Transcripts
1. Intro: I will show you how to animate, morph like this, frame by frame in a free and open stores, animation software, cold open tunes, and you will learn the software step by step as we go through three different approaches that you can use when animating a morph, you will learn how to work in a very organized workflow with a good workflow. You are a batter and quicker and more effective animated. This is an excellent exercise for beginners because it is a lot of fun playing around with morphing. But also you will learn how to control the look and feel of different motions, while at the same time, because we are morphing things, it's not too bad if things aren't 100% precise. So this is a fantastic exercise to experiment with animation without getting overwhelmed to while it same drowned learning the program. So I hope you are along for the right and you are excited, and maybe you already have some ideas of what you want to morph, so it's jump right in and find out what three waste are in which you can approach morphing in your animation
2. Different Types of Morphs: There are different ways of how you can turn something from A to B, and they change a lot of how the more fields number one dwarf type number one is the contextual morph. This is probably the morph that you think about when you hear the word morph and you're thinking about the the Hulk growing or a person turning into aware wolf. This is a contextual more because the elements and the shapes stay related. If the Hulk transforms, an arm stays and arm the face and the highest state eyes. So whatever the objects were before there, the same kind of object later on, they just changed the shape and size and color, and the second type of morph is on the image plane. This is when you dissolve your image into meaningless shapes and lines, and those shapes and lines they form the new image. This type of morph is often used in abstract and experimental animation, where you don't want things to stay, solids and flesh and volume. The third type of morph is not really a morph. It's the cover up and reveal. It's when either new elements come into the picture and cover up what you were seeing previously. And when those elements go away, you see the new image or its elements off that first image moving aside, revealing the second image. And this was done in a lot of motion designs when you revealed texts or logos and and they just come out of different things. And this is also a little bit of a creative kind of more because you can just throw elements onto the picture and you can hide stuff and other stuff where realistically, you know that text wouldn't fit in that box. But it still comes out of this box, which is why I still count this to be a morph. Using those different types off, Morse will give your animation different kind of feeling. If you're going for a realistic feeling like a morph that could maybe realistically happen in that way, then you probably have to go for the context role morph because, you know, somehow we can believe that, like for the Hulk, muscles just start growing like there were muscles before their muscles. Later, that's still kind of makes sense to the brain and is seen as more realistic quote unquote. If you want to go more crazy and have a little bit of experimental animation going on. Then you could try to dissolve the image plane and and turn stuff into line sitting and shapes, and then turn that into something you or cover things up and reveal them again. You don't have to decide for anyone off these types. You can mix them like you can say OK, this element, Morse contextually the objects stay related, but this other article, this other part, is dissolving into shapes and yet another part in the same images being covered up and then then reveals something else. You can mix that in the same morph. In our case, I would say we make life a little easier. Let's just do one more type after the other and now comes probably the most important part of animating. It's not even in your animation softness when you plan the animation because during planning you set the foundation for your entire animation. If the planning is good, your animation it might never get good. Great planning will definitely pay off, and a fantastic way to plan your animation is with thumbnails.
3. Planning your Project with Thumbnails: some nailing is a very popular technique for animators to figure out how they're going to animate their seat. And it's not only done by people are just learning animation. No people working at Disney monsters like Glen Keane. They work with some nails. So what are some? Nance? Those are small, tiny drawings not bigger than you, Some maybe a little bigger where you could just try different poses, different ideas. And because they are so small you're not tempted to put a lot of details in you can, because they're so small and so quick to do, you can just do 10 2030 50 hundreds off them and explore different ideas. Different poses off how your animation could happen. Another disadvantage if you start working too detailed toe early is that you will fall in love with your drawing too early. And then you might just take this drawing because you just spent an hour working on it. So why would you throw that away? You put that in your animation, but it might not necessarily be the best possible drawing that you could do, and this is great about some nailing. You will have 50 or maybe even more little pictures, and you can make an informed decision. You see all the options in front of you, and then you can pick and say This is the best post. This is the best shape. This is the best you know the best way to do this. I recommend not doing thumbnails in your animation software because if you already are in your animations offer, you are tempted to start animating earlier, and it's better to separate that step a little bit from the others. Many people love doing thumbnails on paper. The classic pencil on paper feeling is very unique, and you have a very direct connection with your lines, and it might be easier for you to feel what's going on in your drawings. If there's just, you know, the pencil in your hand and the paper, it's just so direct. If you want to do it on the computer, you should just use the drawing software that you like the most. There is one that I really like. It's called Mischief, and the cool thing about mischief is that it has an infinite canvas toe all sides, and you can zoom in and zoom out infinitely. And for me, this is very freeing. Because when I reached the end of a page on a sketchbook, I'm like a page is full, I'm done. I start animating. And when you don't have a page border, you could just just keep on going and going and popular ideas out. And I think that's really good for the thumb nailing face. Yeah, let's do the exactly that. I'm gonna open up, Miss Chief. And if you don't have any ideas for what you want to morph, I made a little tool. You can find it here, and that will give you some suggestions and ideas off things that you could morph. And you can pretty much more anything into anything else. My tips for making it interesting is, if you can add a little bit of contrast between the objects that you morphing from and to. For example, it could be interesting to morph from something organic from a being to something mechanical and solid. Or maybe you have something very detailed, and then you go to something very simple, and then you go to something that has a little more details again, this sort of contrast off off shapes and levels of detail can make your morph animation very interesting. You can also have a little bit off a progression, like you could start with just simple shapes, and then it gets more and more complicated. And then, in the end, you could have this big morph with many, many different elements. So here the things that I picked, ice cream cafes, sunflower and spaceship Let's just see what we can come up for. Ice cream. Of course. At first, too, we have the very classic ice cream cone. Uh, maybe some soft serve however you drawn. That may be just an ice cream cone with just one. Let's maybe you have some more detail going on. I think I like that already. Let's exaggerated a little more. I don't know that that doesn't look too good. Maybe we need to plan Maura, wear the bulls how they stack. I gonna like that. Um, not not quite content with how that connects to the cone. I liked it when it was dripping into it a little, of course. Just also this type off ice on a stick, maybe was a little bite on it, something like that. And of course, we have ice cream in a cup that it was a very hot week here in Germany. Maybe that is why I'm thinking about ice cream. It's tried changing the proportions a little for that classic ice cream cone. Make the little fat one. I can. I like that. I'm already deleting lines far too much. You shouldn't do that. When you're something I'll just keep going. Don't work on a single drawing too long. And you know what else can help if you just go to Google and type whatever you're trying to draw, and then you you might find some ideas like I could put a spoon in it like I didn't think about that in any of my thumbnails. Oh, the cherry on top, The cherry on top, of course. Would be would be brilliant. Yes. So that's that's always a nice idea. Oh, I like the stacked ice cream scoops. Yeah, I like that. I think that's my favorite. Do you see how how every previous decision previous it aeration informed the next one we had to go into all the different directions to find what I think we will be going with, but we can decide that later. For now, that's that's one of my favorite. Okay, Cat faces. Let's go. Maybe we should start with one on. That looks a little more realistic. That's tries the opposite and a very simply fight cap version. I think I like the reduced version most. So let's explore that direction a little, a little more. And now I'm just trying different proportions, pushing up things like the cheek fluff trying to front facial expressions. Oh, I like that one. It's a little chubby, maybe exploring even chubby of one. I don't know. It's not getting better. Let's continue with the sunflower. How to sunflowers Look, Uh, okay, they have two rows of leaves of paddles. That's pretty interesting. Like I I'm not sure I would have got that from memory that they that they actually have to rose off pedals. I like it where they don't come down to the bottom. Let's explore that a little more. Maybe not all of them. Let's get this. Give the sunflower of face to try some leaves. I still have the reference open, so I know how their leaves are shaped to do things a little more systematically. You could also pick things that you already like about the drawing. Like let's say we like that shape for the head. Um, I'm gonna draw it on a new layer and duplicated a couple times, and now we can try different ideas for faces and this way go a little more systematically until we find the perfect combinations off things that we like the most. And of course I'm doing the same process for the spaceship that shellings here will be to have something that is iconic. But at the same time, I think it might be good to have some realistic elements in there that looked like they could be from a real spaceship. And again, I'm getting some inspiration from the Internet, So I end up with a long list off ideas and suggestions. In the next step, we have to decide which of these drawings we actually take to be our object and how we morph from one station to the other
