Transcripts
1. Animation physics for beginner animators: If you just started learning character animation, you might be wondering how do they do it in the movies that giant creatures, like massive dragons, Orcs or a fighter robots. Few so big and heavy with every motion. Or how in contrast, are small creatures like birds, square roots or fairies animated to feel really light and delicate. This lesson could be the first step for you to master animating characters of different weights. I will walk you step-by-step through some exercises where you will create digital 2D animation in a free and open source software called open tunes. But of course, all the rules and principles you'll be learning applied to any software or animation technique for the exercises, I recommend to work on a drawing tablet or monitor, but you could probably also do them on paper, on a flip book. For the class project, we will be animating a massive heavy character and a lighter character hitting each other. So we can see how the transfer of forces works differently for different types of masses. If you're new to animation and you want to practice how to make light stuff seem really light and heavy stuff feel really heavy. Then this is the lesson for you. Please join now and find out how to create animations with just the right impact.
2. Basics of Physics: Duration reveals scale: And the first exercise that going to help us to understand animation physics a lot better is the bouncing ball. Now, hear me out. You might be thinking just animating a bouncing ball is boring or you've done it before and you don't quite see the point. But I have to say that many tutorials out there in the Internet and sometimes even the universities they focusing on the wrong thing. They tell you what buttons to click on a software and how to put drawings on a timeline and tell you a little bit about spacing. But they don't go into much detail why you are doing the things that you are doing. So especially if you're lacking that knowledge, if you don't know what's happening from the physics side, I advice you to pay very special attention because the bouncing ball is everywhere. If you have a character jumping, running into a wall who just lifting and dropping an arm. That's all the patterns of the bouncing ball at work. By learning about these patterns in a very isolated way, it will be much easier for you to, in the future, animate things that are way more complex. And there are two very important things that we can learn here. Namely, one, how the ration of emotion can tell us about its size and how far away it is. And second, how the impact of something with another thing tells us about the material and the weight of the impacting object from the physics side, these are the two most important opportunities to tell your audience more about the nature of the objects that they see moving. So am I getting this right? You will hold the secret of how to make things feel light or heavy. The bouncing ball that we are about to animate is a so-called free fall. And if you think about it, everybody is familiar with the free fall because at some point we dropped a glass and broke something or we knocked something of a table. So your audience that they know, they have learned, they've seen, they have experienced how much time a glass needs from your hand to the ground. This is a little bit like a vocabulary that your audience, they know about this state, then they won't know. The glass in your animation is falling too slow or too fast. They would feel that because they have this experience. So you as the animator, you need to learn how to speak the vocabulary of physics. One of the most notable points here is that most objects reach the ground at the same time, with the exception of very light and flat objects like a piece of paper, they sliced through the air and they sit on like cautions of air. And that's why they are so much slower because of air resistance. But generally speaking, most things reach the ground at the same time. This free fall is telling us more about the distance that something travels than about the actual weight and material that an object is made of. Fortunately, scientists already have figured all of this out. So we have formulas like this one that we can solve two, What's the height or the duration? And because of this, we know the different speeds at which objects fall. And I don't want you to learn this formula or to always use it when you animate something, it's only really important that you have a rough feeling. For example, if you throw something from two-story building 20 meters or 65 feet, then it's going to take two seconds to reach the ground. I feel like that's relatively long. That's like one Mississippi, two, Mississippi. And then it reaches the ground. Think about a whole long this is, and what that means if you were, for example, animating a giant. And the Giant is just sitting down, he's just letting himself fall, is going to take two seconds to reach the ground. For our tutorial, we're going to use a smaller height. Let's see. What's a good time. We have 24 frames per second. Let's say, Well, that's something fall for 2.5th. That would be after 12 frames, it reaches the ground. We can put that in our physics formula. And we figured out that it is 1.2 meters or 3.9 feet, that an object travels in 0.5 seconds. That's pretty cool. This is Mike drop height. So maybe instead of animating a bouncing ball, you can animate a mike drop. And yeah, it's, it's kinda important that you have the duration of a free fall based on this actual formula. Because your audience can feel if something's wrong, you can exaggerate it a bit. You can make things a little bit slower or a little bit faster. But if you would animate a mike drop and the Mike would take like one Mississippi, two Mississippi. Your audience will not believe that there was, this was just a mike drop height. So, okay, let's start our animation with those 1.2 meters in 0.5 seconds in mind.
3. Getting started in OpenToonz: So let's jump into open tunes. By default, open tunes has a sandbox projects selected and exercises like this you could just do in the sandbox project. But if you're working on a real film, you should create your own project. I have a video on our YouTube channel that shows you how to create a custom project location. If you don't like the location of this project folder and check on our YouTube channel a day. I tell you how to change that. But for now, you could just use the sandbox project. That's perfectly fine. I already have another project created for this premium course. And now the most important thing is to give it a beautiful name. All the other settings they look quite right to me. 1920 times 1080 pixels is of course, beautiful. Full HD. That's more than enough. I like 24 frames per second. That's my favorite frame rate for animation. You could make sure that you have autosave switched on because sometimes open tombs likes to crash. Um, but yeah, then we're ready and we can create our scene to make sure that the Viewport here is showing your the entire image, the entire framing of the camera. You can right-click and choose fit to window or hit the keyboard shortcut Alt nine. Next, I like to create a vector layer. I like to work in vector graphics with bitmaps, you have a fixed amount of pixels, namely 1920 times 1080 pixels. And if you zoom in those single pixels, pixels are starting to show. But if you're using vector and you only have coordinates and your pictures always rendered sharply and very crisp, even if you zoom in or make the strokes bigger and manipulate them. I like vector because I can click on single strokes and change them a little bit. So yeah, that's why I'm creating a vector layer here. And then we can go ahead and start drawing by selecting the brush tool from the toolbar. There are two main settings that are really important. First of all, accuracy, if we lower that, the strokes will become a little bit smoother, but they might not quite look like what we drew. With a high accuracy. Everything is looking exactly how you drew it. And with smoothness, the strokes are lagging behind a bit so you can steer them to get the right, the right shape that you want. An experimental little bit with that until you have something that allows you to comfortably draw a circle like this one. And don't worry, we only need to draw one circle. We got to copy and paste that one circle to do all our animation frames because we're using a vector layer, we can use the control point editor tool to click on points along the path of our stroke and adjusted a little bit. And in my case, also select a couple of points and delete them with the delete key. And this way we can tweak our circle a little bit. Now before we are starting to generate all these frames, let's think about how we have to space our frames between one frame and the next one is you might now, this is called spacing, the distance between lines from one frame to the next one. And there are two interesting rules that I want to show you for figuring out the spacing.
4. Free Fall: Odd rule for realistic spacing: The first method that I'm going to show you is actually physically accurate. If you construct your spacing in this way, it will be 100% believable because this is exactly how objects fall in real life. Now in this pattern is given away, we can see that in the formula, if a distance grows squared, then this gives us a very particular pattern. And this pattern can be constructed with the odd rule. And to use the odd rule, we need a grid I premade ones that you can download with the course material and you can import it into open tunes by just dragging it from the file explorer into open tunes when you're importing something from outside the open tunes folder, every project that is created actually lives in a folder where it stores all the drawings. It's going to ask you if you want to leave the image in the location where it's currently in, or if you want open tunes to copy it into the folder where all the other files of the project are, I would recommend to hit Import. You might have to resize it a little to fit better into the camera frame. And you can do that by using the column animate tool, not the Select tool, not the mouse cursor, but this tool up here. The difference is that the mouse cursor allows you to select single strokes or draw a selection around a couple of strokes. And this tool is animate. Tool, is going to grab the whole layer. Open twins calls this column, and all drawings that are on this column will follow with whatever manipulation you are doing right now, what we're gonna do is we're going to choose in the settings, this scale property and we scaled this entire column. Keep in mind this will affect any drawing that is on this entire column. We will make everything that is on this column just a little bit smaller so the grid can fit perfectly. Now we might have to adjust our balls so that it sits exactly on the grid. And for that, we do not use the enemy tool. We don't want to change the column where the ball is on. Instead we're going to use the Select tool. And my ball consists out of a single stroke. So I can just click to get the entire ball. If you're drawing consists of multiple strokes, you could either hit Control a to select all lines that are on this layer. And currently, you know, it's just whatever object you drew there. Or you can, using the Select tool, click and drag a marquee selection around your strokes. And then you can grab them and reposition them so they align with the grid. And now we can measure our spacings using that grid. And here's what the odd rule actually says. The article says to get a physically accurate fall. You need to increase the spacing by the next uneven number. So let's make a little helper layer that helps us to mark the