sake of showing you how it works, I'm going to press "K" to get my fill tool, and then I'll go through and just add a fill to both of these shapes. Now you know the basics of the pencil and the pen tool. Let's get back to our walk cycle and start cleaning up our animation. 10. Cleanup Strokes: This is the part of the process that some people really love and some people really hate, but for me I really enjoy it. I think it's really a relaxing part of the process and this is when everything starts to come together and that's the cleanup stage. In order to get ready to do this, what I'm going to do is gather all these layers that we've already made just by shift clicking, and I'm going to put them all into a folder. This is a nice thing that you can do it in Adobe Animate, not every program has this where you can actually just group all of your layers into folders, but we're going to do that right now. We call this the rough. I believe what you can do now, I guess I didn't put it all into the folder, but you just drag it into there. Now, what you can do after you've put all those layers into that rough folder is you can right-click this whole folder and change the properties of the layer to be transparent all at the same time and so that's what we're going to do. I'm going to go ahead and lock it, and now all those layers are part of that rough layer. Now all we need to do is use our newfound pen tool or pencil tool, whichever one you're more comfortable with and we're going to clean up this animation. I am also going to turn this character sketch back on so I can see where these eyebrows and eyes need to go, and I think what we're going to do is we're going to wait until after the rest of the body has been cleaned up to go ahead and put that face in there and I'll just animate that face moving up and down with the body after we've already cleaned it up. Let's go ahead and just add a new layer, lock down every other layer except for this one, and we'll call this the cleanup. Now, when we worked with the rough animation, we made each of these body parts on its own layer, but for the cleanup layer, what I prefer to do and everybody does this a little differently I'm sure, but for me, I like to keep everything on one layer because it links a lot easier to do fills and remove lines and all that stuff if you just keep it all in one. Also, we have all of our lines already. It's not like we need to have separate layers to offset timing or anything anymore or to do any overlapping action. We have it all ready placed into our rough so at this point really all we need to do is place clean lines over everything. I'm just going to do that for a few frames just to show you my process and then the rest of that, I'm going to go ahead and fast forward through it because you will have already seen it. First thing I'm going to do is make that torso area, and I'll start with the pen tool, I'm just using a black line here. I'm just going to clean up this line a little bit, and let's go ahead and do this side as well and we'll just go all the way down the line here. This should feel a lot like working in Illustrator. Again, you can move and delete and place line points anywhere once you've already placed them. I'm going back to the pencil with Shift Y to make this line here, back to the pen tool with P, I got to remember this is his left leg, so I'll make that come up all the way over here. I'll grab this little extra bit that's hanging off the edge and just delete it and this is a line that's crossing over on the backside, so I could just delete these as well. I want to straighten this out just a little bit. Couple of straight lines coming off of the end of the leg here and I can just grab these extra bits and delete them. I'm just going back and forth between my Shift Y, which is the pencil, and the V key which is our selection tool to select anything else that needs to be deleted. Pressing P for the pen tool. I'm going to make these shoes just curved a little bit at the end, and it's right there. Looks like we might have a couple of little outlying hanging overs, so I'm just going to press Z to zoom in, clicking and deleting any extra bits that are just hanging off the edge. You can see them sticking out. Make this one with the pencil tool, here we go. You can see how easy it is to just make nice clean lines here, and now that we have these clean lines, I can definitely see where these body parts are overlapping or they should be. This is his right arm and I'm going to first make a top of the torso here. One thing you can do when you're in the clean up mode is, you see how when I drag or hover over this line, it's a curved line, right here if I get to this end, it actually is asking me if I want to grab that corner or the very end of the line and I can do that and grab it and move it. I like doing that. Sometimes it's just complete lines sometimes. Actually I want to delete some of this information here and just have this line come down to here. It's really important that I just go ahead and delete anything that is not an actual line and also to complete any lines. That's feeling pretty good. It looks like I wanted this hand to swing