4. Defining the Motion with Breakdowns: It's so great that we now have a map with many possible options to pick from. If this was a project for a client or for real big, important production, I would do even mawr of thes drawings so that in front of me I literally have every possible options. And if I make a decision saying like, OK, this cafe's is the best cat face than it's an informed decision because I have seen so many other possible options. But I decided for certain reasons that I wanna have this exact one. So here you see the power off thump. Nailing it will also later in the progress you will be mawr sure of your decision because you tried every possible combination. You tried every possible thing, and you don't feel like this is the right option. You know that it is the right option. So let's make some choices. Let's pick a witch drawing Exactly. We're going to take for all morph animation and for the ice cream. I think I still either want the stacked one over here or or let's let's take the three stack this one. I'm gonna copy it, put it on a new layer down here so we can see all our options. Side by side s for the cats. I think my favorite is still this one. There we go. Let's take the chubby face sunflower with that leaf over there. And finally, I think with that last rocket, we found a nice compromise between being having the iconic shape. But it also has this more technical looking kind of bottom wings that I really like. So let's take that one. And there we have it here of the stations for our morph. And as a first step, you can mark in colors which elements turn into what, For example, this first ice cream scoop will turn into the left eye off the kitty, and that second ice cream scoop will turn into the other. I like that. And since, and ice cream cone doesn't have much to do with the cat face, we can't really do a context role morph. You know, we don't have ice on the ice cream cone so they can become ice on the cat face. However, we can still make some connections with the shapes like the um, the actual waffle that I marked with this teal color. This is a triangle, and this is a triangle as well, so you can still have some connections. I still want to go a little wild, though, Like I don't want the the triangle just to shrink down to be a triangle over here. No, no, we're gonna have fun with the breakdown. And as you might remember, the breakdown is this middle stage off your animation that defines how exactly the objects and elements on your screen travel. So I think it could be interesting to have the elements drift apart a little bit. And maybe, let's let's have that that purple shape that's going to become the mouth. Let's have that travel up like that. And the other shapes are kind of just going to the side, floating to the site, making making space. Um and yeah, One of the impossible things that I wanted to do is that that little rectangle inside of Theo ice cream becomes our becomes our cat face. So I haven't expand and already kind of get soft at the edges, but it's not quite there yet. And as for the triangle, let's let's already bring that to it's It's almost and size that it will have at the end. And this would give you a very interesting animation because we have some elements that are still almost how they were in the previous image. We have one element. That is how it's gonna be in the end. And we have one element that is kind of in between. They're playing around with the image plane. Let's have a look at how we can get from the cat face to the sunflower. And here we're going to do a contextual morph. The I, the ice air going to stay eyes and the mouth is going to stay the mouth and the outline off the face is going to stay. The outline of the face and all the other other elements are kind of just just getting revealed. Maybe we could even take the pedals from somewhere, like the whiskers and the side fluff and the the ears. All this is gonna become pedals around here. Stuff that is still blue is just kind of getting revealed. You see how the types off Morse are already getting mixed, and again I can try to define a in between frame. I think it would be funny if the cat knows is still there for, like the longest time the cat nurses still kind of hanging around. But the the mouth maybe already moved to to its final position for the eyes. There's obviously not a lot off a lot of change going on. This is gonna be interesting. This is like still having a little bit of an oval shape while the ears are coming. Paddles on the sides are becoming paddles, a swell on little paddles, air coming out here and the whiskers kind of exiting like that. And maybe the green part is already coming out. Maybe the leaf is coming from under here, just traveling down. Oh, yeah, that might be quite nice to get from the sun flow to the rocket ship. I'm going to do a reveal. So our our flower is just kind of moving a side like that like we're going to keep all the elements. It's just flipping over, and then we recognize that the underside off the sunflower really waas the rocket, and maybe we can makes it a little like the paddles could turn into into some smoke or something. Or they could turn into the the Little Wings has at the bottom. So there's a little bit off contact stroll shape matching in there, but most of it is still gonna be revealed from the flower. Just just flipping aside. Wonderful. As you could see, a lot of the animation process happens outside of the animation software. You don't need tohave open tunes or flash or Maya whatever using. You don't have that open to be animating. You need to plan and sketch ideas and find the best solutions for your animation. And you can do that more effectively, probably outside off your animations after in your sketchbook and whatever favor drawing tool you have. And then once you have a clear vision, clear plan, you can come into your animation software and animated, and this is what we will be doing next.
5. The Basics of OpenToonz: the following video is something that my followers might have already seen on our YouTube channel animator Island TV. It's a tutorial about the basics off open tunes. I know that skill shares all about learning by doing, but I want you to know some of the most important functions are ready because in the following parts, I like to focus on the animation techniques and not on the buttons and the interface of open tunes. So I want to get that out of the way. So you have more fun animating and you can concentrate more on the motion and what you're doing animation wise. So, yeah, I just want to separate these these things a little bit. So you are not completely overwhelmed as should this really be the first time that you animate something? So if you already know open tombs and you know you can recognize a brush symbol to be a brush and stuff like that, you might want to skip this video. But if you're really new to all of this, um, yeah, check out the basic functions off open tunes in this video. Open tunes is open source software, and that means it's free to download and use. Just follow the link down here. It takes it to the official download page that currently looks like this. If you scroll down, you will find the download button four open tunes and below the terms of use. You have to select your operating system, either Windows or Mech OS. If you start open tunes, it should look a lot like this and by default. Open tunes comes with a sandbox project, and the sandbox project is a great place for your first animation exercises and experiments . But if you want to create something real, a short film or even just the scene for Instagram, you should probably create a separate new project for it, which is a little bit tricky. If you want to save it as a location other than this, you should never go in and change the safe in file path. This is not what it is meant for. You should instead create a new project at a custom location, and that's a little bit tricky. I'm going to show you how to do that in a separate video. For now, for your first steps into open tunes, the sandbox is more than enough. Let's name our seen. We have to name our scene first steps or something like that, and down here you can check the screen resolution is 1920 times 1080 pixels, which is a very common screen resolution that is used by many TV's and monitors around the globe At the moment and down here, you can see 24 frames per second as the frame rate, which is a pretty great frame rate for animation. Before we hit. Create scene. Make sure that you have automatically save every five minutes activated. This can be really lifesaver. If your software crashes or your computer has a power outage or stuff like that, then you will never lose more than five or 10 minutes off your work. Depending on what you sat down here and now we're ready to jump into the program by clicking, create See One of the most important tools that you will use all the time is the brush tool , and in the bar up here, you can change some settings off your brush. You can set a minimum and maximum size, so if you have a pressure sensitive device you can start with the minimum size, and if you press harder on your pen, you will get a thicker line. You can undo most things that you do in open tunes with Control Zet, and our line disappears. The accuracy setting up here describes how well accurate your lines will be converted to a vector for Mitt. If you're accuracy is very low, let's set it to one. Then the soft herbal smooth out your lines. For example, If I draw a very jittery line down here as soon as I let go, the low accuracy will cause it toe look a lot smoother. If you set the accuracy to 100% your line of will look exactly as a jittery and wobbly s. You drew it. The smooth setting causes your line to leg behind. If you set the smooth setting 20 you will draw exactly where your cursors. If you set your smooth setting higher, your line will leg behind, and you can use that to steal your line with the other end off the cursor. Just give it a try and see if you can use this tool to improve your lines. It helps a lot. If you want to create like a perfect circle or perfectly smooth lines, you can switch pressure sensitivity on and off here. So if it's not working for whatever reason, make sure you have this checked another tool that you will use a lot besides, the brush tool is the selection tool. The selection tool can be used to select a single line on your drawing, and here you really feel the advantage that open tunes is a vector software, because you can manipulate that single line infinitely without it ever getting pixel eight . So let's say I want to change the thumb Aiken. Just drac it and change it until I like it more. And this gives you a lot of flexibility to tweak your drawings with the Control point editor. You can have even more control over single lines. If you click on them, you see all the edge points off a single line, those blue ones, and you can click them and to direct them. The purple ones are tension points with which you can change how the line flows through that edge point. If you have some points that make your line very wobbly, like this one and this one, you can just go ahead and select them and delete them. Besides dragging the tensions to