spacing. For that we can create another vector layer on another column. And this, of course here is our starting point. The next uneven number from 0 is one. So this is our first spacing. The next uneven number from here is three. Then we have 5, 7, and so on. In this way, we can pre-plan the spacing until we have 12 segments for 12 frames. And now that I'm commenting on this footage that I recorded earlier, I noticed that I've made a mistake because what's typically numbered as frame one is actually kind of a little bit like a frame 0 because no time has passed yet. So if you want a motion to take 12 frames, the point of the rhythm would actually be one after that. And I was doing this wrong in this tutorial, the ball shouldn't reach the ground at frame 12. It should reach the ground at Frame 13. So if you want to do it absolutely correctly, you could add one more segment. But of course with just 12 segments, it's just a little less of a distance and 1.2 meters. So I'm okay with that. Let's just continue with that. First, we need to make sure that you always see our helper layer as we move forward in time. You need to go to the column of our helper layer and click and drag on this gray handle to increase the exposure, the amount of frames during which we can see this drawing, since we have all the important information on our helper layer, you can switch the grid off. The eye symbol above. The column switches the column of a to be rendered during an export. And the light table symbol below makes the layer invisible while you are working on it in the view port. So this is quite useful. You can have a layer that you don't see when you export your animation, but you do see while you work with it or vice versa layer that you don't see why you work, because it has too many distracting background elements, but when you export it, it's there. Very helpful tool. We don't want to draw a perfect circle every time, so we just copy what we've already drawn. If it consists out of multiple strokes, you just click and drag a selection over your object. Then you hit control C to copy that thing. And to get to the next frame, you can either go to the timeline and click onto the field just below our drawing 1, or you use the down arrow key to go to the next frame in that column. And there you can just start a new drawing or paste what we just copied into the clipboard into that new drawing. Now on this new frames, those lines that we copied day exactly match the position of the previous frame. So we can just take that selection and shifted down a little bit. If you hold Shift while you are you clicking and dragging, you can make sure that it stays along that axis, or you could just use the arrow keys. To make it go just a few pixel lower towards the first spacing that we marked on our helper layer. And now we're basically doing this over and over again. We go to the next frame, either by clicking or using the down arrow key. Paste the ball that we have in the clipboard onto this new drawing. And then we shift those lines down to the position according to the helper layer. One thing that makes a working a lot easier and animation is the onion skin. It allows you to see the previous frames shining through and in open tunes you can activate that by creating those red bubbles above the red and green onion skin marker like this, you can mark how many frames you can see back in time from your current frame. And this way you can see really well how the spacing increases with your actual drawings. You might be wondering, aren't there easier methods than copying and pasting and shifting all my drawings one by one. And yes, there are open to, it's also as keyframe animation where you can manipulate the same drawing over a longer period of time. But I think we'll talk about that only in the next premium lesson. Because I want this course to be for beginners. And I think one of the problems that computer animation has is that you are a bit removed from feeling the spacings. I want you to copy and paste and adjust the spacing for every single drawing. Because I want you to feel how it feels. If the spacings get larger. If the spacings get smaller, I want to make you sensitive to shifts in the spacing where you should avoid that a spacing was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then suddenly you've got smaller again and then it gets bigger again. I want you to run into that mistake and correct it and have an eye for an eye onion skin where you can see that the spacings are always getting, getting bigger. So bear with me here. It's really good for beginners to feel out how the spacings change from drawing to drawing. And here's another thing that I want to point your attention to. Why are we copying the lines from every drawing and not the drawing in the timeline? Because you could also go into the timeline, click on a drawing field, hit Control C and Control V and copy and paste those drawings. The problem with that is that in open tunes, the drawings are always linked. If we copy drawing one and somewhere later, we paste it into the timeline. It will also be drawing one. It will be an instance of the exact same drawing if we change anything. And it doesn't matter where in which frame we change anything about this drawing. It will change in every instance of this drawing, meaning on both position, the one where we copied it from, the one where we pasted it in. So that's the reason why we're not copy and pasting in the timeline, but rather a copy and paste actual brushstrokes because that always creates an independent new drawing on the timeline. You have completed creating all the frames, all 12 or 13 frames. You could extend the exposure for the last frame just a little bit. Now we can click the Play button down at the viewport to enjoy your animation, a physically accurate free fall. But of course, this is a bit of an annoying process because you need the coordinate system isn't as something easier. And yes, of course there is. In this next segment, I'm going to show you the second method of how to create spacings by always huffing distances. Let's have a look at that next.
5. Free Fall: Halfing and terminal velocity: Animation, especially frame by frame animation is a very tedious process because you have to draw so many frames. So animators, they figured out ways how to do it more effectively and how to make their work a lot easier. And one of the things that they figured out is that most of the time, you don't need the full 24 frames per second, which we were using in the previous, in the previous exercise, we made a free fall on once, meaning that there was a new drawing on every frame. But for most motions, it's enough to have a new drawing every other frame and just so show one frame twice. And then if you have a very, very fast motion, you could temporarily put a drawing on every frame animate and once, and then you could switch back to only drawing every other frame, which is called drawing on twos. For the next, the lazier workflow, we got to animate something on twos. We'd gone to double exposure every frame. And that's already saving us a little bit of work. But we're also using another method to construct the spacing. Instead of taking a coordinate system and physically accurately measure things out, we're going to eyeball it with a method that is called huffing. We're going to draw a timing chart once again, but this time we're gonna put our six segments that we need to fill the 12 frames. We're going to put them in with a huffing method. We take the entire distance and just half that. And the resulting half we have again. And then we put it in the next half and the next half. And now let's animate exactly how we did before. We copy and paste the ball into every new frame. For now, you can work on once. You can just hit the arrow key ones to get to your next frame or just click on the field directly below your drawing to create the next drawing. This way you complete the entire animation and when you're done, you can select all the drawings you just created in the timeline by clicking and shift clicking and then right-click, reframe. You can set it to be on twos, meaning that every drawing is exposed for two friends. And when we play it back, you can see that the more simplified version with just having the spacings works just as well. Although this is not physically accurate, it's still looking very nice. Actually, it exaggerates reality a little bit. In the beginning, it starts slower. You can see that the ball on the left, the physically accurate one is already further then the not physically accurate one. Then in the end, the large spacing of our huffing method gives us this, this huge spacing that makes it really snappy, really fast on the last portion of the fall. And this is a form of exaggeration. We made the slow parts even slower and the fast part even faster, just to be clear and acceleration, like the huffing method, where the spacings get larger and larger. It doesn't have to get larger and larger for the entire motion. It could also be that you reach something that's called the terminal velocity. That's the point after which an object doesn't accelerate anymore as humans skydiver reaches terminal velocity after about 15 to 20 seconds. That is the point where they will not fall any faster. So you might get celebration spacings that looked like this. We have a constant speed. This is the terminal velocity after which an object does not increase in speed. This could be like, you know, the spacing is always the same because it reached terminal velocity. And then you just add an acceleration here by using the graphing method. And then you have an acceleration up here and just a constant speed for the rest of the fall. There's of course a very exaggerated example, but yeah, this is how that could work. How you could have constant speed combined with an acceleration. So we safely brought our objects from up in the air down to the ground. We've got the free-fall part covered. But what about the impact on the ground? For this, we need to have a closer look at how heavy and light objects deal with forces differently. In the next segment.
6. Resistance to forces, momentum: The difference between light and heavy objects can very easily be observed. Here, I flick light, crumbled up piece of paper, and as you can see, the flick of my finger is enough force to send it flying. If I take a heavy book, I can flip it, but nothing happens. And the reason for that is that objects of different mass, a differently resistant to forces put on them. It takes less force to start, stop, or change direction of a light object. And it takes a lot of force to start, stop, or change direction of a heavy mass once they overcame this resistance and are moving, the objects are charged with momentum. When there was a lot of force applied onto an element, it's now charged with a higher momentum than anything that was charged with just a little bit of force to come to a stop, this momentum needs to be taken out of it by applying a counter force for this heavy book, I need to apply a lot of force to make it stop and I have to go with it a little bit to have a longer distance where I can apply the force. In contrast, if we take the piece of paper, I can just grab it from the middle of the air and take all of the momentum out of it immediately my hand doesn't even have to move with it without a counter force and object charged with momentum would continue to move indefinitely, which you can see when an astronaut throws something in outerspace, it just continues flying. On Earth, objects are often stopped because of gravity. They are pushed down to the ground where the force of the friction of the ground is taking out the momentum until an object comes to a stop. And to see this in action, I have another quick exercise for you that you can do.
