Cel and 2D Animation: Streamline your Workflow in Procreate Dreams | Danni Fisher-Shin | Skillshare
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Cel and 2D Animation: Streamline your Workflow in Procreate Dreams

teacher avatar Danni Fisher-Shin, Animator & Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:26

    • 2.

      Getting Started

      1:27

    • 3.

      Setting Up a Rough Animation

      8:19

    • 4.

      Creating Cel Animating Elements

      11:39

    • 5.

      Animating the Hero Element with Performing

      4:02

    • 6.

      Adding Character to Hero Element

      9:17

    • 7.

      Adding Depth, Color, and Lighting

      10:18

    • 8.

      Adding Finishing Touches

      8:26

    • 9.

      Final Thoughts

      0:59

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About This Class

Create hand-drawn 2D and Cel animations from conception to composition all in one app with Procreate Dreams.

Welcome back art director and animator Danni Fisher-Shin. You may know her from her first Skillshare class, but you may have also seen her work in Olivia Rodrigo’s “brutal” music video and her long list of creative campaigns with brands like Apple, Google, and Facebook. She has been using software like Photoshop and After Effects to make eye-catching and emotional animations for years–first building out the idea in Photoshop and then finalizing it in After Effects. As a long-time Procreate user, Danni has now been able to use Procreate Dreams to take all her animation creation and composition all in one app. Since its inception, the app has helped streamline her workflow and boost both the mobility and accessibility of her animation process.

Now Danni wants to teach you how you can create a professional, fully completed, and composited 2D Cel animation from start to finish in Procreate Dreams. In this class, Danni will walk you through the creation of an original animation while diving into Procreate Dream capabilities like adding keyframes, creating camera movement, performing, and grouping keyframes and layers. 

With Danni by your side, you’ll:

  • Keyframe camera movement
  • Create a dynamic background
  • Animate a loop within groups 
  • Use the Performing feature to animate your hero element
  • Add customized animated elements to add depth and color

Plus, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look into Danni’s workflow and how she creates her work as a full-time animator.

Whether you’re a seasoned animator looking to streamline your process or take it on the go or you’re an entry-level animator who wants to explore a new animation software, you’ll leave this class with newfound confidence in using Procreate Dreams and an understanding of how to make all of your future animation projects all in one app. 

Animation experience whether in Photoshop, After Effects, Procreate, or another animation software is suggested when taking this class. You’ll need Procreate Dreams, an iPad, and an Apple Pencil. 

This class was filmed using Procreate Dreams 1.0.5

Meet Your Teacher

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Danni Fisher-Shin

Animator & Illustrator

Teacher

Danni Fisher-Shin is a professional animator and illustrator born and raised in Los Angeles, California. With a passion for intersectional feminism, empathy, and empowerment through art, she strives to create work that reflects what she wants to see in the world, or at least makes someone smile. Currently an Art Director and Designer at Scholar, she's created work for many clients, including Google, Netflix, Procreate, and more.