change how the line flows, you can also click directly on a line to drag and drop it to a shape that is more to your liking. If you're working with smooth lines, your tensions usually look like this. If you click on one off the handles and you move it up, the other side will move down. They are linked together on sharp edges. Those tensions are broken. You can move them individually from each other if you want. You can convert connected tensions into broken tensions by holding the old key while you click on them. As you can see now, I can move them individually. I don't need to hold the old key again. I can just click and drag the tensions. If I do click the old key again, I convert the broken tensions into connected tensions again. If you don't like the with off a line, you can also change that. You have to expand your tool set palate down here and there we have the pump tool and with the pump tool you can make lines thicker or thinner. As you can see, we have many options to change the lines even after we drew them. If you want to move around in your scene, you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and zoom out as you see, because it's vector. Nothing will get pixellated. Even if we zoom in very large with space bar, you get the hand tool that allows you to shift your view port around. And if you want to see the entire picture, you can right click anywhere in your view port and hit fit to window, and this will fit the entire camera view into your view port. As soon as we started drawing open tombs created a drawing on our timeline, and the timeline is here, located to the right, and this is a small difference compared toa other animation software. Our timeline is a vertical, not horizontal. So our animation starts with frame one off the animation here, and then it goes to a friend 23456 and so on. In this vertical axis, all we have to do if we want to create the next frame of our animation is to hit the down arrow key on our keyboard. By doing that, we shifted from frame one to friend to with the up arrow key. You can go back up to frame one. Now let's go down. If we are on frame to weaken, just strive, drawing in the view port again and you will see that it created a new drawing Over here. We now have two drawings located on our timeline. The drawings are named a one and a two. It's not showing the A anymore, but these drawings belonged to a stack off drawings that is called levels in open Tombs. And here in this panel, you can see all the drawings that belong to a level. If we draw on the frames right next to an existing level, it will aunt the drawing to that level. So if we go down one more frame using the arrow keys and we draw our next frame, it added another drawing to level A. If you draw anywhere on the timeline in a frame that is not next to an existing drawing Steck, we could just click on frame six. As you can see, there's no drawing stick nearby, and if we draw now, we will create a new drawing level. And in this drawing level that is named B, we just created drawing one that you can see over here. Usually, you would do either the entire character in one drawing level. Or maybe if you separate your character to different layers, you would put the arm on one level and the body on another level. But levels are not to be confused with your layer order, because for the layer order, we have the columns in the timeline. At the moment, everything is on one column in on one layer, but we can click on the little handle here at Level B. Click and drag it over and put it on column to now This chubby face is one layer in front. Off column one. Let me shift that back so Howard drawings don't overlap For now. At the moment, every drawing is just visible for one frame, and if we had played down here, we can see that our animation is going by far too fast. Like none of the images is shown long enough, you can show one drawing for longer by clicking on the drawing and using that gray handle down here to increase the exposure. So if you want to hold drawing a one for six frames, we have to drag that handle down all the way to here. And now we can see that frame. A one is being held until on from seven. We have drawing, too. We can also make this show up for longer by dragging the handle down. You can also direct the handle up. If you want to delete a frame, you can always click on it and hit delete. You can undo this. You can select a range of frames by clicking somewhere, holding shift and clicking somewhere else. Now we have the whole area selected, and if we hit delete, you can see that drawing a one is now completely gone from our timeline. But drawing a one is still over here in the level panel, and we can take it out there. We can click on it, which takes us to a single view mode where we can only see that single drawing. What we usually see was the camera that also sees all the other layers, but now in the level panel, we can drag this drawing out and back into the timeline. If you click on the timeline, we will also go back to the camera view. As you can see now we can see the white background again, and there we have it again. There is our drawing a one now, as I'm shifting this down, it also shifts everything else down. But I want to close that gap. I can do that by dragging that entire a Steck by clicking on that handle here and dragging it up. One important thing to be aware off is that those drawings are linked. If I take the drawing a one out of the level STEC and drag it into the timeline, you can see that our animation now goes from drawing a 12 a two to a three and back to a one. If I change anything about that drawing, let's and a fun hat to our character. You can see that this also changed in the level STEC, and if we go back to frame one in our timeline, we can see that our changes affected both the drawing. A one that goes from frame 126 and the drawing a one that goes from 13 to 18. Those drawings are linked. This is good news because if you have an animation that repeats itself, you can do changes and it will be updated everywhere on your timeline. But you also, of course, need to be careful if you don't want them to be late. Let's say I want to take that a one drawing as a base. If I coffee it with control C and paste it with Contrave, you can see we we once again get the drawing a one. This is no good. This drawing is still linked, so what we can do is to get a duplicate drawing off. Drawing A one that is not linked is we can click on it so it opens, in our view, poured. You can click and drag to select all lines. Hit Control C. It's important that you copy these lines. Don't copy the drawing from the timeline. We want to copy the lights. And if we now go down here to frame 19 which is right below are drawing stick. We can hit control V and we paste that the lines into a new into a new drawing, which is named a four. Now this one is not linked to the drawing A one. We draw him a mustache. You can see that he only has the mustache on drawing a four and not on drawing a 11 function that you were constantly use. While animating is called onion skinning. You confined it over here. If you never gate to any frame, you can see that in this column. We have this half red, half green dot If you go below and above in the same column, you see those yellow dots you can click above to make this red dot appear, and this will make you previous drawing show through in red. If you click below, you can make the next drawing show up in green. As you're navigating around your timeline, you can see that you can always see the next end. The previous drawing shining through it doesn't even have to be the next drawing. You could say that you want to see the previous drawing and let's say your end key frame over here. You just need to keep in mind that as you're navigating around in your timeline, this distance also shifts. If you always want to see the drawing that is on frame six, you could instead off using that green bar. Move a tiny bit to the left and click here to get an onion skinning drawing that is nailed to that specific frame. If we now move the time cursor around, you can see that the blue dot stays where it iss. While the red dot is moving with the time cursor and you can see that drawing six is always shining through in green. If we are before that drawing and in red, if we are after it too quickly, activate and deactivate onion skin. Just double click the red and green onion skin circle next up. We're gonna take a quick look at colors. A color palette is tied to the level. You can see that we have a color palette here that's called level palate A. And we have the black color here that we were drawing our lines with. If we wanna fill our shapes, we can use the fill tool to do that is the bucket right here. You can press F to get that fill tool, and we have to create a new color swatch down here. I knew that by right clicking and selecting new style, and here we can pick a skin color. Let's say it's like a little bit of an emoji thing, so let's let's make him a little yellow. We can use the color sliders here, and then we can just click into our shapes to fill them. Appears an option that can close gaps for you and see how well that works with the image over here, where I let left a huge gap as probably not able to close it. But we could set it very high. Maybe can do it. No, it doesn't. I actually would have to close this line, and you could do this by drawing an extra line or by using the Contour Point tool to make sure that the lines connect. Okay, and now we should be able to fill this with no problem. The cool thing about colors in open tunes is that they stay linked. If we change the color in the color palette, let's say we want him to be blue. I select the color, so I have the color swatch picker here and now watch up here. What happens if I change the color down there? The color changes everywhere, So this is really cool. If you're already did your animation, if you already colored it, you already finished it. But you feel like, Hey, I don't want this character toe. Have a red shirt. Let's give him a blue shirt. You can change that very easily. The absolute fastest way to export your animation as a video you confined under file fost rendered to MP four. However, you need another tool on your computer For this to work, which is called F F M. Peck, which is a video and coda that will compile or render the video for you, you can find the files that you need for this to work on ff impact dot orc that you can click on the download button and you need to get a already compiled version for your operating system. In my case, this is Windows, and there we have. So you have this confused me the first time I was looking at these. These are the source school code. You don't want to don't load that or clone that or do anything with that you want to go to the bills that you can download over here, then you need Teoh. Choose whatever option applies to you. And you get these this nice zip file that you need to unzip in a location that you will find again and this location you have to put in file preferences, import export. There's the FFM packed path. It's important that you don't move the files out of this location once you put them there. All right, so just with this knowledge you will get very far in open tunes. And now let's get to the fun part. Let's animate and focus on creating some amazing and appealing animation.