7. Pushing a light object: We're going to animate this ball, which pretty much behaves like a hand. It's pushing a very light object, in this case this wine glass. And as you can see, the moment they collide, the glass immediately takes the momentum of the ball and moves together with the ball. There was no resistance at all. And now it's interesting when the push of the balls stops, the ball comes to a stop with a, an ease in the glass just continues for a little while. And the reason is because it's relatively light, the force of gravity on it is also very light. A heavy MAC filled to the brim would be very heavy, have a higher mass. And therefore gravity would push it down a lot stronger onto the table, which would answer with friction, which takes out the momentum. But in this case, the friction on the glass is very little. This might also change depending on the material of the table. For example, if there would be a tablecloth depending on the material, the friction could be a lot higher. So this looks more like a polished wood surface or something like that. And this is why the glass continues to slide a little bit. The momentum has to be taken out by the friction. And that is something that doesn't have anything to do with the ball anymore that was pushing it previously. So I'm animating this in a brand new project on a vector layer and we need a light object. I chose a wine glass, and I realized that actually had to do a quick Google search. How the shape of a wine glass actually is. It's interesting how a little bit of research can make your drawing a lot batter. Because drawing purely from memory is not always that reliable because I'm using a vector layer I can use to control point editor to shape my drawing a little bit. Once again, I am going to create a ball and I position the glass in the middle. The ball, we cut out and paste on an extra layer or column as it's called. Here down below in the Styles panel, I created a new style with a right-click. And styles in open tunes are basically the colors. If my shape is closed, I can fill it with the paint bucket tool, but you need to really make sure that your lines are closed. You can close them either by putting in another brushstroke were used the control point editor to close gaps in your line. The cool thing is that these colors, they stay linked to the swatch. If I would like to tweak the color of the ball or changing from red to blue, I can just change the style and all instances of this color will also change color, which is pretty cool. The animation of the ball has a lot in common with the free fall exercise we did previously. You need to start the motion with an ease out so the ball slowly catches up speed. To do that, you use the selection tool, select all of your lines. You could also hit control a if the policy only thing in your layer to select it. All lines. And then with Control C and Control V, you can just copy and paste it into a next frame. You go to the next train by either clicking on it on the spot right below the drawing or using the arrow key. And then use the selection tool to nudge your drawing just a little bit further to make the ball's speed up you of course, start with very small spacings, make them larger and larger. In this example, our ball reaches some sort of terminal velocity with the spacings are always the same size, just the width of the ball. This makes it very easy in onion skinning too, to keep the spacing the same. If you're using the Select tool to click interact the ball, make sure that you hold shift so the ball stays on the same height. You don't want it to shift up and down, only left and right. If your animation looks a bit jittery and it's often because something that should move along a surface or a line, it is wiggling up and down. It's deviating from this line. I think later in this recording, I'm actually correcting some instances where I accidentally shifted the ball up and down. So watch out for that. And here's the interesting moment where this next frame would be inside of the glass. But between the two frames, the ball picked up the glass. And because the glass has very little resistance, or in this case we claim no resistance. It just now stuck to the ball. Make sure that you're working on the right column. The glass should be on one column and the ball on another. Now if you have something like this where one element picks up another element, it makes a lot of sense to only animate one of the elements. First, usually the one that is the driving force. So in this case, we would continue animating the ball and then always stick the glass to it. You can see that I start to neglect copy and pasting the wine glass and just finished the animation of the ball. In this case, we want the ball to slow down. So we do what we did for the speeding up, but in reverse, the spacings now gets smaller and smaller and smaller until our ball comes to a stop. Now we can create the missing frames of the glass, just like we did before with the ball. With control a, we select all the lines, controversy, we copy control V will paste onto the next frame. And this is very easy for the frames with constant velocity because we can just stick the glass or write to the ball. And here for the first frame, where it's really notable that our ball is getting slower, the glass starts to split from the ball. You can see that this spacing that we're doing right now, it's a bit smaller than the spacing before because the push is gone, but the momentum is still there and the resistance, the friction of the table is not enough to make the glass stop immediately. So it continues for a couple of frames with decreasing spacings because it's also slowing down. And yeah, I'm experiment with this a little bit because your animation can be different from mine. You can say, No, I want my table to be even, even more polished. I want the glass to slide a little longer. You could add a couple more frames of sliding. You could have the spacing's not decrease as quickly as I have it here. Or you could say, I make this object a little bit heavier and have it come to a stop even more quickly. There is no right or wrong, just what is appropriate and make sense for what you're animating. My glass ended a bit too far on the right. It's getting off screen and I didn't like that, so I grab the camera column, you can just click on the camera and then using the animate tool, you can switch it to manipulate the position of the camera. So the starting and stopping point are both in frame. The key symbol in the timeline shows you where it's stored that position on the timeline. And it makes sense to have that on the first frame, as with the previous exercises, why we're animating, we put one drawing after the others, so our animation is currently on once, but we want it to be half as quick. We want to show every frame for two frames, meaning we want to play it on twos. So yeah, we have to tell open tunes to switch it from showing every frame once to show every frame twice. So I need to select the portion where we have one frame after the other. We can just select everything because it would also reframe the long exposure that we have that just keeps the glass at the same spot. It will also change that to be on 2s and we don't want that. So we need to do the sections where we have everything on one's separately and make sure that it matches up and the glass is still sticking to the ball. But then yeah, we have it on 2s and we can play it back. I realized a couple of things that I didn't like. I adjusted the sliding a little bit. I had a little bit of up and down wiggle in my animation that I corrected. And now you finished your animation. You practiced speeding up and slowing down or ease out and ease in, as it's called in animation terms. And we saw how a light object just immediately picked up all the force from another pushing element. I would of course, love to see your result, see what you are pushing around. And you can submit your animation down below. In the next section, we are modifying this animation to push a heavy object. And the neat thing is that we only have to do a couple of tweaks. See you in the next tutorial.
8. Pushing a heavy object: For this next exercise, we can copy and modify the animation that we already have. But this time we do not put a light object in the way of the ball. We're going to put a heavy object there. I guess. What I want to show you with this exercise is how we don't need to think about it so much in terms of calculations and formulas. But then it's more thing of logic. How much force is needed? And where does it come from and where does it go to? And that's all. I'm starting by creating my heavy object, this panda statue. And I'm going to add some little stone details to make sure that this can be read to be a stone object. You can of course, choose any other heavy object that you think would be fun to get pushed around by this little ball. Now we can hide the layers we don't need for our current animation, we're going to hide the layer of the glass and the ball to switch it off, you can use the icon to not see it in the render and the workspace animation disk icon to not see it while working in open tunes. Now we shift the column of the statue one over so we have room to copy and paste half of the animation of the ball onto a new column, we only going to use half the animation because at this moment, at this fastest point of the ball animation there, we want to put the have a statue in front of the ball. Keep in mind those frames are linked. They are instances of the same drawing. So you need to make sure that you're cut off the animation the moment that they touched the stone. Because from there on, on, we will only be adding new frames, not modifying existing ones because that could destroy our previous animation. And now we are already at the point where we need to apply logic or rather set the logic when the ball runs into the stone statue, we now can make certain decisions. And they will change how the motion of the ball fields, how heavy the statue fields, etc. But those decisions we can apply just by doing some logical thinking. So first of all, is this a ball that is just running into the statue? I would say it is not. I would say it is like a hand, like a person. It's like a person pushing something. So if it was just a ball rolling into the into the statue, it could just get deflected. If you roll a tennis ball into a wall, it will just be deflected and come back. But that's not what we want this ball to be. We want this ball to be honest, I could character. So the characters of walking against the statue. And now we have to make the next decision. How much force is our character ball already applying? And I would say it was enough to make him move. But it's not enough to make Statue move. So that's why the moment when our ball runs into the statue a has to stop because it doesn't have enough force yet. And, you know, it looks like it's stopping. But what I wanted to do there is I wanted to really start pushing to build up this force. Because remember, heavy objects need a lot of force to be moved. So that's why I'm drawing this frame where it's leaning into the statue, gradually building up the force that is required to move it. And that's quite interesting. In the previous episode, we decided to animate the ball first. Now, I'm very interested in how the statue react. So I just animate the statue starting to move first by having a very long period of an ISS where the spacings are gradually increasing. Any could be even strong. It could be even more. I could have even added even more frames to make the statue of Phil even more heavy and more resistant. And then it's reaching something like its terminal speed, which is of course based on how strong our ball is in total. He doesn't want to push the statue any stronger. So there is a cap on the speed that the ball has together with the statue. And then we think what happens when the character stops pushing? If feel like really immediately took his hand off, the statue would come to a stand almost immediately. Maybe there's just one or two frames of a little bit of a settle. And the reason for that is because gravity is stronger on bigger objects, they're going to push against the ground with a strong force, Which is met by the ground with a strong friction. So yeah, the motion stops relatively quickly, especially compared with a lighter object on a polished surface. But it could also be that the character while pushing is just applying less force. So there might be a couple of frames where the spacing is also already decreasing. And then the moment where the ball really steps away from, from the statue, it comes to a halt very, very quickly. So the ease into the end position has less frames then the ease out of this starch position, because for the start position or ball had to gradually a ply force over a longer period of time, getting the spacings bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And in the end, when this force is missing, There's just so much force, so much resistance that is making the statue stop that it comes to a stop fairly quickly. Now I returned to working on the ball layer where just copy and paste the ball from its strained pushing position to new frames. And I move the lines to always be right at the statue because they need that contact to the statue to continue pushing it. If you want to see the onion skin for both the ball layer and the statue layer, you have to right-click on the onion skin marker and select extend onion skin to scene. Here's an interesting point where the spacings of the statue really become smaller. I would assume that is because the balls stopped pushing. So here I restore the ball to it's, it's relaxed ball shape. And then I'm just adding a couple in-betweens for the ball, namely a once when he starts pushing, I have a breakdown frame that takes him from the relaxed pose to the pushing wall posts. And the same thing when the ball comes to a stop, we can add a frame to have and go from pushing to relaxing. You could also add a little ease out and in here to make that transition even smoother, of course, you can continue to experiment if you might want to give the statue a couple more frames or less frames to come to a start. Stop. And then I hope that fairly quickly you get an animation that you're happy with. Now, I would love to see what heavy objects you in your practice animation are pushing around. So please submit your animation down below. And now let's move back to the bouncing ball exercise and have them bounce up depending on their weight.
9. The bounce reveals the mass: Now it's time to have a closer look at what happens when an object bounces of the ground. Here we have a light tennis ball and a much heavier book to demonstrate how light and heavy masses bounce differently as we already saw previously, the tennis ball and the book of falling at the same speed. The book has a heavier mass, so it takes more force to make it move, but gravity is stronger on bigger masses, so that compensates and there's more force of gravity pulling on the book, Making it take speed exactly as the much lighter tennis ball. The different forces of gravity pulling the object down, charged them with momentum. The tennis ball gets a lesser momentum than the book. Now to understand what's happening on impact with the ground, we just need to think about it logically. On an impact, the momentum that an object hat is turned back into a force. The tennis ball had little momentum, that's turned into a little force. And the book had a lot of momentum. That's turned into a lot of force. Now the table compared to the other two objects, is a much greater mass and one that doesn't and can't move with the little force that comes from the tennis ball and the book. That's not enough to make a table move. But where does this force go? Well, a little bit is absorbed by the table, turned into heat and stuff like that. What happens with the rest? Well, the rest goes back into the object, which deflects it into the opposite direction. And the book is actually not bouncing up for two reasons. One, because of its larger mass, it's more resistant to take a force that would have a go in another direction that I was previously going in. And secondly, there still is the force of gravity on this book. And it's larger than it is on the tennis balls. So there's a much bigger force into the downwards direction that we would have to overcome to send it up again. The tennis ball, on the other hand, has a lighter mass. It gets less force back because it had less momentum. There's not so much force that can be reflected, but the force that it gets back is enough to overcome its inertia and is also larger than the force of gravity that is pulling the tennis ball down. And that is why it bounces up. And you notice it's not bouncing up very high because there was some force, some energy being lost in the process. The table took a little bit of it, the little inertia, the tennis ball has also took its toll. So that's why the ball bounces, but not quite as high. What I find very interesting, if you look at the cover page of the book, it jumps up because just the cover itself has a lot less inertia, a lot less resistance. So it is taking all that force and causes the book to open while the pages of the book behave like one single mass with a huge resistance. I think that's quite interesting in this footage. In the next section, we're going to apply what we have learned in open tunes.