See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: One of my favorite things about what I do is that you can create something from scratch really quickly, especially in Procreate Dreams because you can just draw anything you want and make it move immediately. I think that's really fun. I'm Danni Fisher-Shin. I'm an Art Director, Animator, and Illustrator. I really like creating the things that I wish existed in the world. You might know my work from several made-on iPad campaign videos, music videos for Zedd, Olivia Rodrigo, [inaudible], and I've also worked on projects for Apple, Google, Facebook, and [inaudible]. Today we're going to learn how to create a full 2D animation, completely in Procreate Dreams from rough animation through cel animation, learning a bit of the performing feature, through the end product and compositing. I think the hardest part of 2D cel animation when I first started was having the confidence to play around with it. You really can find your own voice. It'll be a lot easier and it'll be a lot more fun. All that you need to take this class is your iPad, Procreate Dreams, and your Apple pencil. By the end of the class, you'll have a professional-looking fully completed, and composited 2D and cel animation. I hope you'll leave this class with a newfound confidence in using Procreate Dreams and an excitement to get started on making all of your own professional-looking projects. I'm so excited to be teaching you in this class. Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: Welcome to the class. I'm so excited you're here. I've been creating 2D animation professionally using Photoshop and After Effects. Now I'm excited to use Procreate Dreams to do all of my process in one app. Professionally, I've always had to use cel animation and then export and bring it into another program to composite and finish. But with Procreate Dreams, I can do everything all in one app. I started using Procreate all the way back in 2016 and it sparked my creativity because I was able to do fully illustrated digital art all in the go. Now I'm excited to use Procreate Dreams to do that same process but with full 2D animations. I love the accessibility and mobility of Procreate and Procreate Dreams. I have a short attention span and I like being outside and moving around, so this was the perfect development for my illustration and animation practice. We'll be going into this class with our knowledge of Photoshop, After Effects, and Procreate, and using Procreate Dreams to recreate the same processes all in one app. We'll be learning as we go in this class. Taking a rough animation all the way through to polish and the finished piece, we'll be creating a fully realized 2D animation of a sprite zooming through vortex with transitions in and out. We'll be going through all of the key steps including the performing feature, key framing, and style animation within groups. All of the skills you're learning here don't have to be used to create the same thing. You can take these skills and transfer them to your own animations and your own ideas, because we'll be learning all of the basics. Now that we know what we're going to make. Let's get started, grab your iPads, and meet me in the next lesson. 3. Setting Up a Rough Animation: We're going to start with the basic file set up. As you can see here, I have my frames per second set at 12 just because I like a step more hand animated look and the duration is just 7 seconds for right now because that's probably around where we're going to end up. We can always change that after. What I'm going to do is the idea for this animation is to have a sprite that moves across a vortex and then ends up in a swirly end bit that it disappears into. With that beautiful sketch in mind, we are going to draw the basic background layout so that we can use that to keyframe a fake camera move. I'm going to start laying out a full panel for us to move a fake camera over with our keyframes. This is just going to be a guideline for our end animation, and the nice part is that we do get to keyframe it, so it'll be there the entire time for us to reference, to make sure that our camera move looks right and everything is looking like a real camera is going on a real space. I'm just going to draw some really rough sketched guides, and these can be, again, very imperfect because they're just guides and that's the nice part of this. We're just getting the main key frames in, the main camera movement and then we get to do the fun stuff. I'm going to draw these out super long just because we want our sprite to have a ton of room to travel this way, so we get a really nice sense of zooming through, we can have cool little like sprites shooting past as speed lines and things like that. It'll be much more dynamic the farther we take it. I'm going to draw just a really simple little fake vortex for our end part here. Just for this purpose, we'll sub in a nicer, more simplified version of this later. But this is just to get placement right, so this is fine for now. What I'm going to do here is since we have this whole long piece, I'm going to take this piece and put it in a group, press and hold with this selected and press Group. If you do that, it becomes a group and you have your main drawing layer inside of this larger group, like in Procreate, when you group layers. Whatever a keyframe on this group itself is going to apply to everything within the group and I can still edit this inside of that group without affecting the key frames. We're going to use this group as our camera move group and put all of our keyframes on this part. To do that, I'm going to tap here at the very beginning and select the move action. I'm going to choose move and scale, because we want to slide this all the way over, and I'm going to click and hold and expand that. What this does is it breaks out all of our different dimensions and properties here, like if you were to separate dimensions in after effects, et cetera, or go into the additional properties. We have our x movement, our y movement, our scale on both axes and our rotation. What I'm going to do is just keyframe the x movement here. I'm going to go all the way to the end of my composition. Maybe I'll go right around here because I want to have a little bit at the end while it's straight on the vortex. Let's go here. See I have this x showing on the key frame. It shows my y whenever I move it, so I know that I'm on the x horizontal movement here. I'm going to tap that so it makes a keyframe, and I'm going to drag this all the way over to make our camera move. Now if I press Play, we can see that we've created this false camera move with our keyframes. It's very rough right now, but this is what we're going to use to set up our main camera move animation and then animate within that and on top of it. As you can see, it's easing in here to this animation and that's something that we're going to edit as well. If you click and hold again and click Set easing, you can change from linear easing, which is basically all at the same speed, or ease in, ease out and ease in and out, which is just easing in and out with speed between each key frame. We want this to move a little faster. We don't want it to start from such a slow start. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag this key frame a little bit earlier, so we hit right around the part where it's getting a little bit faster. Now we're starting a little bit further in. Let's see how that looks. That's looking a lot better. I'm going to speed it up a little bit because that is super slow. I'm going to drag this back. Let's say around here, we can see how that looks, and our camera move is going a little faster. I think that looks fine for now. We can always adjust this later. That's the really nice thing about it. Now that I've keyframed the x axis, I'm going to start keyframing our zoom into the vortex at the end here. This is why I separate the dimensions. At this point, I want to be able to control everything individually. Now we're going to zoom into the vortex using our rotation keyframes. What I'm going to do is select this layer. If you see these three dots, you can edit the anchor point, which is something that's really nice, that is not in the regular procreate. I'm zooming out. My anchor point is all the way over here, because this is where I started drawing. I'm going to put it right in the middle of this beautifully drawn vortex. We're going to use that to start rotating this. I don't want it to stop and then start rotating so I'm going to use these separated dimensions to have it start rotating a little bit early. I'm going to delete this first key frame because we don't need it, and it's a little cleaner if we just have the ones that we need. Now I'm going to offset this a little bit. Our x key frame stops here, and on either side, we have our rotation. I'm going to click on the top right corner to create the rotate option here, this little arc and I'm going to rotate it. Let's do just one for now. Now we can see how that looks. So good. I'm going to change this easing to an ease in because we want it to blend with the movement that we're having here sideways, and I'm going to drag this a lot farther over here. There we go, because it's starting to spin a little bit too soon. That's a little more like it. This looks really simple, really rough, really gross right now. But this is the basis that we're going to use for our nice animation later. We want to lay it out very well at the beginning. Now that we have a rotation in, I'm going to start keyframing a zoom in for the end and for that we're going to use our scale. I'm going to create two scale keyframes because we want it to scale at the same rate on either axis. I'm going to make end keyframe here and then scale the entire thing up to where I want it to end at. Let's take a look. There we go. That's not bad for our general layout. It is starting to spin a little awkwardly and scale at the same time, so I'm going to again, set the easing here and this is also going to be an ease in because we want it to feel like it's starting slowly and then sucking in really fast. Now that we've learned basic keyframing and set up our main camera move, meet me in the next lesson to go over creating cel animated elements that will add into this move. 4. Creating Cel Animating Elements: So now that we have our main camera move animation, I'm going to start creating our cel animated sprite. One of the nice things about this is I can create a little living hole loop, and then keyframe that for the overall animation. I'm going to start by just drawing our little sprite. It's just a little brushy ball, and I want this to look very hand-drawn and hand-done. I'm using this big gouache brush. What I'm going to do is I've created this layer, I can actually just swipe down here and use the flip book feature to animate frame by frame very easily. Now that I have one, I'm going to actually click here and do show onion skin, and that way I can see what the previous frame was. You can go in here and edit all of your onion skins, change the colors, change how many frames, forward and backwards. These are my settings, I like to keep it on a lower opacity and different colors for forwards and backwards. All I'm going to do here is just keep drawing over with the same brush, the same circle, and as I go forward frames, it's going to jitter a little bit. I want that because it looks like I hand-drew every frame, but I didn't, it's a lie. I'm going to keep going through and doing that, creating several frames for it to loop through that we can then keyframe overall. Now that I've created a few frames, I'm going to swipe down to get out of the flip book feature, and we're going to see how that looks. I'm going to drag my timeline over here so that I can see the loop. That's not too bad. I'm going to add a couple more frames, and I'm going to make sure that the scale matches, because these are looking a little bit different. What I'm going to do to create a good loop, I'm going to duplicate this first frame and drag it back over to the end, when I look at my onion skins, I can see the difference between this frame and how it will look when it loops back to my first frame. I can see that this one is going to be a little small, so I'm just going to scale that up a little bit, instead of hand-drawing it all over again. This one also needs to be scaled. We can take these pieces that we've already hand-drawn, and adjust them like this as well, which is really nice so we don't have to redraw everything. I'm going to add a couple more frames just to get a longer loop, so it looks a little more realistic that we hand-animated every frame. I'm