6. Setting rough Key Frames: in order to keep our animation process organized and as effective and fast as possible, we will always be working from rough to find. We will start with rough drawings on a scribble layer and just a few with them A few most important frames that we need to have in our animation. Then we're gonna add more frames that will make our animation more fluent and or smooth. But we still work very rough in the drawing so that even if we decide we want our animation to be a little bit different, we didn't lose a lot off drawing time. We didn't you lose drawings that we were working on a lot, and then we're gonna go in and make a clean up off our drawings, so we have a nice, clean version off it. This process minimizes mistakes that cost us a lot of time to correct. If we make a mistake in the rough form, it's not bad because it's just a rough. We didn't put a lot of time into it, Um, and this is very important because once you work more detailed and with a lot off elements and a lot of characters on screen. You want to redo things as little as possible. And at the same time, you want to have a rough preview off your animation as early as possible. So you know that it's worth working on that animation for, you know, hours, days or weeks or however long you will be sitting on your animation. Of course, our little exercise won't take that much time. Eso I'm gonna pull up my, um, my drawings and put them on another monitor. I have a second monitor, which is really, really helpful for animation. But of course, if you worked on a sketchbook, you can just have the sketchbook next to your next to your monitor or on your on your desk . Um, so I gonna put those all my work space next to me and, um yeah, this column one. This drawing stay could be is gonna be our scribble stack personally what I like to do when I'm in the scribble face. I like to make my alliance a little transparent so you can go into your color swatch over here. Make sure that this is selected, and then you can switch the Alfa down and see those lines they become a little bit transparent and this looks a little more at least a little bit more like pencil strokes with what you look and you can use it to, you know, really build out the shape. How you wanna have it, Knowing that later on, we're going to clean this mess up and make it look a little nicer. I'm starting with very rough shape. So our on my accuracy is still still too low to follow my quick brushstrokes. So I'm just going to do really rough shapes for my, uh, ice cream scoops so that I know that I can fit thumb all on screen. Um, I'm gonna work a little more careful than I was working in the thumbnails, because this is more or less the proportions that I wanna have my draw, that I want my drawing to 1/2 later on. Um, but we don't have to put in a lot of details yet. Um, I just want to make sure that everything is more or less where it is supposed to be and that I know how I need to clean up my drawing later. Which parts I have to to clean in a certain way, and I can always go in, use my selection tool to tweak shapes if I am not quite contend with how they how they look yet And there we have it, our ice cream cone. I think I'm gonna keep working systematically, going from the important drawings to the less important drawings, meaning that the next really important drawing is the next key frame. And the key frames are our more shapes. So the next key frame is the cat face, and I'm very much content of how the scribble turned out. So I'm gonna import that drawing. I saved just that that cat phase as a image file and you can just click and drag an image into the view port. And, um, I should probably make sure to put it on an extra layer. So let's shift our, um, a rough layer one over. So we have now have a background layer layer behind our current rough scribble air, and I'm gonna click and drag the image into the view port. It's offering us to either linked to the location words currently at, or we can say, imported into the open tune scene. So it's always there, and I think that's what we're gonna dio. So as you can see, we now have on this first column, which is behind our scribble layer, we have that image and I'm just going to trace it. I'm just gonna put it on frame to and go over again to our second rough layer. And I go here, Teoh, right under the first drawing off the drawing strike be and I just going to start drawing my cat. Tracing it onto this rough layer and the onion skin is a little confusing, so you can just double click onto that big circle here, and then they are just switched off. It still kept our settings, but we no longer see the onion skin. Now that our little imported image served its purpose, I can just delete it again, and now we only see our scribble image. There's an eraser that you can activate with E, but it's tends to create thes spots. Um, okay, on to the next key frame, treating the facial features off the sunflower a little bit to be their friend from the cat . Now I made sure to count the Leafs. It's 12 of them so I can make sure it's 12 in every image. And I gotta go with three of thes double leaves behind our sunflower off course. We shouldn't forget the part under the sunflower. Okay, time for the rocket ship. Our most important frames. The'keeper's frames made it over into open tunes, and you can scrap through them and make sure that the positions are there where you would like them to be. And if we are content with how the rough drawings are, we can move on to the next step, which is copying the breakdowns that we planned into open tunes. Let's make some space on the timeline for our breakdown drawings. We can do that by extending the exposure off this frame by clicking that little gray handle here. Now that one frame is held for two frames, that one drawing is held for two frames on frame, one and frame to. We can delete this so we can fit our breakdown in between key frame one and key frame to and let's make some space between the other key friends as well, always dragging down one and still needing what's here by hitting the delete key. Now we can go between every single one and add our breakdown ESRI planned in our scribble. It might be helpful to activate onion skin again if you want to see what your previous and your next key frame are. And yeah, let's put that in. I like that. This kind of looks like a paw print, as if it's almost intentional that it's going to become a kitty now. Now let's put the mouths halfway on the path to its new position, but already have the mouth as planned. Be the new mouth. Let's make sure that all the pedals air there. So 123456789 10 11 when you more going to that one. And now we have to put the drawing between the breakdown between the flour and the rocket ship. Again, I'm referencing my plan. As you can see, this is again half way between both lines. It doesn't have to be halfway. You could even, like, flip here and then come down and reveal the the spaceship. You know what? Let let's do that. Let's flip it up here just to show you that you know we don't have to go in the middle. We can go. We can flip the flower first and then go down. And you know what? The leave is becoming the flame, and that one is going half way. You know what? We should probably also go back from the rocket ship to the ice cream again. So let's invent a breakdown for this real quick. I think it could be fun if the, um, the spaceship turns upside down into the ice. Uh, ice cream cone. The wings detach and they form the ice cream balls, and they like going in a big arc around it. And then they stack at the bottom off the rocket, which is going to become this part off the ice cream waffle, and they're gonna go plop, plop, plop one after the other. At least that's the plan. And if we make sure that we have onion skin switched off of weekend scrub through our animation with the arrow keys and it's already gonna look quite fun. Yeah, you can already see that there. There's some crazy cool stuff going on, and it's really cool how all the elements to solve and moved into different directions. Yeah, so I think we're ready for the next step