10. Two very different ball bounces: We're going to do now we're going to animate two balls very, very differently. One of them has a fictional bouncing ball material that takes all of the energy back from the ground and jumps back all the way up again. And the other one is more like a bowling ball that just does a little very tiny bounce and stays on the ground immediately. We built, of course, on the animation of the falling ball that we have already made previously here I have already switched off the columns of the ball and the timing truck that we used for the rule currently only see the ball and the timing chart that was done with the huffing method. We copy all the drawings from both of these columns and go to the right and paste them there. Once again, keep in mind these are instances of the same exact drawings. If you change anything in one drawing, it will also change on the other instance on the other column. So we need to be very careful about modifying the drawings here. And you might be wondering, why are we doing that to get two balls, because currently they are laying perfectly on top of each other. That's why we still see the same thing. Well, while we can't modify the drawings themselves, we can use the animate tool to modify the position of the column. With the enemy tool, we're not modifying the actual drawing on the column. We're modifying the entire layer that these drawings are laying on. You can imagine this to be like a layer of glass where we place our drawings. We can shift the glass to the side, and that will shift all the drawings that are laying on this column without actually modifying the drawings to keep everything nice and tidy, you should make sure that the keyframe indicated by this little key symbol on the timeline is on frame 1 because we want the position of these elements to be like that. Starting from the first frame on and our first final animation of the ball bouncing all the way back up again. We get that fairly easy without having to draw anything, because we can just use the frames that we already have. If you select all but the last frame of the ball on its way down, you can copy that and paste it right after. Then, for these pasted frames, you can change the order. So our frames are being played backwards. You do this by right-clicking our selection and choosing edit cell numbers reverse. It was important to exclude that last frame. So it's only there once. So we have a clean 12345654321. And just so we see about a second time, we can copy everything. Make sure that the frame one in the middle of your loop isn't longer than it needs to be. Want to show that, that drawing for four frames, only for two frames, wanted to stop in the air for a brief moment and then come back down again. This is a little detail that can make a loop like this look a little bit weird. If you copy and paste it frames and you accidentally held it in the air or underground for too long. So yeah, make sure that it isn't there for longer than it's supposed to be. Although you can experiment with this a little bit, sometimes it looks interesting to hold something in the air or to give it an extra frame on the ground, usually to do a deformation on the ground. So the rule isn't that you should never hold anything in the air or on the ground is just it should be a conscious decision that you're making if you now hit play, that first animation should basically be done. Pretty cool. That was pretty fast. What I really want you to keep in mind and see here is that in this extreme example, the spacing right before the collision and the spacing after the collision is the biggest of the motions. If something is falling and you really wanted to have a strong impact, that spacing right before the impact should probably be the largest. Or if your object or any reached terminal velocities, they are just a bunch of the same spacings, but it can look kinda soft if the spacing right before an impact is not the biggest spacing of the motion. And then after an object is deflected, even if it's not as much as it is here, the spacing right after the deflection is the biggest because it gets all that force that wanted to go into the ground is put back into it to go back up. At this point, the force is as big as it's gone a, b, and the spacings are getting smaller again, because gravity is taking out the momentum gradually. This is a really important pattern that you will need and countless animations, not only for collisions with the ground, but collisions with a wall, collisions of two objects. Even if you're just animating a high-five, It's still the case that the spacing after the collision is the biggest and then gets slower as the characters use their muscles to make the motion stop. So very important pattern right here. Now, let's have a look at the second ball. And actually it doesn't look too bad. It just stays on the ground. That will make the object incredibly heavy. It's so heavy that it doesn't bounce at all. We don't want to have it that have we want to mitigate a little bit lighter. We want to have a teeny tiny balance. Let's make a plan how that bounce looks by working on that timing chart annotation layer that we already have. Now keep in mind your conscious simply draw on that drawing on the annotation layer. Because that line will appear on both layers when we need to do instead, is we need to create a second. Drawing that we can then modify to draw the bounce into and not have it appear in the other timing chart. So to do this, I went to the column of the timing chart that we want to modify. I got rid of all the frames. So we only have drawing one at the very top. Now we could just, as we've done countless times in this tutorial copy and paste the lines from drawing one into the empty field right under it, which would give us a duplicate. But you can actually also just right-click on the drawing and select Duplicate drawing. And then we have a new drawing underneath with the same content, but it has a different name. So the two instances on the two layers are no longer linked. And yeah, we can get rid of drawing one and set up our new annotation layer. Now first, let's mark how high we want the ball to bounce because it's a very heavy ball, bowling ball date don't bounce up very high. We just have this, this tiny bounce and we mark the uppermost position. I want the motion to be rather short. So you could employ the huffing method here where you have one distance and then you have another distance again. But I don't think I want that many frames. So what I do is I plan my spacing to be an ease in for the top position by placing it like a two-thirds up from the ground. So we're not using the graphing method here. We doing a 1 third, 2, third division. So we have an ease towards the top. The ball is actually getting slower as it goes to the top, as gravity is kicking in again. And the second bounce, I want to be so fast and so little. It only has the topmost position marked on our little timing chart. Now how do we go about animating this? I actually go back to animating on ones, one frame after the other. Under the last frame that we want to keep, we play the existing frames all the way to frame six, where it is on the ground. And now we're not modifying frames, we're adding frames. And we can do that because the frames that we add now, they are not used in any other column on the timeline, so we don't have any danger here of destroying a previous animation. Just be careful withdrawing into existing frames. I copy the ball from the previous frame into the next one. I click hold Shift or use the keyboard to position our first frame according to the timing chart, two-thirds up into the air, and then we do the next one with a much smaller spacing. I'm exaggerating it here a little more. I make a spacing that is even closer than it is marked on the timing chart. Of course, this, again is a good place for you to experiment. Maybe you want to add some more frames and use the huffing method. I just wanted to show you the two most extreme ones in this exercise. The one that goes all the way back up again and the one that stays pretty much on the ground, the cool thing is spacing on the way up is the same as the spacing on the weight down. So we can just copy frame 7 to get the 0s. And once again, take frame six to be the frame where the ball is all the way on the ground. Pretty neat. Then we copy and paste the lines for the last drawing in our animation. And this is going to create a new drawing, drawing nine. And once again, we reuse drawing six to be the drawing back all the way on the ground and we're done. Now we only need to re-frame the frames that we created on once to also be on twos. And we just need to add some exposures so our heavy bowling ball doesn't vanish while the other ball is still bouncing up and down. And then we are done. Congratulations you just animated to bouncing balls with different materials. Of course, are also love to see your results, especially if you're start to experiment a little bit, maybe create some other things that bounce around. Please submit your project down below. And I think now it's time to apply what we learned on something more complex, something that isn't just a ball bouncing around. Let's start with some actual character animation.
11. Character design and key thumbnails: For the class project, we will animate two characters of different masses hitting each other. We will have a character with light mass hitting the other character with bigger mass and vice versa. Now what we have learned is that big and small masses react differently when forces are applied to them. We need a lot more force to make an impact on a bigger mass. And we only need a little bit of force to make an impact on a smaller mass. And this is exactly what we can see in action with this exercise. The small creature and hitting the larger creature might not have any impact at all, but a larger creature hitting a smaller creature might send it flying to the ground or to the wall. Depending on how comfortable you are with drawing and getting creative with your animation. You can also vary this exercise a little bit. You don't have to animate it exactly how I animated it. I think the most easy tweak would be to change the direction that the hit is coming from. You can think about, do you really want the big creature to hit the small creature down? Or you could also smash them against the wall or something like that. So you can be a little bit creative with that and just apply the same principles that you have learned, only going towards a different direction. Now the first phase for your project is to create the character designs that you are going to use. And these should be guided by two main focus points. First, the idea, you need a smaller and a larger creature. And if you can, you should push this as much as possible. The big creature should be really massive and have thick arms, and the smaller creature should be a lot more delicate with thin arms. The second thing that should guide your character design process for this exercise is efficiency. You should try to find a design that is easy to animate for you. And depending on where you are in the learning process, maybe you've just picked up drawing two. It would be really beneficial if you picked a very, very easy character design with as few lines as possible. For example, the characters I animated don't have legs for this punching exercise. Your characters don't need legs. And the bodies are also not very complicated. They're just big blobs. So you could do the same thing for your characters. This way you can really focus on the animation, on how to do the spacing between the different frames. And you don't have to. On top of that, think about how to construct this complicated, realistic character. You should have a positive experience and a finished product way sooner. And you will notice because we're doing that, I actually get a little bit loose with my shapes. Like for this exercise, it wasn't that important to me that everything feels super solid and that nothing ever shifts and volume. I think the focus for this exercise really should be to get the acceleration right of the arm and the transfer of the weight. That should be your main concern if the model shifts a little bit or you sometimes have something wobbling or morphing in there. I think it should be part of the style and Um, yeah, just, just try to find something that is very fun and loose and easy to draw. So I'm starting with my character design phase. And I already decided right from the beginning that I wanted to do like an orc and a goblin kind of creature. And for me it was really important to find a very fun style. Yeah, I'm pretty early on I had this idea of the 4k just being like this one blob shape and his arms are kinda like in there. I really like that. And yeah, try a few more things, but ultimately that's what I landed on. You can already see for the goblin that I started to give him this kind of Sesame Street knows in the middle of the face. Oh yeah. And once you're getting closer to the body shape that you actually want to use, you can start focusing on single elements. Like you could draw the same body shape that you decided on a couple of times and then put different ears on it and different noses on it to find the nose and the ear that you think works best with this body shape. And of course, you could do this with every single body element. You could try different mouth's, different shin shapes. And this way, you have a systematic approach to finding the perfect character design. And here just to see how it looks, I