going to make sure that they match to this last frame, and this one can also be scaled up just a little bit more. Let's see one more and see how that looks. I like to keep the edges really textured here because that's what's mainly going to show when we end up key-framing this later and make it look really handmade. Now that we have this loop, I'm going to delete this last duplicate frame, and I'm going to select this and just drag all of these, click and hold and group them. Now I have my loop as a group. Let's see how that looks. That's not bad. What we're going to do is I'm going to name this, press and hold, and I'll name this Sprite Loop. Now what we can do is instead of taking this and redrawing it over and over and over again, we're just going to duplicate this. This way, we have it animating in a living hold throughout the entire piece, and we're going to take this as a full group and keyframe that. That way the entire time it will look hand-animated, but it's not, it just is much more efficient. I'm going to select all of these, and group them. Now we have our living hold of our sprite that we can now animate over our main camera move, and it already looks somewhat convincing, even though we haven't done much yet. Now that we have our hero element animated in the loop, we're going to animate a few different effects that we're going to use within the camera move, that we're then going to duplicate in the same way so that we have the entire screen populated, but we only have to create a few different assets. What I want to do is while we're zooming through this horizontal space, is I want to have some animate speed lines, some blobs, stuff like that, flying past in this direction to really emphasize the speed that we're moving at camera-wise. I'm going to choose my brush. I'm going to go into my camera move and I'm going to start animating some streaks flying by. I'm going to do the same thing again. I don't want to start at the very beginning for these because we're just creating the straight ones for right now, for this big long horizontal piece. I'm going to go into flip book again, and I'm just going to start animating a piece flying by. I want to make this look very textured again because I like making it seem this whole thing was hand-drawn, and we're just going to very easily, very simply, roughly draw in a few frames. As you can see, we're following these guidelines that we've set for ourselves, so we can pretty clearly see what everything needs to do in order to look it's moving with the overall motion of the piece. I'm going to drag this down a little bit because that is a little bit off, go back to my drawing function, and then back to flip book. That is one of the nice things about this, is that now that we have our rough animation, it's pretty much set to go in terms of needing reference for making everything look right motion-wise, which is really nice. Let's have our little sprite just fully exit off screen, and then we'll see how that looks. That will do. I've made a few in different colors. We can always go and if we want to change a color. If we press this Plus sign and add a track, if we wanted to change the color of this one, right here, then we could just take this color and drag it in, and then create a clipping mask. If we do want to do that while we are duplicating these, we can do that. That's a really nice thing about working with these animation layers. We have these few different ones here. I'm just going to start duplicating and dragging these over. This is all just stuff that we can edit and finesse as we go. I'm liking how this is looking so far. What we're going to do next, now that we have our speeding sprite animation, is we're going to go into this vortex part at the beginning where it's a little more curved, it needs to be customized, and this bit at the end when it starts to spiral. What I've done here is I've added this guide because hand-drawing spirals is just not going to happen in a way where it looks perfect, so we have this guide in here and I'm going to actually follow these guidelines instead of the rough ones that were in my own sketch, and animate a few pieces going into this vortex. I'm going to take my main colors and start right around here, where we start to see it within the camera move. I'm going to follow these lines that we have in the guide. Again, I'm going to keep this really rough and make sure that it's following these lines. Now, one thing you can do is you can animate this outside of the group along the spiral and then put it inside of the camera move if you don't want to go hand-drawn for each of these. But in my opinion, it looks better like this, so I'm just doing it on top of the entire thing so it looks a little smoother. Again, I'm just following the same line of the spiral as we go. As it goes farther into the vortex, it gets smaller because it's farther away, so I'm just enhancing that scale a little bit to add to the effect. I'm going to have it break up a little bit as it goes, so that we can have it fade out. We're just going to keep doing this for the rest of our spiral pieces. I don't think we'll need to make too many. But we can also take this one that we have here, and since this is a perfect spiral that we've dropped in here, we can always duplicate that and move it as well, in the same way that we did the other sprites. I'm going to go back and animate in the same type of way at the beginning, following my guidelines, a few sprites going in this more curved perspective. Again, these guidelines are super helpful even though they were really rough at the beginning, having them here now makes it way easier to know what we're doing and not have to keep the guesswork. In the same way, I'm going to take these, duplicate them, and make custom animations for each of these more curved parts that need their own specific pathway. I'll just take those and add them so that we have enough to duplicate across these whole spaces and make the beginning and end of the vortex feel full. Now I'm going to go through the tedious part and duplicate all of these and create all of the custom animations. Now that we've animated all of our horizontal elements, duplicated them across and created a really nice scrolling background, we've added our custom pieces, cel animated at the beginning and end of our vortex, now we're going to animate the hero element using the performing feature. 