7. Straight-ahead Animation: Of course, our animation needs a lot more frames to be amazing and smooth. And so far we have been using a method that is called post to pose animation, where we will go to important poses off our animation and then fill in stuff between those important poses. And then you could go on like this. You could again go in the middle, put a frame there and you know this way. Work your way in until you have a lot of frames. The other working method is called straight ahead animation and in strata had animation. You just start with frame one, and you're going to go from there and do frame two from three of frame four, and you feel the motion a lot batter this way. Poster post animation has the advantage that you do a lot of planning. You put a lot of effort into crafting the single pose, and straight ahead animation has Theodore Vantage that you just go like in a flip book. You go one drawing after the other, and you can almost feel the motion developing in your hands the disadvantages the post that you might get at the end off your straight ahead. Animation might not be the one that you wanted to end up with. So we are combining these two techniques. We right now, the post to post for the key friends and the breakdowns. We have those milestones off and off, our animation tied down. And now we're going to do a straight ahead run for single elements off our animation. So this gives us both there planning and very carefully crafted poses off post a post animation and some smoothness and spontaneity from the straight ahead run that we're going to do on single elements of our animation. We will not be doing a straight ahead pass off all the elements in the picture at once because my brain isn't smart enough to do that. Uh, rather re pick one element and we're gonna feel and animate the motion off that one element . Usually you would pick the element that is leading the motion or that is moving the longest . We need to make more frames, and we can do that by again, grabbing the drawing at the grey handle and deleting that frame. We could switch on onion skinning to see what we're doing, and here's in general what we will be doing. We will put in anticipations and overshoots during our straight ahead run. You could also put them in in a post to post fashion like you could go between every every off, every single one of the drawings that we just did and say, OK, I'm gonna put in an anticipation and gonna put in an overshoot. Anticipation is simply, if you're for example, throwing something, you have to go into the opposite direction first, and then you go in the direction where you actually want the throat. That's called an anticipation. You preparing the motion going into the opposite direction. The overshoot is the opposite of that. For example, if you jump and you come down, you need to go further down. First, you need to catch yourself and then come up again. You overshoot the position, the end position that you actually want and then you come back to it so you could go in at key frame one. We're gonna put in an anticipation, have the breakdown, haven't overshoot and have the next key frame. That's the post proposed approach that you could be doing. We're gonna add anticipation and overshoot while we're doing the straight ahead run. And we're also gonna add something called Easing. We want to make sure that our emotions start slower and get Foster. This is also something that happens because of physics, and then they get slower again. And in general, this is how it looks. You know what? Let's make quick quite some room here so we can go on just with the arrow keys and we have a bunch of empty frames to fill. Let's start with that ice cream ball. It's gonna become, Let's say it's gonna become this one over here for the onion skin. You can also lock specific frames. If you move of one dot over, you can in this row, pin a drawing to the onion skin. If we moved the onion skin around, you will see that this dot stays where it ISS and keeps showing us this drawing. We know that we're starting here. We know that we are ending up here now. What does it mean for anticipation? We need to go into that direction first, and we want to do it with an ease. That means we gonna increase the distance between the lines going in that direction. Let's put that on an extra layers. So the planets, you know, if if this this Linus indicating the position off that line down here, we can say like, Okay, we're gonna go first a very little bit into that direction. So we get a very slow and smooth start. Then we have a bigger spacing. That means that our ice cream cone sped up and here's slowing down again because that spacing this is smaller and this is what we needed to get anticipation. We're gonna go in that direction, and now we're going to go into the direction that we actually wanted to go again. We start with an east and we're gonna and up here at the moment while we are on our chart layer. Don't see the onion skin for the other layer. You can change that by right clicking on the onion skin marker and say, Extend onion skin to seen. Now you can also see the the little drawing that we pinned to the onion skin on the other layer. Okay, so we know that we have to make all this distance, and it's nice to to do it in a little arc. Um, until we are here, this is where where our animation ends, we're tracking the left, the left border off our off our ice cream scoop and one off the effective easing methods. It is that we're just gonna half the spacings. We can just put spacing here, spacing here, Gonna go in here and the last one I'm not gonna have because that would give us two identical spacings here and here much. Rather, I will also like this to struck slower like that, and we're gonna put the same pattern on that site. Of course, this is just undies and no overshoot eso we're not going over this position coming back. Um, but, you know, maybe that's okay. We could, for example, do the overshoot on Lee on that ice cream ball because it has a lot like that. That distance seems a lot smaller, so it's going to shoot over and come back. And by having this this kind of overlap off different elements like this one is easing. This one is over shooting. It's going to give us a very interesting and pleasing toe watch animation. So it's finished the spacing pattern over here. You don't have to make a plan like this. If you're doing straight ahead animation, I guess it takes some of the spontaneity out of it. I just wanted to explain to you the way that I'm gonna place the lines as I'm going through this animation friend, my friend. He's a little side note from the future because I'm now treating this drawing that I earlier sent would be a breakdown. I'm now treating it more like a key frame, like a key post or an extreme, because I'm easing in and out of it. Normally a breakdown. You wouldn't ease in and out of it or at anticipation before and after it, because it's in the middle off the motion. For example, in the transformation between the sunflower and the rocket ship, this image clearly is in the middle off the motion. It's actually when the motion is its fastest, and the spacing before and after is the largest. So I don't want you to confuse this because I think this is one of the most common mistakes . After people stripe using anticipation that strike, using ah spacing that they would ease into a position that is actually on Lee on the way through that you really don't want to ease in or out off. So you need to pay attention if a drawing you're doing is actually at the beginning or end of emotion in this case, when in between you wanna add and ease, you might want to add extremes to get anticipation and overshoot, or if the drawing you did is in the middle of emotion. In that case, you don't ease in and out of it. And the spacing toe either side is the largest at this point in time. All right, I hope this is clear. Let's go on. Let's extend our marker to make sure that we seeing it all the time and then we have ready to go to draw one drawing after the other. The first drawing that we're going to draw is very, very close to the first line that we can see through the onion skin in red. I would even say that here at the bottom, we are exactly on that line. We only have a elements at the top which are already slightly moving into the the direction off the anticipation, and we're going to draw very closely to the red line. So it's gonna start nice and slow. And Theo, the distances are gradually getting bigger, as you can see. Now we have that big spacing here. So it should already be here. Um, and probably now get some off the dripping, pulling it back into the ball. And now we have unease again, for we have a very, very small distance for at least the top part and the left part. See, that's very, very small again. That green, all in the background, is distracting me a little bit. So I'm going to switch off our fixed onion skin. We are now here in our charts. So it's another very, very close, Very, very close drawing. Now, according to our plan, that next spacing is bigger. So we're going to do exactly that. We can extend our onion skin to see the previous drawing and to see exactly off how our