tried a character design that is a little more realistic just to see how that would feel like. Once again, unless you are already really, really good at drawing, I wouldn't recommend using that if that is one of the first animations that you ever do. Instead, I would recommend you to go with a much simpler design style. Now for the ORC, I'm doing a similar process. I decided to use that single massive blob body shape. And now I'm trying different shins, trying to fit the body in it in a different way. And I'm also experimenting a bit with the gnosis and how far and wide the mouth would go. Yeah, and this is how I experimented with different versions, trying to get closer to the character design that I want to use. I really like this wider chin here, but I didn't find a satisfying answer how to use it in a front view. So I ultimately decided against it and to just have the mouth in there with no chin. Because I thought that looked very condensed, very focused, and put even more emphasis on just that massive blob shape that he is. If you're really just starting out learning how to draw, I would recommend simplifying your character designs even more to the point where you only have one big shape for the body. And the arms are just strings with big circles attached. Really keep it simple. So you can focus on the actual animation a little bit later, almost too late, because I was already in the animation software. I also had the idea to make the ORC Cyclopes by just giving him one. I, I felt like that added a fun little dimension to the character. And this is also the reason why character development process is so important because during it and sometimes very, very late, you will have ideas. We think like, oh, that's really cool. I really need to do that and it's best to have those ideas now, then, after you've already started animating and you're like, wow, that would have been cool. I wish I would have thought about this earlier. So a good character development process helps you to come up with good ideas and put them into your animation right from the beginning. So after we've come up with our character designs, it's important that we make it a little more clear what we actually want to animate. Oftentimes, you might think that in your head you've already figured it out exactly. But often that's not the case. Often when you then start doing stuff you realize like, Oh, this wasn't really fleshed out or I don't know exactly how this should go. To avoid this, we now go into a thumbnailing phase where we make scribbles, little tiny scribble. It's not bigger than the thumb. That's why they're called thumbnails. To really figure out the steps in our animation before we actually animate them. And you will get better at this with more experience, you'll be able to storyboards and nails then are a lot like your final product a lot earlier. But the cool thing about thumbnailing is because it's just the size of thumbnail. It's a really small drawing where you don't get caught up in details. You can make many of them. If you feel like something's wrong, something's not quite working or I'm missing a step or hmm, I wonder if I'm really communicating everything that I need in that one drawing, then you can just make another one and try to push things and try to make things more clear. And it won't take as much time as you already animating and you know, you, you put all these details and on this work in it, finance are a really good starting point. So I start thumbnailing down the exact progress of our animation. And I start with the storytelling keyframes, the so-called golden key frames. Those are the minimum amount of drawings that I need to tell the story. And one of the most important stations in our story. Well, first of all, I was thinking a lot about what could actually start this fight. You don't necessarily have to do that. You can, of course, also just animate characters or punch, punch, punch, just because that would also be fine for this exercise. But I personally, I like to add a little bit of a story even to my exercise animations, you don't have to do that, but it makes it more fun to me. So I always like to think about, okay, what could be, the reason for it? What could be going on in the character's heads? And I used one of the most simple story hooks that you can think of. They are fighting about food. You know, that's something everybody understands and that makes sense. So even during the character design phase, I already had this idea and I gave this, or this piece of meat and the goblin once it, and this is our first thumbnail. This is the starting point for the animation. The important thing for this starting point is that you can really see that the goblin one set, that's why I have the idea to, you know, he has his tongue out and maybe his hands already extended a little bit in the direction of the meat to really sell that point. Once again, you might do multiple versions of the stump Nayar to find poses that tell your story in the most clear and efficient way. Maybe you want the Garland to leave even more forward. Maybe you tried to have his mouth even more open. And it's very important to try those things now before you actually start animating, What's the next beat in our story? The goblin protests and bumps his little fists into the 4k, which isn't really moved by it. That is the second beat. The third beat is the orchid gets annoyed. This beat I stretched out over multiple drawings because I really wanted to have that moment where the ORC fist is just hovering over the goblin, the goblins realizing, Oh, I did something wrong. There was a really important beat for me in this story. That is why it has an extra thumbnail. The next bit is the ORC hitting the goblin on the hat. And then I had the idea to make it a loop. However, if this happens again and again, well, we need a short break, a short moment where the ORC is thinking like, and I can enjoy my meat in peace. So that's the next beat. And then we have the goblin popping back up being a little groggy as the last beat in this little story before it starts over again. Now that we have the beats, the most important key moments of our story defined, it's time to jump into open tunes and do the so-called blocking, where we nailed down the most important poses of our animation.
12. Crafting the key poses: And now that we have a very clear picture of what is happening when we can jump into open tools and start with the actual animation. I already created a new scene and on a new column, I put in first character design model sheet thing that I will use as a guideline when I now start creating my first post, my first poses for these two characters guided by the thumbnails that we just created. Very important, if you went with a character design that is a little more complex, I would really recommend you to work first on a scribble layer where you can really construct your characters out of geometric shapes. Don't try to animate directly in a cleaned up drawing. If you have anything that is more complex than what we have right here, I made this holistic choice for me to animate in clean up because I want it to feel like, you know, like a phone doodle, something you do, what you were doing while on the telephone or on a voice chat. I'm okay with proportions shifting and stuff like this. But if you have a character design style that is more complex, has more details. You want to have believable 3D volumes and perspective shifts like that. You should definitely scribble your entire animation first on an extra layer. And don't be afraid of having the construction shine through because it kind of clean that up later. So depending on what style you choose, you should do everything what we're doing right now in a scribble. First, I now start drawing my first key frames on top of that little scribble that are already hat when I was just transferring the model. And yes, you can see, even though we have a thumbnail, there are still a lot of tweaking going on. I changed the position of the limbs and some details about it until I found the drawing that I think communicates the start of this little fight really well. You should have at least one layer per character. The ARC should be on its own layer and the goblin should be on another layer. For some reason for the goblin, I didn't stick to the thumbnail I should have right from the beginning, he doesn't have his tongue stretched out right here. I change that later in the animation progress. If you're happy with the first poses with this starting positions for the ORC and the goblin, you can go on move to the next frame. For now. I do not want to think about timing. I just do one pose after the other post one is on frame one post tours on frame two. And so on. With the exception that if a character holds still, you might just add one exposure frame while the other character has the reaction pose, but the first character is still in the first post. So sometimes you might just drag a drawing open a little bit. But generally, you should not concern yourself with timing yet. You should only have one pose after another. So you can flip through with the arrow keys and yeah, just while flipping through, kinda make like a test timing to see how the things work together. So here we have the next couple of poses with the ORC about to bite into the meat. Notice how I leaned his body a little bit forward, so his head now in total is a little bit lower. And I wasn't just changing the mouth. I was not just opening the mouth, but I'm actually moving the entire face down a little bit and moving the arm and have some motion in the body. And This kind of moving the hat and moving the body will make your animation look a lot more lively. Of course, you shouldn't have big changes like all the time. Like a character shouldn't go left, right, up and down for every pose. But it's nice to think about like, when do I want to intensify moments? When do I want the character to lean into something a little bit more? When do I want him to lean away? And when do I want to maybe reverse a lean? Like maybe there's this moment where characters always drawn to something leaning in. And that's like that for a couple of poses intensifying a little bit, maybe only going a little bit back, but then there's something big happening and he's leaning back. And you really need to think about when is that moment where the lean changes a lot and when the liens only changed like a little bit to intensify the post. Yeah, but it can definitely make your animation or not more likely if you're not just holding the body stiff and making the face move, the mouth go open. And this butt to really have like the whole body working a little bit, not too much. You can see me doing a lot is flipping back and forth between two or sometimes three drawings with the arrow keys. This way I can judge how the motion fields. I can I can see this lean, see what that means. I can see the shift in the hand and yeah, I can already test the animation without doing actual timing. Now that we're happy with the post for the arc, we can move onto the next pose for the goblin. Interestingly, I found that there was a reaction missing from the goblin that we didn't have in the thumbnails in the story. Something else. We immediately went to the goblin banging on the ark. But I feel like there's a step missing here. That needs to be a reaction that the goblin is more like, oh, how can he? And here I'm experimenting with something that we just talked about. I'm reversing the lean to the other direction to make the change and the shock that the golden has even more noticeable. There certainly also a version possible where the goblin leans in even more, maybe tries to grab the meat. But I literally took it into the other direction to have him so taken aback that we have this big visual shift of him leaning into the other direction. One of the biggest mistakes that young animators make is that too much stuff happens at the same time to animate how the 4k bytes into the meat and the goblin already starts punching him or starts freaking out. But that is too much for the eyes to follow into process. You should do one thing after another, maybe overlapping a little bit, but generally, you need to guide the eye. So goblin does nothing while the oracle lifts up the meat. Then the arc does nothing. Why the goblin reacts to what he just saw. In this way. The, I can go back to, back and forth. First look at the Oracle lifting up the meat, then looking at the goblin freaking out. And it's happening one after the other. You don't have them moving and reacting in a big way at the same time. And here's the moment where I decided to change the first pose for the goblin. Now have him with his tongue hanging out because I think that underlines much better that he wants to eat the meat. And now we come to the next big posts for the goblin. Again, the ORC is just holding that post that he currently has of him about to bite into the meat. And while he's just holding that, the goblin is doing his big next thing which is punching on the arm. And for that, we need to think a little bit more about the animation basics and principles. You can find some videos on my YouTube channel about that. One very important thing we need to put in as an anticipation, and the push has to come from distance a little further away. So he's lifting up his fist first, ready to punish the ORC. And in the next frame, he already makes contact with the Orcs arm as suddenly shifted the body just a little bit to have a go along with the motion to have something happening in the body of the goblin. And yeah, that