5. Animating the Hero Element with Performing: Now we're going to bring back our main hero element that we pre-animated at the beginning. We have some nice textural animation happening right now, but we want to make it move and have its own character within this vortex. What we're going to do is we're going to use the performing feature, which is something that's extremely unique to Procreate Dreams and very exciting to animate something that feels really natural very quickly. For this animation, we want it to be a little more subtle, so I'm going to do a more natural looking animation where the sprite stays a little more in the center and then zooms into the vortex at the end. So we're going to select our main hero element and we're going to press this "Record" looking button. What this is going to do is as soon as I start dragging this layer, it's going to move it both where I'm dragging it and across the timeline. As I drag it throughout the entire timeline, it will play and it will record that animation and keep that as keyframes. Let me show you what I mean. Now, when I go back, you can see that we have that entire animation that I just moved with with just my pencil that's already animating throughout the entire piece. Now this is something that is then saved as keyframes. If you look here, you can see all of the individual keyframes that were saved for each position that we were in. This is editable, which is something that's nice. We can go back in here and clean this up and make the motion a little bit smoother. We can also just undo it if we don't like how we did that movement and just start over again, and it's super, super fast, which is really nice. I'm going to try to make this a little more natural, a little more centered, and then I want it to have a big movement at the end. Something like that Is a little more what I'm going for. Let's say I don't like where it's landing here. I want it to be a little bit closer to center. I can just take that keyframe and drag it in a little bit. This way I can have a custom animation that feels really natural. But I can still go back in and edit and make it feel exactly the way that I want it to. It's now has a bigger circle and then a smaller spiral as it gets deeper into our center of the vortex. One of the nice things about performing is that you can do different functions and it will record them at different times. I just did the position. Now let's say I want to animate the scale. I'll press the "Record" button. Let's say I want it to start very small, get bigger, then as it goes into the vortex, I want it to get smaller again. Now we have that also built in, also baked into the same keyframes, and we didn't have to hand do that at all. The great thing about the performing function is that you can use it to any extreme. You can make an animation as subtle or as crazy as you wanted to be. Let's say we wanted to make the zoom toward screen zoom away. It really dramatic with it. We can do that super easily, just as well as if we were doing a subtle, more natural animation. Now you can see we have them zooming everywhere, all over screen and we could even play with the scale on top of that to make it even more dramatic. Let's say it's getting closer and farther. Now we have the super dramatic crazy animation that could be really fun and happened extremely quickly if we wanted to have that level of movement. Now we have our main hero animation done super, super quickly and just the amount of time it took to move my pen. We're going to go into adding in some bespoke cell animated elements on top of it to add character. 6. Adding Character to Hero Element: Now that we have our full animation with our hero element and our background animation scrolling, we're going to start adding some character to our hero element by adding cell animated touches. What I'm going to do is I want to add a bit of a trail behind it as it's flying through this space. What I'm going to do, since we have our sprite within a main group, is I'm just going to duplicate one frame and turn off everything else so we can focus on this. I have it positioned a little bit farther from the center. This is probably the farthest from the left hand side that it will ever get. One of the nice things about key framing on groups is it's like key framing on a precomp in after effects. If you add something to the precomp or to the group that the key frames are on, then it's also subject to that movement. I'm just going to animate one loop of a trail and then put that inside of my group with my sprite and it should move with all of the movement that we just did using the performing feature. I'm going to take one of my trail colors. I want to make this really nice kind of textured wavy trail for this. It'll be like this shape and it'll just trail behind and undulate like a wave motion behind our main animation, something like this. I'm going to use the bonobo chalk brush because I really like the nice noisy texture that it makes and it's very big and soft, so you get some nice edge texture as well. I'm going to start animating still on this background. I'm going to turn on my onion skins again and I'm going to just follow this wave motion and create a simple loop for our trail. I'm going to make this pretty subtle just because I don't want to distract too much from the main animation and if we have it going too far, it will become a little more obvious that it's key framed. We want to make this look really natural. I'm just extending that wave motion a little bit, keeping it very textured and getting a little bit wider at the end for the drama. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to do that same trick that we did for our last loop and I'm going to take the first frame and duplicate it and drag it to the end of our cycle so we can see what the differences and see how it's going to loop. Now I'm going to use that to make this match a little bit better. Now we have this rough animation. Let's see how that looks. I'm going to again group these and move that to the beginning so we can see what our loop looks like. Now that this main animation is in place, I'm going to key this in a little bit more, smooth it out, make it a little more subtle, and then we'll get into adding more pieces of character to this hero piece. Now we have the simple looped animation of a trail for our main sprite. I'm going to go ahead and drag this into my main sprite group and it should perfectly line up with the animation. Now we have just a few frames of looping animation that will loop through the entire straight part of this animation, which is really nice. We don't have to animate anything else for this, it's just five or six frames and we can have that play for most of this piece. Now what we're going to do is add a bit more of a personalized animation for this end bit since clearly our straight trail won't make sense with the vortex part. And just a little bit at the beginning to make more sense with the depth that we've created in this environment. Now we've added some animation at the beginning that's personalized and some at the end for our spiral swirl. Now I'm going to add a little bit more character to this by adding a gradient to our trail. It's a little plain right now. I'm just going to go into our trail loop here and I'm just going to make a solid and drag that in. I'm going to use our big texture brush that we're using and just make a little bit of a gradient just towards the edge of the screen. Then I'm going to go ahead and do that clipping mask that we did earlier. Since this is within the camera move, I do need to make sure that it goes all the way to the edge all the time. I'm going to scale that up a bit so it still looks good. Now we have a nice little bit of colored detail. Now we're going to apply the same idea that we did before with our first trail and I want to add a little bit more of a thin line detail since most of our design so far is very brushy. I'm going to take the same principle, and I'm going to use a thinner brush that's a little bit less textured and I'm going to go ahead and start making a wavy trail. I want this thin trail to be a little bit less perfect and a little bit more scribbly than our last trail, to add a little bit more character. I'm going to go into my flip book feature for that and see what starts looking good. I'm again going to turn my onion skins and just start animating straight ahead for this. Sensors is a little looser. It can get a little bit more crazy and I want this to be a lot faster so we really get the feeling of wind and speed whipping through this environment. Once again, I'm going to bring back that first layer and duplicate it so that we can get to a good looking loop. I'm going to draw these in between frames to make sure that our loop works smoothly and we'll see how that looks. This isn't looking too bad, so I'm going to clean this up a little bit and then we're going to get into duplicating it and adding it into our main animation. Now we've dragged our thin line trail animation into our main sprite animation and is following just as it should. Same as the other trail. I'm going to make a clipping mask that's plain white so that it shows up a little bit better against our other colored elements. Once again, this is a super nice way to make quick edits without having to recolor every frame. That looks pretty nice to me and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this trail that we have, which is just on one side, and I'm going to duplicate it. I drag it back a little bit because it's within a group. I duplicate it and I'm going to just drag it so we have the same exact layer, one on top of the other. What I want to do is make this actually happen on both the top and the bottom of the sprite. I'm going to take this duplicated piece and I'm going to click this top button and flip vertical. Now we have the same exact animation, just flipped around. I'm going to rotate it a little bit so we have some nice variation in there. I think I'm going to offset it a little bit so it's not the exact same animation, so it looks a little bit more natural. I'm going to drag that just a couple key frames ahead. Now, just by animating one line, we have this nice multiline trail that follows our entire preanimated ball. Now that we have our cell animation customized for the beginning and end of the vortex, for our thin line trails, we're going to start going in and adding several passes of extra design layers, a little bit of customized cell pieces. And just generally making it have a very finished and designed look. 7. Adding Depth, Color, and Lighting: Now that we have our final animation Keaton, we want to add all of our finishing touches and make it look as best as it possibly can. We're going to add some lighting passes, some extra vortex darkness and rings of color and anything we can to really plus it up. I'm going to start with adding a little more dimension to our vortex and to the beginning to add a little more depth. I'm just going to go into the camera move that we already have and I think I'm going to use that same brush that we used before to start darkening the parts where it goes farther back in space. I'm going to just do a really big loose pass and it mostly happens around this area. I'm just going to blend it out really smooth, lower my brush opacity so it feels like it's gradually coming towards us in space. I'm going to go ahead and move this back a little bit and this way, we're getting a little bit more depth here as it comes towards us. I think I'm going to make that little softer and then add an even darker piece as well. This is all just design stuff that we can add at the end, just little touches that make it look a little bit more complete. I'm going to add a darker color as well just to see how that looks. Again, I can edit all of these in color, placement, everything whenever I want to because it's within a keyframed group. That's the really nice thing about using this keyframe function for our main camera move. Now we have a little bit more of a sense of depth here traveling through space towards us, and let's start to add some of that at the end as well. What I'm going to do is add a track and start adding a little bit more depth to the center of our vortex, and this is again going to be really rough, and I think I'm going to layer this up a little bit, so we get a really nice gradient as we get farther in. Maybe I'll make another track and make a slightly darker color. It really feels like we're traveling through space as we go farther. I can always take this and start playing with blending modes. This is a really fun part