spacing is growing. Now, see that we had that little spacing. Now we have that spacing here. No, we are on this frame. Okay? We're running out of frames over here. You can move. Ah, whole block. A whole stack of drawings by clicking at the side here, Gonna draw further down and extend our little timing grid our timing chart so we can see it through all the friends that are coming up now and we're going to continue now. These spacings are the same. Um, so we can we can fully embrace that now it's time that we can see our final position again . So I'm going to switch on the fixed onion, skinning again by clicking on marking the layer in this way. Now we can see our goal. And, um, we can do a nice easing into that into that final position. The next drawing is going to be notably closer, and the one after that is almost on the green line, cause it it reached it's end position to not see our timing charge. We you might be tempted to click on the I, but you're still seeing your timing chart. This is because that symbol is switching it off in the render off our project. If we're gonna make an export, a movie export off our animation, we wouldn't see this timing chart anymore if we have the ice which switched off. But if you also don't want to see while working. We need to switch it off here, which hides it in the view port as well. And that's quite handy. So you can leave your timing charts or your annotations in the in the scene, and you know that they're not going to be exported when you render the movie or vice versa . Maybe you have something that you want to be rendered in the final export, but you don't want to see it while you're animating because, like a foreground element that is distracting you or something like that very handy. We can already press play. It's gonna be a bit fast, and there is a little stray line somewhere here. Probably drew that to indicate some timing somewhere. And let's make some more room and make this animation a little bit slower at the moment. We are on 24 frames per second, but 12 frames per second are usually already enough to see your animation fluently only for very fast motions like running or a hit, you would switch to, um 2 24 frames per second, And in order to slow down our animation, we're gonna show one drawing for two frames. Business done a lot in animation, and it has its own term. It's called animating on twos because you're holding one drawing for two frames and in opened once there's a really easy way to do it. Let's just select this whole block. You can alternatively, click on the first image, hold shift and click on the last image and then right click choose reframe on twos. And now this animation she should be watchable. This is nice and gentle now, Maybe the, um, those fluid arms, they are vanishing a bit too quickly. I'm gonna at them here and that drawing so it's clear where they went. I think this is even a little bit too slow. So let's kick out some frames and I want to do that in a very specific way. Usually, a big thing that you can do to improve your animation is to make the slower parts slower and the foster parts faster. That can often give you a more interesting experience. Now I'm pretty content with the slow parts, so I'm just gonna make my animation foster. And here's how you can do that. You can kick out Um, the frames right before the fastest part off the emotion. And that would be this one and that one. If we kick those out, our our motion is still going to start very slowly. But then it's going to speed up very quickly and keep that speed for two frames and then slow down again. So let's see what those frames are. It's going into that direction. Here is the out most position off the anticipation, then this is that one. This is that one, and this is the one that we're going to kick out. I'm going to select them down here and hit the delete key Slight over the block of drawings . This one too. Slide the other drugs over. And now our animation still starts nice and smooth, but it's gonna snap into the new position. Yeah, I like it that way. This shape here, off the face, expanding. That could be that could be just in the middle of the motion. Um, you know what? Let's let's do that one next. Um, and let's see where that is coming from. We could to keep things a little more organized, we could work on different layers, so I'm going to slide the whole package. That whole package over to my first column I had it on call him to because of the image that we added earlier, I am gonna animate that, um, square expanding. So again, let's switch on onion skin. We already are on, too. So I change my onion skin to reflect that. And I'm gonna animate how that that shape here expands. And this time I'm not going to draw a timing chart. Um, I'm just still doing that pattern. Um, but I'm not I'm not going to draw it first. We're going to start with in ease out. So it's it's starting really, really slow. And those other lines start disappearing now, As you can see, this stack of drawing just got a new name. We did everything on B. And now we have drawing level D, and we started with the first drawing. So I expanded this and down here I can draw our next our next frame. This time, my spacing is a little a little bigger than it was before. Honest, getting bigger and bigger. Okay, now, I kept this basin kind of uniformed because we are in the middle of the motion and we can see that it was kind of like we can't fit another drawing between the green and the rent line. The last ones, without making the motion feel slower. So what I'm gonna do and gonna take that shape out off the out of that breakdown drawing and make it so that we can have that earlier I already gonna put it in here. Get off that straight line that we left behind so already reached its point here. And now the next drawing that we're gonna aim at is the can't face here. So I'm gonna take our pinned onion skin and I'm gonna I'm gonna pin the cat so we can already start moving towards towards the cat shape. We're going to do a huge overshoot over shooting. Now let's move the other drawings out of the way first. Still need to pin the correct drawing again. We're gonna ease into the overshoot, and we're gonna do another ease easing out of the red line into the green line. Next we're gonna do and he's into the green line. This type of drawing, by the way, it's called favoring. We are favoring one line off our onion skin over the other were favoring the green future, drawing over the red previous drawing. I'm not quite contented with how the shape expands. I think it's lingering too much in this state. I think I'm just gonna delete this drawing cause it's just keeping the square shaped for far too long and then suddenly grows wider and make it grow wider earlier. Let's make it like an anticipation by making it go, um, squeezed first and then expanding. I think that my add a nice touch when it goes toe. What's are slim direction first, and then it grows wide. Okay, let's continue to bring our other elements into the position off the breakdown drawing, which is I guess this is how it looks now with the very expanded, um, Tet head. Maybe we should move our ice cream scoop out of the way. Have a like that. Okay, I'm gonna animate this ice cream scoop on the same layer as the other scoop. We go doing an anticipation, going towards the right. And you know what? This one is only doing a very small anticipation. It's now already going to the left, but Now it's doing a very extensive overshoot going all the way here and now on Lee Onley now slowing down. No, that's maybe too slow. Let's make this one be the overshoot frame and then go back towards the green putting and he's here. And the last ice cream scoop down here is gonna hold its position until the other two are out of the way. I could already structure retract the the liquid ice, the melting ice. Uh, there we go. Now it can move. It's a way up too many on his skin frames. And here it's gone ISS ease into the final position. It reached its end position one frame before the plan breakdown. So I'm just gonna hold it there for one frame in place. That's also really nice if some elements already come to stop while others are still moving . Now for the ice cream bowlful, we have a shrink down, but let's hold it first, especially so we have enough time to see the square coming out of the coming out of the waffle, and there it could already start to come down again with an east. We could initiate an overshoot here and this could be already the beginning off the ease into into the position where it will be at the end on the nose, like we need to keep in mind that later we need to continue the spacing pattern.