back, all the way back, so I'm just going to go ahead and make sure I do that. This line isn't super clean but what I can do is just go ahead and try to smooth it out and see if it does anything to help it. It's a lot smoother now I guess. I'm going to grab my pen tool now and I'm going to start to work on this front arm a little bit. Again, it really doesn't matter if you overlap these lines because you can just delete the lines that you've overlapped, especially because when you cross the lines over, they create new intersections that you can remove and replace. This is where I got really messy, but that's okay. We can just clean it up. That's what we're doing today, and you can see how it creates all these little intersections which make it a little bit more tedious to get rid of some of that stuff, but that's okay. There we have it. We have one single clean drawing, and that's all there is to it really to this cleanup process. We're going to do that for the rest of these. One other thing I'm going to do real quick is I'm going to make a new layer, this would be for the face. I just want to draw the face one time. What I'm going to do is create what's called a symbol. This is something you might have heard of if you've ever worked with Flash before or Adobe Animate. Well, I'm going to do is I'm just going to make one single face using two eyebrows, I'm going to do the O key for these eyes, which I'm going to delete those weird, creepy, orange fills. Here we go. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab the information I just drew on that new layer and hit F8 creates a new symbol. This is the dialogue box that comes up, it's called Convert to Symbol. I'm going to call this The Face. What this does is it basically flattens it out into a pre-comp, it precomposes all of those things that you just drew, the information, and it creates something that you can then instance throughout the rest of the piece or you can just keep it where it is, you can copy and paste it, but it groups it all together and it makes it easy for you to then go in and I can double-click it and now I'm editing just that symbol inside of its own little layer structure. You can actually go back here. Each time I move this body, what I'm going to do is make a new keyframe, just like this, press F6 to create a new keyframe with the same information, and I'll move it to follow the face, but I won't have to redraw it every time. This is a nice thing about making symbols. I could have done the same thing with the head, but I knew that because his hair was going to be overlapping and doing interesting things like bouncing and stuff, might as well just draw it every time. It's not going to take that much longer. But for the face, why not just go ahead and create a symbol out of it and that way I can just move the face up and down, left to right, rotate it if I want to. For the rest of this clean up, I'm just going to go ahead and fast-forward through it now that you've seen the process for how to use the pen tool or the pencil tool to make clean lines and delete anything that's extraneous. Also one other thing I have been working in a three point stroke size, and instead I think I want to drop it down to one. That just makes everything a lot cleaner. We do the same thing for the face. There we go. You can see how that really cleaned everything up. Let's keep moving through. Now, I've gone through my cleanup lines and I've removed any extraneous lines that I don't want. Right here actually you can see one more. I'm going to unlock this layer so I can do that. Any lines that you see or overlapping things that you don't want anymore, you can just grab it and delete it. But now I'm going to unlock my face layer and I'm going to go through each one of these one keyframe at a time just by pressing F6, which is your Add a New Keyframe, it's on a blank keyframe it's using the same information as before and I'm just going to make adjustments. I'm going to turn on Onion Skinning so I can see where the last face was and I can also press back on the timeline just to see where it was on the face, except maybe this could go up a little bit to the left. I'll go ahead and just fast forward through this part too just so you can see what it looks like at the end, and there you have it. Now, we're ready to move on to the final phase of this animation, which is just filling in the colors. This is a really fun and really easy part of the process and I think you're going to really loved doing it. 11. Color Fills: Remember earlier when I was saying that my favorite part of this process is the cleanup. Well, it's actually I was lying. It's the color fills because this is where you actually get to see what the final is really actually going to look like. So let's start just deciding what colors you want to start filling this width. So I'm going to teach you how to use fills in Adobe Animate here, it's pretty simple. You just press "K", which is your fill tool, and you change your color to really whatever you want. There you go. You've got your first fill. So I've chosen a fill color. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start filling this stuff in, and I'm going to try to show you what you might run into as you're doing this. One of the things that you always need to be aware of is to make sure that all the lines are closed to some degree, like there's no holes or openings. If there is, what you can do is go up to this option where it says "Gap size" and make sure one of these is checked to close small gaps, medium gaps or large gaps. I just keep it to don't close gaps just to get ruined. I'll just go through and make sure that this shirt has a fill. So right here we've got one of those issues. I'm not sure where the opening is, but I can check. It's probably up by the neck somewhere, it's not that one, let me see this one, It's this one. So now I've closed that hole, and you can keep moving through. So I'm going to go ahead and do that for this whole shirt. This process goes really quickly, looks like I didn't clean up everything quite well enough there. There you have it. I've already filled in the shirt. Now I'm going to choose a color. I think I made an image for this class. I'm going to be pulling colors from. I'm going to use the same color for the hair and the pants. Now let's just use that same color for the shirt on the shoes. That's how easy it is to take your cleanup animation and fill it with color. So in the next lesson, we're going to add some nice little shadows, just as finishing touches to any areas where the skin overlaps each other like for instance, right underneath the neck. Whenever this leg crosses over, we're going to have a nice shadow here and here. I might even add just a nice little shadow to this edge of the arm too. So let's do that in the next lesson. 12. Shadows: This is a little bit more advanced. If you want to follow along, this is great, but if you don't, that's okay. This is just a little bit of extra stuff you can do to spice up the animation even a little bit more and make it really pop. I like to add little shadows to some of my fills. The easiest way to do that is to just draw lines like this, wherever you're going to have a shadow. I'll put one here. I'm going to put one I guess on this side as well. That works. I'm going to skip forward to frames. Make sure my shadows are consistent. What I'm going to be doing here is adding a fill just to this one little area that I'm blocking off with a stroke and I'll delete the stroke later. In fact, we probably won't have any strokes in our final animation. That's up to you, it's a stylistic choice. I'm just winging it where I'm putting these lines because the animation is moving at this point, which means it's already clean so any shadows that I add is just icing on the cake. It'll add a lot of punch to the final animation. Now I've got all these lines. What do I do now? Well, what I'm going to do is I want to actually grab this color here, and I'm going to make it a little bit darker. I'll just drop it down a little bit, make it a little cooler. I'm just going to block fill a lot of this stuff and I'll do a different color for that next shadow. We'll do the same color. Actually, I think this might be a little darker even. To go back to that first frame, make sure that this is all matching. Now that I've gone through each frame and added those shadows to the body layer, I'm going to change this color for the next shadow and just make it a little darker than it is. This is all up to you. This is where you can make your own design choices and decide what style you're going for. If you don't want it to be a hard shadow, you can even make it soft. Now what I'm going to do is a really little fun part of this, I'm just going to say it even right before I do it, but I'm going to select all of my drawings by doing the edit multiple frames and hitting Control A to select everything. Tapping V and I'm going to change my stroke color to none and I'll go back to this just to see what it looks like. I got to actually de-select everything again. Select all then de-select by hitting Control Shift A, and then I'll uncheck this edit multiple frames again. Now we've removed all of our strokes and all we have is now those fills. It actually looks neat. I really like the look of fills only on these types of animations. But that's up to you. You can make things in your style. You could add a stroke if you like, you can make the stroke really thick. I think at this point I want to get rid of that ground layer as well. Just like that, we have a nice clean animation that's ready to share. 13. Finishing Touches: All right. I have one more finishing touch I want to add here, and that's where this face is. I want these circles to be filled with black, so I'm going to go ahead and grab my fill tool and just fill each of those with black. There we go. I like that better. Then actually, what's neat about that is that because it's a symbol and I just copied and pasted the symbol across all of these key frames, it updated on all of those symbols. That's the whole purpose of symbols and why people use them a lot. Now for this hair, there's one more little detail I want to add, which is a hair shadow so when this hair bounces down, we'll have a little bit of that. We'll see it on the face. On this character clean up, I'm going to go ahead and make sure that my line is there. I'm just going to make a nice little line here. Now we have that extra little bit of detail that just adds to the personality of the piece, and now we're ready to share. 