of the project to do that on. It basically just makes everything look a little more lit when we have some nice colors interacting in there. I think I'm going to add one more and make a light at the end of the tunnel here to contrast our main sprite, which is very dark. Now, it really looks like it's zooming into an entrance or an end of a vortex, and it looks a little bit more dynamic and has a little more depth to it. I'm going to try to center this a bit as well because it's moving a little bit where I don't want it to in the camera move. That looks a bit better. Now we have this fun vortex moment that really feels like we're going deep into our space. Since some of these swirls are getting lost in here a little bit, I'm just going to take some of these layers that I've made and use them. I'm going to duplicate this gradient layer that I have, and I'm just going to use that as a clipping mask over some of these swirl layers that we've animated. These pink ones are getting a little lost. I'm going to add this over them, make it a clipping mask, and I think I'm going to see if a blending mode can pop these out a little bit as well. These, I usually just like to cycle through them and see what looks best. Sometimes I get one that's close, but I want it to be a little bit later, a little darker, so I'll just go in and hand edit it. I think for this one, I'm just going to customize it specifically. I want a pretty bright color. I'm just going to fill it with a color that I feel like is good. That feels like it stands out a little bit more. Now we have a little more depth added here, and I think I'm going to make sure this doesn't pop on. There we go. I think I'm going to make this fade on a little bit because it's a little stark right now. Here I just made an opacity keyframe, and I'm going to set this one to a little bit lower. Then by here, I think I want it to be fully dark. That way, it feels a little bit more smooth, and I'm going to do the same thing for this piece as well. This is one of the nice things about being able to keyframe in this program is we don't really need to reanimate much, which is really nice. Setting my opacity and then bringing this one lower as well and I think that will do it. Yeah, so that's looking nice to me. I think what I want to do is now add some lighting passes on our main sprite. I feel like that will make it look a little bit nicer and more polished. Let's go out of our camera move and into our main sprite. Right now it's just a flat color. I think I'm going to add a little bit of a glow around the edge where the trail is coming off because maybe it's just like a glowing sprite emanating light as a trail. Who knows? Whatever looks good, so I'm going to go in with one of my color palette colors, and I'm going to just add a little bit of, I'm going to use the same brush that I used before and add a bit of lighting. I think I'm going to focus it around the back here so that it feels like it's glowing towards the edge. I'm going to drag this layer out, so it covers the entire thing and let's see how it looks as a clipping mask and a blending mode. Now we have a little lighting and adds a little dimension to our static sphere, which adds a little bit more of a finished look. Now that we have that light source in, I'm going to add the specific lighting on that part of our hero ball. For this room light, I think I want to make it a little more thin line to match these little trails. I'm going to start going in with this same brush that I use for that and I want this to be very much a rim light, very hard lighting coming from this really intense light source happening here. Let's see if we can get that to look right. Again, I'm going to blend mode. Add is usually a good one for light itself. I think I want to make this a little bit more saturated and darker. Let's see. Again, this is all experimental. This is the fun phase where you can play around and see what looks best just by adding these simple layers on top of things. It's a really nice way to make something feel a lot more finished without having to put in a ton of more work. These layers of detail are something that I would normally add an after effix after exporting all of my cell animation from a program like Photoshop or animate, and being able to do it all in one place here makes it a lot more streamlined. That way, I don't have to jump back and forth between apps, re-export things. I can do everything all in one place. I'm going to play around with this color a little bit, find what looks best and add this lighting. It looks like it's emanating from where our main center light source is. I'm going to rotate this a little bit and I think I'm going to have this fade on as well. Started more subtle and by here it's more opaque. There, so we see it fade on. Since I don't need all of these, I'm going to delete them, and I'm just going to keyframe the rotation. It's a little cleaner this way. You don't need to do this, but I prefer it so that I don't have a ton of unnecessary keyframes just sitting around confusing me. Here we have a rotation. I'm going to keyframe this here. Here it's turned inward again. Adjust again here and so forth, so it really feels like it's being lit by this light source. This adds a lot of dimension to what otherwise would have been just a flat shape and that's a really nice and easy way to add a little bit more of a personalized touch to something like this. Now, this looks a lot more lit, a lot more designed, a lot more finished than it would have otherwise. 