8. Rough Animation: So let's pin the final drawing off the cat face to be Ah, goal and see how we get there. So first the ice cream scoop. Let's gonna start with that one. Start easing again. Okay, let for now, let's just continue on once again So we can just press the down arrow once, and we don't get any problems like accidentally creating a new drawing level. Um, so has continue on once. Change our onion skin to be accordingly. And here we're just gonna he's into the final I position and putting this on twos, we need told the layer with the cat face outline the other. I would like to arrive there a lot quicker, so that's already have this huge spacing for it. Here. Let's check if that is Yeah, that is doable. Smallest facing bigs facing. That's nice. And you're gonna see it's gonna look really nice with the ice arriving at different times. Oh, do we skip a drawing? You know, we skipped the drawing. I would like for the eye to rife even earlier. Wonderful. Now we can move on to the next element and I think I'm going to do a little change of plan here. Originally, we wanted to the, um, triangle down here to become the nose and the ice cream scoop up there to go down to become the mouth. But I'm not sure I like this cross transition now, So I'm just gonna turn this nose into the mouth, maybe with a little overshoot and settling down. So let's see what your start here and here. It's obviously speeding up. It's good that we can see the previous spacings deaf, grown larger and larger and larger, so we need to do something pretty large for the next frame. It's maybe make it like that. Let's keep this speed. Maybe the spacing is a little larger than the previous one, but now we're going to slow things down, and we're gonna come down in the next couple frames, put one in the middle and then we have the last frame here. Or you know what? Let's make this the ease frame. Then we don't have a breakdown for that motion. For straight motions, it's usually better to not well, not better, but in straight motions, you can have no breakdown without losing information. You know, if you have a ball falling down or going down. It doesn't matter if there was an image here or not. The viewer would assume that the all traveled down. But if you want to go in a curve, you definitely shouldn't go on a cough like that. You definitely need that break down here. That tells us that we went this way at all. Oh, didn't we want to turn the waffle shape into the mouth and not into the nose? See, that's that's why you need to do planning now. The ball shape coming from above needs to cross the nose. Let's see how that looks. Let's find the last frame where the ball was all the way up. Could already struck. Going down here. Take the shape off the mouth at least a little bit. Pretty early on. Yeah, that's what I was fearing that it's getting a little full here, but it's definitely dissolving the image plane. We have no feeling for volume or anything like that. It's all just shapes coming together to firm this kitty head, which I think is kind of cool for the whiskers. I think it would be fun if they came out of the for maybe from here, I think we can do all four of them. And once it's a little ease and now we just shoot them out like that and within ease, gonna come down to its final shape. He's been. He's out almost completely there at the green image. There we go. I like how the whiskers shoot out of the face. That's really nice. We keep it that way. The East. We could take out the criss cross hatching so we could make it connect and come down like that, as if it's drawing itself towards. If it's if it's pulling a string over and here we can already make the line disconnect down here there. We already have the ear shape just waiting for the head to finish. Maybe we can make sure that always connects to the to the other shape, turning to form a connection down here and now we just have to trace it. You know, if you animate stuff that it's drawing itself, that's definitely morphing on the image plane or strings being pulled, informing something that's a very classic example, and you can do really fun stuff with it if you just trace lines along a path and you, you know, you play with, um spacing, going larger and larger and larger, and you know that along a path can really, really nice. You can do really go stuff with that. It's now not reacting to the shape at all anymore, which is not not anything that would happen if you have, like a real organic shape that years would move with the squashing and stretching head like it. If it would be a pillow where we had years sticking to it, they would definitely move with it. But since we are in such an abstract space, we can just do whatever we want. And Theo nly rule is that it has to look good and somehow interesting. I like redrawing elements in place because it gives you that jittery line that makes you a more really life, Lee
9. Focus on Anticipation and Overshoot: okay for the morph from the can't face to the Sunflower. We already have a breakdown. Bankers. There's a lot of information, and this one is definitely a passed through. Ah, breakdown. Meaning that this is indeed the middle off the motion coming from here, that's the middle. And this is the end. Meaning there will be an ease out of this'll one. This will be in the middle with no ease. It will just have huge spacing to both sides up and down. And this is gonna have an ease in, maybe even an overshoot, actually. Um, yeah. So let's start with the biggest element which I think in both stroke, both drawings is the head because everything else is following it or somehow attached to it . That's a great opportunity for us to define a good leading motion. I am gonna rip this apart again so that we maybe have this somewhere in the middle. Let's work on. Let's work on once again and then change it to tools after we're done. S o. I need to change my onion skin to be accordingly. So let's think about how many frames we actually need to get from the cat face to the the breakdown to the halfway point on Dhere. We can use a tiny chart again to assist us in finding our motion. I think it would be nice to start with with an anticipation in the other direction. Um, switch on our column for earthy timing charts. So we're gonna go down since this is a straight motion and we don't need to break down to tell us how the, uh, the path of the motion ISS We can work without a breakdown just in east, out East, in going in that direction for the anticipation and now going up, Um, we already have the end frame, which is the frame of the sunflower. That's the friend that we're going to draw the anticipation, the lowest point of the anticipation and this frame we already have. This is the breakdown that we are seeing in green. It's exactly in the middle of the motion. So let's think about how many other drawings we need. Think we're just going to divide it like this and thirds and this should be sufficient. That should be all the drawings we need. And yeah, I'm gonna make it so that I can see the timing chart for a while. We're gonna need 123 for No. 123 This one is the same for five until we reach the breakdown. 1234 five. And the 5th 1 was the breakdown. I know it's still hard to count today, seriously, but I'm going to see, um I'm going to see if it's enough. And now we could either go straight ahead, you know, starting here doing that, that part off our graph doing that teeny, tiny little um he's or we could work a little more poster pose and say, OK, let's draw the anticipation. And the anticipation is 12 through three frames in and, um, he would could come up with an interesting anticipation frame. And I think it would be interesting if the cat face is more or less still a cat, maybe at the head, it's gonna it's gonna grow a little a little more years, a little more leaves. Um, but I think I want to keep it a cat. Um, mostly we could already we could make it like the Their head is bowing down and closing the mouth. Maybe so We're now treating this more or less like character animation. Having a a had turned a frontal head turn stepping down a little. Um, so if you want to make sure that the years are the same that the ears have their volume, I like to trace them from the previous drawing, and we can just grab that. And we know that they are exactly the same proportion wise cause we took from there. I just make made it end up a little bit because things like to point in into the direction that they came from. This is something that we're gonna learn in another lesson in greater detail. This looks a lot smaller than the other year. Somehow, maybe it's just because their head is a bit of cricket. Okay, so that's a nice anticipation frame. And now we can go in between. Oh, you know what we just did? We just accidentally created new, um, new drawing layer. Uh, this is not what we want. So I'm just copying all of the lines out of here. Make sure that we have this and it switched color. We, of course. When I have our caller Swatch, that was here previously. I'm gonna delete that one, if that is possible, okay. No, it's not. Yeah, I change it to that color. Now we can delete that color swatch. Okay, So after we planned our animation, we planned anticipation to happen here. We can just again switch to straight ahead and start drawing our ease favoring the red line . It is so hot in my room. I had to switch on a fan. I hope it is not too too noisy for you. Um, in the sound. Um, yeah. So everything is just shifting down a little bit. The hair is still pointing in the upwards direction, and now we have the ease in the other direction, this time favoring the green line that we are easing into. It's gonna be so cute. This is also gonna be the gonna be an interesting moment Where, um you see if I can a little more visible. The lines of the mouth are coming from up here, so it will be a little further up, but what we can do since the mouth is closing at the same time. Um, instead of having it be like this, we can make it be exactly on the green line. So we have a counter motion. This part of the mouth is moving down. And this part, the jaw is moving up. Oh, we didn't draw the whiskers at all in the in there anticipation frame, and we can right click reframe, but it on twos. It was some time to see the anticipation. Uh, okay, The hair is being pulled a lot from moving down, So in the next one, it's flipping over because the motion is now slower, it flops over again. Now, in our timing chart, we are here. That's the mutual frame. And now it's going up again in an ease. In theory, you can reuse the friend that we true previously Ah, lot, Except for when it reveals where objects came from, like the hair pointing up. And I think in our case it could possibly nice if he redraw this because then we can make the whiskers flip down and that hair proof of hair flipping down, having the years rotate out worse again. Now, do you notice the difference? We're now moving a lot more, considering how parts are attached to other parts, and I will make in new lessons and new courses about how exactly you need to think about that kind of stuff. But for now, it's it's It's interesting to play around with, You know, if if if the year is exactly where it was on the previous image or if it's going like that to that side