already looks pretty good. And here I already made the decision that I wanted to have an ease in after the punch, after the punch. I want the motion to be a lot softer. So. I draw a frame that is favoring that part of the goblin removing the hand from the arc, feel a little bit softer this way. I know I already dipped a little bit into the actual animation part here. I want it snappy for the actual hit. And after the hit, I want it to be a little softer to have that one in-between coming from the contact of the hit. The next post for the org is also one that we don't have in our thumbnails storyboard. And that's why it's so important to feel what your character's feeling, to see like, you know, how are things progressing in their head, what is happening? And the thing here is that after the goblin has punched or a couple of times, he meets to bake a small reaction, you know, even if it doesn't hurt, even if it doesn't really do anything, we need a little small reaction. And this is that post where he just drops the meat a little bit and closes his mouth a bit and it's just looking at him like What, What are you doing? Oh, it's just one random little note. Have a look at his upper tooth. It's staying in the same position because teeth are fixed to the skull. And even if you're covering up your teeth with your lip, with your skin, it's just skin moving over the tooth. If the skull stays at the exact same place, the teeth of the upper row stay exactly where they are. Only lower teeth can move when the head isn't moving because the chalk and move. But that's a little thing we can bring a little bit of realism even into a goofy scene like this. That makes it feel a little more like, you know, there's a world. There is flesh and bones here. After we have this little mild reaction from the org, we now have a bigger reaction. We have the actual value response where you really shows us how II he is feeling about this. Namely he is mad about this. Everything else I would like to keep more or less in place. So the facial expression really captures the viewer's attention. If the phase is the only area that moves in this post change, it will definitely direct the viewer's eyes only to the facial expression. Next up, we have to think about how is doing the actual punch. Here. I want to go with a little bigger change because this is motion that has to do with the entire body. And I wanted to make it really clear that something big is about to happen here. So I raise up the hand above the Gabrielle. I try a couple of different positions for the raised arm until I finally land on this one. And I also want to point out one interesting thing that I did here. I traced the meat drumstick from a different frame and pulled the lines over to the position where I actually want them to be for this post. There's a little trick. If you want to keep the volume before, make sure that an object on screen isn't shrinking or anything like that. You can trace it from a model sheet or from another frame and move it around. Sometimes that makes your animation looks stiff, but it's a nice trick to make sure that you're not change, changing sizes for certain areas of your drawing. Next key drawing for the org is the fist actually coming down, slamming into the goblin. And I really want the viewer to pay attention to the fist. So I keep the entire body where it is. I'm not not moving it Realistically. I mean, it would at least move a little bit. But you know, in 2D animation, you sometimes get away with that. Just holding something completely still. And I'm not holding a completely still, am actually tracing it. If you copy and paste the lines will just look dead. But if you trace it, it will have a nice little wobble that keeps everything alive. So yeah, I keep the body in place and I make a impact frame for the fist. I exaggerate it even a little bit because I I, I bend the arm into the other direction, which is a little bit reversal of the curve that the arm had before it went down. And yeah, just emphasizing this contrast even more. Now we only have a couple of remaining poses for the goblin. Of course, the pose where he sees the fist looming above him. And we have this nice little o moment. I experiment a little bit with the mouth shape here. And then we have the frame of the impact. And you will see that I test different things and I flip back and forth to see how it will look. This was my first try. And then I already got caught up a little bit in the moment of animating. I also wanted to add a frame of him falling off screen. Then I went back, tried something new for the impact frame and tweak that again a little bit more. I like that he gets repelled a little bit like accordion or something like it. And I tweak the arm position so it's clearly readable in the silhouette. Last but not least, we have the moment where the goblin comes back up, totally wobbly and in pain. For me, it was important that in this post he was lean to the right because when he gains a census back and he is interested again in the meat, he will be leaned to the left. So I wanted to have a little bit of contrast there. So that's why I put him more to what's the right and yeah. Put some stars around it and rotating eyes so we know it hurts. We know he's dizzy and there we have it. All the key poses are here. And in the next step, we're going to have a look at what happens between those key poses. We're going to fill in the breakdowns.
13. Breakdowns to flavor the motion: At this point in time, your animation should look a little bit like this. When you flip through it, you should get the full story and all the key poses that you have done so far. I copy and pasted the actual hitting for the goblin a couple of times. So we have a couple of bits here. And yes, so this is already coming along pretty nicely. The thing that we have to define now for every single post change is how do we actually get from Post a to Post B? Let's take the first post change that the org does over here. We need to fit a frame in between there. So what we can do is click and drag over both layers. So we have that little handle here, and we can add a frame between pose 12 to create a new drawing between those two keyframes, all we have to do is just make sure that we have selected that held frame that is marked with that line. And just start drawing something in a viewport. And here it created a new drawing. Don't mind that my drawings have may have different numbers than what you might be seeing. It's because I'm recording this footage at a point where I've already drawn a bunch of in-betweens. So, yeah, for new friends, I get higher numbers now. Also, depending on your settings, open tunes, numbers the frames differently and can actually auto, rename them and stuff like this that you can fine tune in the settings if you don't like the way how open twins isn't numbering your drawings. Another way to create a new blank drawing is to go to the place where you want to create one and hit Alt D. And now we have a new blank drawing on this frame. If we turn on onion skin, we can nicely see the previous keyframe in red and the following key-frame in green. And we can draw in between it. Actually, for good breakdowns. We don't just take the middle of everything. We don't just draw everything exactly in the middle, but we're trying to find interesting ways how to go from one keyframe to the next. For this one, for this first one's actually kinda subtle. I just have the I going in like a slight curve to the left and the body is kinda in the middle, just a note on the ears. I have one of them pointing a little more into the direction of the previous key, and the other ear pointing a little more in the direction of the next key. This mixes it up a little bit. We're going to see the concepts a lot clearer in the next key that we're doing a breakdown for here with the goblin going from his wanting pose to the shocked pose. And here's the thing. Breakdowns shouldn't just be in the middle. There shouldn't just be a morphing transition. I'm doing a bad break down right now where I'm kind of just put everything in the middle. The arms are like emits transition. And this looks okay. This is not horribly wrong. It's just, it's just boring. In contrast, I would encourage you to do something new in the breakdown. For example, here we are dipping down the body to have a curve going down. The right already overshot. Its goal is not like MIT transition. It's already more than there. It's overshooting. While the other arm is overshooting into the other direction. We have one arm overshooting going up, in the other arm overshooting going down. This is going to give us an interesting motion because we have things going in different directions. And yeah, that breakdown is just a lot more interesting. For this next breakdown, we're trying something a little bit different. Instead of having onion skin switched on all the time, I just get that line at the bottom that I definitely need to get rock solid. But then I switch onion skin off and I just flip back and forth between the previous and the next key. And I tried to fill out my lines in between them. And usually you get breakdowns that are a little more life li, a little more interesting this way, because having on your skin activated tempts you to do the morphing kind of in-betweens where you just draw in the middle between the red and the green line. But in this case, I actually needed a little more precision in the arm. I didn't like how it was totally flipping out. I wanted it to be a little more in the middle. I switched onion skin back on and found a breakdown frame for the arm that is a little more in the expected middle. I did like the result though for the body. So that's one trick that some animators use to get some very loose, very interesting breakdowns. The next breakdown for the arc is again, not that spectacular. It's just him closing the mouth a little bit while the goblin is punching him. A lot of the lines we draw will be exactly in the middle for that. But I made one big choice. Namely that during the breakdown, which time-wise could be the middle of the motion? The meat drumstick is already all the way down as you can see, I'm favoring the green line for the drumstick. And most other lines are a bit more exactly in the middle, but letting the meat crop first might give us a nice little overlap experience where some motions already come to an end while other motions are still going on. The next breakdown is similarly uneventful. We're actually keep the body exactly where it is because only the mouth shape is changing. So we try to get an interesting in-between mouth shape for the 4k now showing his emotion that he really doesn't like the punching of the goblin. This next one is a lot more interesting. We have to figure out a way how to raise the arm and how far is the arm already raised during the middle of the motion, again, flipping will help us to figure this out. We can also see if we can do something interesting with the body. Maybe dip it down a little bit, see how that looks. During big body motions. It's always a very good idea to close the eye because we humans just tend to do that while there's a big body motion, pig head motion, we usually close the eye, the ears I have pointing in the direction of the previous keyframe of the red onion skin. Because the tip of the ears are being dragged behind. And that has to do with what we talked about, the resistance to change the position to change the state of motion, inertia, which causes this kind of lag behind which animators often referred to as follow through an overlap. And we will have a closer look at this in a whole other lesson at a later point in time, the other arm with the meat, we just dropped down to get a little downward curve. And with that, we already have this very important breakdown frame done. The next breakdown is the one between the pose right after the hit to him, tucking his arm away again and being happy that he has the drumstick. And of course, the biggest motion here is the arm being tucked back. And yeah, you can see I experiment with a couple of directions and also how to hold and position the fingers. I found that you can create slightly different impressions and make the motion feel a little bit different. Once again, I recommend flipping through your drawings so you can see a little bit of a preview and see if it's working or not. The left arm and the meat again is on a curve on its way back. And the tip of the ears are pointing in the direction of the previous keyframe. Yeah, When I was flipping through my animation, I was not happy with how that arm looked and I went back and changed it again. So yeah, this is totally part of the animation process. Test and see if things work. Yeah, If it doesn't work, you have to change something. Here. I'm adding a breakdown for when the goblin is coming up. And I do that with a nice little arc for the entire head. And so dizzy eyes, you can have some fun with these breakdowns. Here. Another nice one, when he's shaking himself out of the dizziness. Notice the arc for the nose. And here I'm doing something interesting. I'm having the right arm B in the middle of the motion here, but the left arm is still pointing down, it's still on its way up. And with this kind of mixing up the, the different body parts, you can make a very interesting breakdown. Now, after we have designed some awesome poses and some interesting breakdowns, we can start putting them on the timeline, actually time our animation and see something awesome when we press Play. And we're going to time our animation right now in the next video.