8. Adding Finishing Touches: Next, I think I'm going to add a little more detail to the background. Since we have the scrolling camera, we might as well add some static lines that will be scrolled past with our camera move. We don't have to animate anything else, but it will add the illusion of more movement. I'm going to go within the background area of all of our animation. I'm going to go ahead and add a track here. I'm just going to go over this entire thing and add some lighter lines, just very subtle, like our beginning sketch. I'm just going to sketch them out like we did before, super subtle, and drag them all the way across and see how it looks when our camera moves across them. This, again, can be very rough. We'll just be scrolling past them, and the more irregular they are, the more motion we will see as our camera moves. I'm going to take this bit and customize it a little more to our dimensions here to reinforce our space. We scroll for a long while, so I'm going to add even more length to these. Again, these are super rough, but that adds to the feeling of passing through space, to the imperfection, to the texture, and makes it feel a little more human and detailed. Even just by adding the super simple static lines on our back layer, it adds so much more motion to our main camera. We have a lot more of a feel to that background, it feels more dynamic, and it has more texture and detail to it. Now, I'm going to add that same principle to our spiral here at the end. Just some static lines that go along the same spiral that we used as a guide before. Just to add a little bit more of that same detail to that piece. I'm going to go in actually on top of everything. I'm going to go all the way up here, add a track, and so adding some more spirals. This again, can be super sketchy, just adding some speed lines, super loose, adding to the sketchy feel, the level of detail. Just because these lines are super thin and clean compared to the rest, it looks a little bit more detailed. I'm going to blend them in a little bit with the other lines as well. Once we get these all in here, in this way, when we start zooming in here, we get more pieces coming towards us, more depth without having to re-animate anything. I'm going to clean up some of these a little bit, but you see how we are already getting a lot more dimension. I'm going to have this fade on as well. It's really nice being able to just do this all in here. Super easy, super fast. I'm going to blend out those straight lines that we added before so that they don't conflict with our spiral lines. Again, our big textured brush comes in very handy. Blend that out, and it looks a little bit more clean that way. I think adding a couple more small cell animated touches is going to help make this feel a bit more detailed. I'm going to add a dramatic little sparkle here when the ball disappears, because that will help with the visual impact of it finally disappearing into the super swirly vortex. I'm just going to, again, go on top of all of these layers because this is more of additive, fun little hand drawn piece. As this disappears, I'm going to just draw a little bit of a starburst effect. Again, these are all extra touches. You don't need them but it's fun to think about what would make your animation look a little more exciting. What small details you can add to just add that extra layer that makes something amazing instead of just good. Let me turn on my onion skin so I can see where my last frame was. I'm going to make a little starburst here. Since this is [inaudible], I'm going to just go back into my flip book. Again, I want this to look sketchy, so I'm going to make it not too perfect. Maybe there's some hand drawn edges that are coming in to match the aesthetic of the rest of the stuff that we're doing, but with this thin brush, it automatically looks a little more detailed. Same feature as procreate. You can drag and drop, and use the threshold to create a shape. I'm going to make this a little smaller. This is maybe going to end up being two or three frames of hand drawn animation, but I guarantee you it will change the overall impact a lot. Especially with adding these levels of detail, maybe a little thin lines on the edges, small touches like that can make all the difference. We have our sarbo, so let's do a little bit of a remnant here. I think I'll have it traveling to the edges. It feels like it's emanating out from the center, adding to that depth. Let's turn off our onion skins and see how that simple three frames looks with this. That definitely adds a little bit more drama to that end part. I think I'm going to experiment with blending modes on this. Maybe I'll go back and add a little more detail, a little more glow. Maybe something like that is cool. Just playing around with a little bit more, adding extra touches. All of these small pieces makes such a big difference in the end. I think I want to add a little bit of glow to the sparkle. I'm going to duplicate that and add a blending mode. I think I'm going to use add because that's usually great for lighting. It just adds a little bit of a glow to the edges of our burst. Then I want to have this fade out to white as if the vortex has overtaken the entire screen, just to add to the drama of this last bit. I think that is looking good to me. Any extra touches we can always add later because we have all of this animation ready to go. This is part of the process that I would normally have to export my cell animation and pull it into after effects. Maybe another program for compositing, and then pull everything out, flatten it, and start making all of these layers of detail. But the nice thing about having procreate dreams is that I can keep all of this in one place. I don't have to re-export if I want to edit something in my cell animation. It's way easier just having everything all editable in the same place. 9. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you made it to the end of the class. We've learned how to create cell animation, add key frames, who's a performing feature, and composite all in Procreate Dreams. With this, you can have your entire workflow all in one app to create a fully finished piece. I can't wait to see what you've created in this class. I hope that you use these principles to create your own animations other than the project that we made within this. If you've made any of those, please remember to share those in the project gallery as well. I'd love to see them. So much can be done in Procreate Dreams that couldn't be done in other iPad apps before. Among so many useful features of after effects with cell animation programs, and makes everything so much more convenient and local on the one app. Whether you use Procreate Dreams for personal professional work, it's the perfect tool to streamline your workflow, especially moving through 2D animation processes. I hope this class helped to open your mind to what you can do with this amazing new tool and spark some creativity to create your own fully fledged animations. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you had a lot of fun in this class and I can't wait to see you in the next one.