14. Looping and Exporting: There's two different ways you can loop this. One is to just export the video as is and have it just be one second and then you can put it into an editing software, maybe Premiere Pro or Adobe After Effects, and then just repeat that one second animation a few times and then export that. But I think what I'm going to do is just for the sake of getting it done quickly, I'm going to cancel this. I'm going to drag my cursor across all of these frames and hold the ALT key, which is going to be duplicating it, and drag it right to the end of each of this one. Do the same thing, I'm going to make this actually five seconds long and all of these, maybe I'll make it four seconds. Now that it's looping four times and it's four seconds long. That's a pretty good amount to loop on Instagram. I'm going to go ahead and export this video again. There's one other thing we need to talk about before we export this video. It's the publish functions of Adobe Animate. Adobe Animate used to be Adobe Flash. This is a program that was created to generate web graphics and web animations and that stuff. There's still some latent, old publish settings that are still part of this program, so what we need to do before we export our video is go to our publish settings because there could be some weird stuff that happens that you do not want when you are exporting. For instance, this checkbox right here include hidden layers, you want that unchecked when you do your publish, otherwise, these layers which I have turned off, my rough, my character rough ground and sketch and all that, those will be turned on if I have this checked. Everything else is totally fine. We're just going to press "OK" and I'm going to try to export my video now. We've got a few options here. There's an image, is the image legacy export movie, Export Video, and then animated GIF. Animated GIF is fine if you are just going to be publishing to something like dribble, just make sure that your size is 800 by 600 or 400 by 300, right over here. Then what's the difference here? What's export movie? What's Export Video? Well, the movie file inside of Adobe animated, it's actually an SWF file, which is a scalable vector format. Scalable Vector Format, I guess SWF, I think it used to be. The SWF stands for Shockwave Flash, and that was the file format for anything that came out of flash. But it's really helpful if you want to keep it a vector animation, which then you can bring into after effects and scale it as large as you want. It's actually really nice. That's not what we want in this case. I'm just going to do Export Video because then it flats it out, creates a bitmap video for me. It asks me, do I want to ignore the stage color which is generating an alpha channel. Sometimes helpful if you want to do that, you can bring that into After Effects and add a background or shadow or something. Then it has a few more options. We are going to convert the video in Adobe Media Encoder to get it ready for Instagram. I've created a path for my file and I can go ahead and click Export. What's going to happen is it'll do its thing to publish to SWF, and then it will bring it into Adobe Media Encoder, give me some options just like you would with any other video that you export from Adobe Media Encoder. There you go, right there, that's exactly what I want. I'm going to export this right to my desktop called walking man animation. I'm going to watch it just to make sure that it doesn't have any hidden layers underneath it. Perfect,now we have a looping animation that's ready to share on Instagram. From this point, if you're not familiar with how to publish something to Instagram from an MP4, I would suggest maybe looking that up on Google. It's a pretty simple process. But what I'm going to be doing is moving this to my Google drive, downloading it to my phone. Then I'm going to upload the shape to Instagram for my phone. Now you're ready to share it on Instagram. If you do, I would love to see what you made. I'd love to share it on my story and just give you comments. I'm really excited to see what you create. Please use the hashtag JJ walk cycle, and there it is. Now we are ready to share it. 15. Share Well and Farewell: Well, I hope you really enjoyed that. I had a blast working on this class. This is my first Skillshare class. I'd love to hear any feedback that you might have. Was it too hard? Was it to easy? Was it a little bit too fast? Did I not cover enough tools? Let me know, and definitely, please, when you share your walk cycles on Instagram or on any other social media, please use that hashtag "jjwalkcycle" so that I can see it, and then I will give my comments on your animation and give you a shout-out for completing the class. Again, congratulations. You did your first walk cycle in Adobe Animate, and I can't wait to see what you'll create. Thanks so much for taking this class. I'll see you on my next one.