14. Timing the animation, spacing patterns: After you've come up with some interesting breakdowns for your animation, it's the earliest possible time to think about the timing of your animation. There are some animators who wanted to do that even later. They only wanna do timing if they already have some, some eases and more extremes like anticipation and overshoot on their timelines so they would continue working. Like we have just, you know, making space for one drawing in-between two and putting the next drawing in there and always flipping through it. But I know that beginners are very impatient. They just want to, you want to hit that Play button and see something. And I can understand that. And there are animators could do that too. They try to time their animation earlier rather than later. You need to see what you can work with best. But it doesn't make sense to separate these two phases in your brain. So you can first fully focus on some interesting poses, and then you can think about, okay, how does this all fit together in time? Now, after you've put in the breakdowns, your animation look a little bit like this. When you flip through it, you have some interesting moments. They're in-between the motions. And yeah, now it's time to actually put that on or in the right timing because if we just press play, yeah, this is over far too quickly. There is one more concept that we need to keep in mind. We've already heard about that animating on twos, because especially doing slow motions, we do not need to draw 24 frames per second. 12 are completely sufficient. So what we're gonna do is we're going to show one drawing twice. And the other concept that will guide this process is estimating how long motions should be. And this is very difficult even for me up to this day. I'm still experimenting with this a lot. Especially sometimes you will see that just one extra frame or one frame less can make a huge difference, can give the motion a different feel. There are some really great animators who can do this completely out of their head. Like they're immediately know like okay, I know this should be a six frames and won't motion, there should be a 10 frame motion. And it's really impressive. I don't personally work like that exactly. I mean, I have an idea and try something, but I very often change my timing. Yeah, this is one more reason why timing should be a dedicated step in your workflow because then you can focus on getting the timing right. And then you hopefully have more or less right and don't need to change it much. But yeah. So there are a couple of patterns that we can. Orient ourselves at the minimum on the timeline right now, we do have moments where we have a key and then immediately we have a breakdown and then we have another key. So if we would have a ball moving along a line, then here would be a frame here. And here. We can kind of see the arc. We can kind of see that this is going in this outward bend shape as opposed to going here, that would be another option. So the breakdown is vital here to give the information in what direction the ball follow the curve. And for quick motions, this might be it, you know, you might, might add another anticipation before it. This is actually the key. Then this would be the anticipation. For example, of the arm going back and then the arm coming forward and we would have a breakdown here. So yeah, but this is kinda the minimum kind of motion that you can do. There's another minimum motion that I sometimes like to do. Now this pattern is a bit frowned upon many animators because you don't have a breakdown in the middle. So if we had an arc like this, the ball motion would start here than we had an ease out frame very close to it. And the next frame would already be an ease into the second key. And this makes the path of the motion a bit muddy because we do not have a breakdown here to tell us exactly the path of the arc that the motion took. So this is only recommended for very small motions. For example, if you have an arm, upper arm that is moving from here to here, then this might be small enough motion to use this spacing pattern, this timing chart pattern. And this pattern is probably the most used one. And you know, you can build your workflow around it. You can draw your keys first, then you put your breakdown in the middle, and then you put some 0s frames in. And yeah, this is a very common patterns, especially in television animation. And this is oftentimes all what they use. This is the best of both worlds. It gives you a breakdown so you have a clear path that your object or element takes, but you also have eases that give the motion a certain softness. And then the next possible step would be to have more than one iss frame. And I constructed this using the half-inch method and this would give you those three E's frames that will make the motion even softer. And yeah, this is recommended for motions that are a little bit slower and therefore need some more 0s frames. You can see how the ball is slowly catching up speed getting faster and then is fastest at the breakdown. And then the spacings get closer and closer together. So yeah, here we have a longer motion that is nice and soft at the beginning and the end. And we have a breakdown that clearly tells us the path of the motion. And don't forget that emotion, of course, doesn't need to have an ease at the beginning or an ISS at the end. At the beginning, it might be that the motion was already in the middle of it and just entered the frame right now. And that's why you're seeing the motion starting without an ease or an object got hit with something that already was accelerated. Or you might not have an ease at the end if the motion is not slowing down before hitting an obstacle, as we saw with the free-fall, where the ball was just being accelerated by gravity and then hitting the ground. And we will also not see a slowing down before the hits that our characters are doing. They intentionally do not want to slow down because they want to have the maximum impact. And yes, so in that case there is no slowing down here before the hit. Now the way how I like to tie my animations is to play it and feel out where the next drawing should come. To do this, I would just hold the first drawings. And I can do that by clicking and dragging over all my layers and just put some space here, you know, at least a second or maybe two seconds. So when you press Play, you have a chance to feel where the next frame should be. So it'd be like, okay, people should see what's going on here. Here. Should the motion start. Then I would again click and drag and get my drawings up by dragging the gray handle up again. And here I have the breakdown for the motion that leads into this almost byte. And here we can make a timing decision about how long this motion should be. If we would employ this first pattern of having a key, then a breakdown, and then a key. Then we would have the following pattern on tools. The motion would start here. Then we have the double exposure. This frame is just helpful one. Then we have the breakdown. Again. The breakdown is held one more. But I want to move both my layers down so I don't mess up the timing of the goblin or, you know, the the order of drawings of the goblin. So I make sure that I select both layers and make this space for this to be on 2s. And then we know we want to hold this again. At the minimum. It should be on 2s, 2, but we probably want to hold it longer. And then we can go back to the beginning and see and look how it plays out. This is a little bit too fast. I would like to probably use that pattern. So we know that we need more space in the timing right now, this marks the beginning of our motion. Now we put two more drawings in that. Oops, and we should do this on both layers once again, to keep our drawings below all still in order. So here the motion would start. We would have a 0s frame here, then the breakdown. Then we need more space for an East frame. Again, both layers. Here the East frame would be and this would be the end of the motion. If you want, you can already mark your ys frames by creating empty drawings. This can look a little bit weird because you're trying will start to flicker where the empty drawings are. But some people, it helps better to feel out how the speed of the motion actually is. So let's press Alt D and put in an empty frame here, and also go to this empty spot here for the other East frame and also press Alt D. And now we have a motion that flickers. But we can see how long it will be. Fit press Play, and it gives us a little bit of the feeling. But I can understand if you don't like to put in these empty frames, this Flickr frames. So I delete them again. It's just getting a little bit hard to see that, you know, in front of the breakdown, you actually have made space here for the East frame. And here is the beginning of the motion where the keyframe is. But of course the keyframe is still held from when it reached that position. And then you basically go on like this. You put all the frames down and just drag the next key up. Then you play it and try to fill out where the next break down and the next key is supposed to go. Always keeping in mind that because you put eases before the break down, your motion starts a bit earlier. And especially in the beginning, this can be a bit confusing. You might time your animations because you only see the breakdown after a little while. But that's okay if you realize, hey, I now my character is doing The next motion too early, then you can always take all both of the frames and push them both down both the layers to make some, some space there. One special place that you might have to put some thought in is how often you repeat the beating frames of the gobbling beating against the ORC. You know, you might put another loop in there or take one out once you see how it actually plays out on the timeline. And these are the basics of timing and the following chapters when we're doing the in-betweens, we will also revisit this topic a little. So don't worry if you haven't figured out this perfectly, quite yet. This is completely normal. This is something that takes some experience and a while to get a feel for. But yeah, just enjoy how great it is to put these frames on a timeline right now, press play. And if you have some good breakdowns, it should already look very interesting and very cool. If you want share your progress on social media and in the comments, I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys came up with.
15. Anticipation: Let's put in our first anticipation, which is right in the beginning before the big 4k is going down for the meat. Instead of just going down immediately, he's gonna go a little bit up and then down. He's like Really how going up first. So for sure we're letting his head go up just a little bit, but the arm with the meat is going down first, It's going in the opposite direction. And the different directions are logical. If you think about it, the head has to go down to reach the meat, but the meat has to come up. So if you're going into the opposite directions first, it's different directions for the two elements. The head is going up during it, so patient and the arm is going down. So we add everything else accordingly. And now we're going for our first in-between, which is indicating an ease out. We're easing out of the resting pose, out of the anticipation into the motion downwards. And to do this properly, we have to of course, favor the red line, which is the previous pose. We're closer to the previous pose to make the motion start a little softer. Now we are creating the ease in where the arc goes into the position where he is about to bite into the meat. And of course, if we want to ease in, we now need to favor the green drawing, which is the drawing that follows right after. And you can see that the breakdown drawing in red is further away than the green drawing, which is the next key frame. There we have it. We have built our first anticipation. Before we go to the next key, we're going into an anticipation and then we go into the key pose. And we already put two drawings in-between. We didn't put in a breakdown, but instead, we put in an ease out that is very close to the anticipation and an ease in that is very close to the second key. A lot of traditional animators prefer to put a breakdown right in the middle between an anticipation extreme, and a key. But in this case, I decided to not go with a breakdown, but instead have to eat frames to make the motion start a little bit softer and end a little bit softer. And if the motion is a little bit slower or you have a little bit more distance to cover. In our case, the distance wasn't that big, but, you know, I was a little bigger. I will probably have put in a breakdown two. So we would have a breakdown. And those ease out. And ease in frames. And maybe let's plan a breakdown here as well. And this is a pattern that is very typical and often considered the minimum for a motion with anticipation. Here you can see me flipping through the animation and I actually noticed something that I didn't like. I didn't like how the years just kinda got stuck and flopped around for a bit. So I have removed them from all the friends that I have drawn so far and decided to redo them. And here we're leaving a bit this post to post workflow that we have been doing so far. We have always put drawings in-between drawings. And now I'm just doing one drawing after the other. And I tried to feel a little more how the ears, what flop over. And this kind of workflow is called straight ahead animation. And straight ahead animation can sometimes give you a more fluent flowing result. But it doesn't have the security that you have everything planned out. So yeah, this is something that I do quite often that after I have put in quite a few breakdowns and anticipations and maybe already some eased keyframes. I would start putting in some, I would remove some elements and redo them straight ahead because now I can feel more how they would flow. So now that you know how anticipations are done, you could go through your animation and see if there are any more the moments that would need an anticipation. And you could plan them in the same way. You don't have to put in the in-betweens right away. But at least plan that extreme keyframe where it goes in the other direction first and then it goes in the direction that it's actually supposed to go. Keep in mind that you can make it more interesting if you have body parts that go into the other direction, you could also have some body parts not move with the anticipation. You know why the head is going into the anticipation. You could barely move the hands. That would also be something that can create a little bit of overlap that makes it more interesting. And of course, you might also have moments that are the opposite, where you have a big motion that just finished and you're then moving into the hold position. And that will also be an extreme, but it's overshooting the position. And then coming back, I have to say I got a little bit excited with this animation and I already wanted to see how it looks when it, when it has more frames. So in the video that we're doing next, I actually did another and dissipation, but I already put in the in-between frames. So I consider this a new chapter where I show you how high did the in-betweens for this project. So this is still a bit much for you. Don't worry. You don't need to do your in-betweens immediately. Just put in the extreme poses. Try to find those moments, those elements that need a little bit of preparation first and put an extreme for an overshoot before something comes to a stop. You also don't need to do many of them. I think if you have something from the scope that I have right here, I think it's totally enough to have two or three anticipations become because some motions can also start without an anticipation, especially if they're slow. So yeah, go through the animation and add those extreme and his patients and overshoots. And then you can move on to the in-betweens. And yeah, I've I was kinda doing two at the same time. Maybe I should have I should have hit the brakes a little there, but I think it's still going to be helpful if you see how I add the in-betweens in the next video.