or if it's going to the other side, that can make a huge different difference and feel a lot different. Okay, we just did that one. Now we're doing this one. Um, And to do that, we should already have a look at the breakdown drawing that we already have. It's here and now we really going to start the morph. But we haven't. We actually haven't morphed, not really opening the ice again, making sure that the that years and the pedals connect and are readable. We can also flip back and forth to see if we are on the right track. We definitely need something here. Oh, on this side, it doesn't have a spike coming out there, but coming out of here found sheer. The breakdown is already here. Now we need to morph into our final frame. Pin it up there. We're gonna we're gonna overshoot, and then we're gonna come down again. So that frame up here, this is Theo. Overshoot. Um, and then from the overshoot, we're gonna settle into the final position. And let's do one of these again. Just trying to see how big my last spacing Waas my last facing less like that. Um, you know what? Let's directly go to that height. So our spacings, even a little larger than the previous basing waas This kind of weird because it's on the height of the end position, But we're still in the middle of the motion, So maybe maybe I drew it a little bit too round. How was our previous frame? Were still a little a little squashed, The no shrinking I pretty much have the final shape now for the pedals. The's tool should be there in their final size. Everything should be pointing down because it's coming up with a lot of speed. The one that came from the years can already be or can still be a little larger. And here comes the ease into the overshoot. And for that we already take the final round shape off the sunflowers. So I'm going to trace that real quick from the final sunflower image, going to shift it up a little bit. So we get our overshoot. She stood up. Let's rotate the head up a little if we just moved the facial features up is gonna look like like our sunflowers looking up. Not sure in keeping the leaf count the same. 123456789 10 11 12. No, that's correct. Select our frames. Reframe twos. Now we can already see how it looks. By now, you've probably noticed that we're doing the same exact thing over and over again. So we continue by easing out of the extreme position out of the overshoot and in the next frame, we are immediately easing into the the key frame off the sunflower, with the Leafs pointing a little bit upwards, being a little bit wrecked behind. Um, then we check out our next station, which is the the breakdown in the middle of emotion, where the sunflowers sliding down to tribute to reveal the rockets. So again we start this with unease and have bigger and biggest spacings. The closer we get to the breakdown. Yeah, find, find some nice points to lead the Leafs, grow into the sides of the rocket ship and hide the leaves. And, of course, we also ease into the rocket ship. Yeah, and next up we're going to rotate the Rocket and detach the rocket wings to turn the rocket wings into ice cream scoops. Again, We start with Annie's do importation, very gradually sliding the window off the rocket ship to the left. And yeah, so far we did an anticipation dipping to the right, and now we're doing the motion to the left, which is quite a lot faster. You see, that's a huge spacing to the left, and now we east in again into the waffle key frame here. I'm playing the animation couple times, so I get a feel for the motion. None detaching the flame to turn into the ice cream scoop. Yeah, this is interesting. I'm scribbling the path that the wings will do that will detach and turn into the ice cream scoops and actually change my mind, as you will see. First, I had the flame turning into the ice cream scoop that goes around the rocket, but then I change it so that the flame turns into the first ice cream scoop that goes at the bottom off the rocket ice cream waffle thing very early on so that the wings have enough time to detach and go around the rocket to turn into the other two ice cream scoops . Again. We're easing, speeding up and at the middle of the art that the ice cream scoops air traveling and there are the fastest and have a huge spacing, and they stack one after the other, previewing this a couple times. Then I go through the animation, put some elements in that I forgot, like the stem off the sunflower into leave again. We have ease and overshoot and all these nice things that you probably know by heart. Now, Uh, animation can be a lot off the same thing over and over again. Oh, yeah, there's the leave turning into the the flame of the Rocket, and there we go. There's the final animation, and it's looking pretty nice, coming all together very nicely. I love especially how smooth the transition fields from that can't faced the sunflower. That's that's pretty nice. You don't really see where it transforms, which I think is pretty cool. That's really nice. Yeah. Now we're now at a point where we can start cleaning up our drawings on a separate layer.
10. Clean-up: now that you're done with the rough animation my animation is currently looking like this. We can start cleaning up, are very, very rough lines and making sure that everything looks a little more uniform and that we tied down the messy and transparent parts. It cleanup is an art form that also needs a lot of practice to have Flynt's that are really smooth and curvy and and and not jittery. That's the whole skill set that people are training the whole life for. I'm also not the best ink artists. I think my lines are not the smoothest, and sometimes I don't quite get the thicker and thinner lines exactly the way that I want it. But we can at least try, right? So let's dedicate one off our layers to the cleanup. I think we no longer need. Call anything in Column three our timing charts. We can just select all and delete them, and now we can use this whole column because I have a second layer here with scribble stuff . We can use our second column authored column over here completely for clean up, and when we started drawing here, you will see it's creating a new, um, drawing level for us in my case is called H. One of the most basic rules of thick and thinner lines is that you have the lines getting thicker in shadow and thinner in light. So if you draw something like this, then we have the light shining under our object from up here. So this is something that I'm gonna try and this drawing If this is a little do frustrating for you, just go ahead and don't choose a size where goes thicker and center a lot. It's totally find you work in just one brush size, especially if you're just starting out with learning how to draw. Um, another thing that can make it a little easier for us to work is that we can make the other columns a little transparent by clicking here at the arrow. And there we can set the opacity down to like, 45%. That looks good. Do that over here. To this way, we can see a little better where we are drawing our alliance. Yeah, and I think that's a good set up for us to start cleaning up. I personally really like cleanup work. because you can just put on some music, maybe, or listen to a podcast, how you're doing it, and maybe only for the very tricky parts you might. You might need to switch off the music to focus a little better. You can also use the cleanup face, though, to tweak your animation a little more. So if you, for example, um see that an ease is too big or too small, you can change. That s you're doing the cleanup. That is the big advantage. If you ask, the animator are doing cleanup in big production. This might be the drop of a cleanup artists. And then you really need to nail down your rough animations of the cleanup Artist knows what they have to animate. Um, there's also one part where I'm not sure about the animation, I think at the from the ice cream cone to the cat. I think I mentioned it before. I didn't like how the mouth and the nose are crossing each other like that. I think I might switch that up again. I might turn in this bowl into the nose and that triangle into the mouth down there. Um, because I just don't like how how these things are like in this frame. There's so much at one space. I don't like that. So I'm actually going to change the animation a little bit and clean up. This is something that you probably shouldn't do, but I do it from time to time, especially in productions where I have very little time and, um, can't do another rough revision that I might try to fix little things. It should be little things during the clean up phase. In some images, I'm gonna take my carefully crafted lines for the elements that didn't move. I'm gonna take that over into the second frame so that I can be sure that the things that I don't want to move stay where they are in place, depending on the styled. This this might not be something that you want to do. It might look a little more life, Lee, if I going to redraw everything, but I want to get done with this exercise now, so I'm going to speed it up a little bit. I just noticed that the onion skin is a lot more helpful if you switch it from seeing the onion skins for for all the layers to just limit onion skin to level. And then you Onley see the previous cleaned up line in red. But you can still see the other layers transparently in the background on this might be the best way. Teoh, see what's going on in the new frame. But also see the line how you previously claimed it up. All right, so I hope I could inspire you to create your own morphing animation, and I off course, would love to see it. So please, if you post it anywhere used a hashtag morph animation and you can treat or Instagram s at Animator Island And yeah, I'll try to comment on it. If I see something, you can also post it in the Facebook group. If you got the class pass, you got access to our secret elite Facebook group and compost there. I'll try to give you my feet back there and oh, yeah, in total. I just hope you have a lot of fun doing this. I will no clean up the animation and I put it on time lapse. So this video is so insanely long. So if you're interested in seeing me cleaning up the animation, doing the thinking you can keep on watching on, and Yeah, I hope you had fun. I hope to see you around for the next lesson in this class. Next up, we're gonna have a look at very common patterns off motion s. Oh, that is very exciting to know, Like every possible option that you have for your emotion, Right? Thank you for purchasing the premium lesson. I really appreciate your support. Talk to you soon. Keep on animating. - All right, all right. - Okay . - You stayed with me all the way to the end. Thank you very much. This is how the final animation looks like, and I It's quite nice. Turned out quite decent. And yeah, I hope I really hope you're doing your own animation because just watching about animation , just reading about a hearing about it is not the same as doing it. You have to do it to really master it. And I love to see your animation. Please let us know if you if you try your own little morphing animation and I hope you have a great, fantastic day or night wherever you are. Thank you very much. Watching talk to you again soon
Ferdinand Engländer