16. Inbetweens for the orc: Next step, we're going through one of the most important motions in the entire animation, which is the anticipation where the org is lifting his arm and the hit that follows afterwards. And for those important animations or movements, you can see me mapping out timing charts where I plan, how this animation is actually going to go. Keep in mind the ORC is the heavier character. So his motions could all be a little bit longer than the ones of the goblin put in one or two 0s frames, especially at the beginning of motions, and your org will feel heavier than the goblin. Personally, after I was done with the project, I kind of wish I had put in some more easy for the ORC to make them feel a little bit more sluggish. But be careful. He's still should have very fast motions like once he gets swinging, the ORC can still have large spacings and be quite fast. You don't have to write in the frame numbers. It's just that it's sometimes helps me to know what I'm adding when. One thing is quite important though, that once you have decided on the pattern that you want to do or, you know, just to try to see how it looks, that you should set up your friends accordingly. Here I have a keyframe That's key frame in drawing 33. And we have another keyframe That's drawing through D5. And there is a drawing, a breakdown in between the two keys. That's drawing 34. I now have to plan my ys frames accordingly and according to the timing chart. And it's very wise to already create these drawings either by just drawing in your timeline and you see it just created drawing 36 for me. And that's going to be the ease out frame. This is the frame where it's going to be a little faster already. This is the breakdown that we already have. At now the spacing decreases and here we would have the ease out frame. And now we have all the drawings created and they all have a number. And we can put these numbers into a timing chart or do it the other way around. Create our timing chart first, then create the drawings that we need on the timeline. There is one important thing I want to bring to your attention is that by default, open tunes automatically remembers your frame numbers. So if you have frame 1 and frame 2, and you're making space between them and you put something in between there, it's going to renumber the drawing so that you have 1, 2, 3. Oftentimes that is very nice, especially if you're just at the beginning so that you don't have confusing stuff like 1423. And then you have to write that in a timing chart. And sometimes that's confusing. But sometimes you might not want this remembering. For example, if you already have your breakdowns and you have already written drawing numbers somewhere in a timing chart, and then suddenly it all doesn't make sense anymore. So it can be helpful to turn that red numbering feature of, and I'm just want to show you real quick how, how you can do that. It's in file preferences. They're in drawing. You can switch in Abel, how to read number, you can switch that off. There are also other numbering systems. You can make it so that it always gives it the frame number. It tries to renumber drawing so that they have the frame number. This can also be confusing. You might have to play around with this and see what you like. I also had some problems with the auditory number feature that sometimes if I would undo the creation of a drawing, open tunes will crash. And I think that had something to do with the auto numbering because it also tried to undo the numbering. So yeah, just so you know what that is and just you know why open tunes is always giving stuff different numbers. You can switch that on or off. Okay, back to the animation. Now, I can always see, no matter on what drawing I am I'm on, I can see where it's supposed to be in the timing chart and change it accordingly and yeah, make it have the spacing that I planned for it in the timing chart. You have doing another little offset again where the head is already going in the right direction, but the arm is just coming in making a little bit of a dip to the left like an S curve. And you can see that I focused a lot on the arm first and then thought more about the body. Here is also interesting. On frame 19, I have an ease and Ease In for the arm, but the body already reached his final position. And yeah, here I'm on frame 18, which is also an SFrame, which also has a spacing that favors the end position, the extreme, the anticipation. So I was drawing close to that green line. And yeah, of course, always test watching it because I'm curious, I want to see how it looks. Now I focus on the next element right here, which is the face right here, frame 15, very close to the previous one. And actually it's even going a little bit to the right in sort of a mini anticipation. Sometimes you can do that, sometimes you can pit, put a little bit often in anticipation in one element during the in-betweens, so that not everything is doing an anticipation at the same time or starting in anticipation at the same time, you can. Offset the anticipations a little bit throughout the body. But now this is a very classic favoring. I'm favoring the green line to have an ISS in and make the face come to the halt position a little more softly. Again, flipping through the animation to see how it looks. Okay, so I'm happy now with the right arm. So I'm starting to plan the left arm. And I don't want it to move with the same length of an animation that the other arm has. So I want the animation to already be finished off the left arm. While the big motion is still going on. You can see that I planned this animation to start a little bit later. It starts on drawing 15, while the big body and our motion is starting withdrawing foreseen. And similarly, this arm motion is ending earlier on frame 19, while the big arm motion still has an ISS on frame 19. So once again, I'm offsetting the animations and what body parts come to a full stop a little bit to have a nice little overlap. One important note though, even if you decide that you're not going to move the arm yet, if you would have a big motion in the torso or in the shoulder, the arm would of course, have to move with it because it's still attached to it. But in this case, the motion was subtle enough and mostly in the region, I decided to keep the arm completely where it is for drawing 15. Yeah, filling in the details here. You can see that now I'm starting the motion with an ECE. I seem to go back to the breakdown to make it be a little more in the middle. Yeah. You see unchecking the motion of just the meat stick and try to make it a nice little arc according to my timing chart. And yeah, that's also an approach that you can do to just make sure that you get one element of your animation. Absolutely right? And then we just stick the hand under it and have it all how we planned it out. Still tweaking the middle position for the meat apparently wasn't quite happy with how that was. Oh, yeah. And here we have the ease into the whole position. And I'm even tweaking the key a little bit to make sure that the arm is ending at a post that I'm happy with them also changing the shape of the meat a little bit. I realized that on some drawings I had it filling out at the end, near the bone. And in the keyframe, I didn't have this physically end. I just had a straight. I just had a straight bone here. You can see that it doesn't have the fizzle at the end. So I had to correct this shape in the keyframe to also have the fizzle there. Now it's time to animate the actual hit coming down. And here we have something that is a little bit special because we do have an anticipation where the org is lifting up the arm. But the anticipation is actually not the anticipation for the motion because that would have to be really fairly shortly after. Like, if I use this as the anticipation, I would have to go down relatively quickly. But I wanted there to be a moment where the gobbling can notice the fist can be like, ooh, so I want the fist of the org to pause in the air. So this is just like a threat, is just a gesture like, Hey, I'm about to hurt you. It will be just like this. This is just a threat. And then there's another anticipation and then the Festus coming up. So it's threat anticipation palm. So I plan this animation accordingly with an anticipation. Here, the timing chart at the left and then the fist coming down is the timing chart on the right. I'm putting in some frame numbers. For that. I just have to create a framed on the timeline or work with the friends that are already created. Frame 23 is of course, shared by both timing charts. It's the end of the anticipation and it's the beginning of the motion down. I copy the left arm because I wanted to stay and actually the entire body, I want everything to stay very steady. So the viewer really watches the fist coming down. And I experiment with a couple of things here. Like first I copy a bunch of stuff and then I realize like, hey, I actually want to have some wiggle in there and read, just redrew the body a couple of times. Okay, Here we're here, we're doing frame 23, the end of the anticipation. I think This is the motion for that extra anticipation after the the threat frame. And here we're doing the ease out where the motion is starting, what's going up a little more. And here's the ease in where it goes into the actual health anticipation. And having here like a little tiny bit of an overshoot. I don't really wanna do an overshoot after the fist hit because I want to tell that all the energy went into the goblin. That's pretty much the only reason why I wouldn't animate an overshoot after the After the hit. But yeah, here I'm experimenting with something cool. I'm putting in speed lines on the quickest frame of the motion where the fist is almost completely down. And yes, speed lines are really cool thing to put into fast motions. You could also smear the fist, stretch it really long. And obviously, this can only be seen for like two frames. So I had to draw a frame directly after that. It doesn't have the speed line. And where the a N, where the arm is also a little bit more straight. Typically you might want to add an overshoot. If you have like a fist coming to a stop motion, it will overshoot, then come back to a stop. But in this case, we want to tell something very specific, namely that all the heat energy went into the goblin. So, you know, it's sort of something like a transfer, transfer. That's why there's this contact. The government takes all the energy of the hit and is slammed to the ground and the fist barely moves. Maybe they can be just a little bit. I think I have a little bit of a wobble there. But yeah, because we really want to tell that this energy went into the goblin and was transferred like the example of the glass, where the glass immediately takes the full speed. And now just imagine what would happen if we stop pushing. The glass would just continue to slide on, you know, if it was hit with that much of momentum and it would be transferred into a lot of force. And that transfer was enough to make the ball stop than the glass would go on, on its own. And it will kinda be like, Do you know these, these pendulums, like where you have one pendulum start swinging after it just hit the ball like this is, this is essentially the same, the momentum and the force transferred onto the other ball and the other one stays in place. And now it's already time to plan the arm going back to the body. And the arc actually reverts back to his very first pose. And yeah, same thing as everywhere else. We already have the breakdown 29, we have the key posts where it goes into that's actually the very first drawing, the very first key. And yeah, I'm, I'm experimenting with how the fist actually tech spec. And then I realize I want to have more images. The animation was actually a bit too quick for me. So I didn't knew timing chart this time with more with more frames for the animation. So this is something that can happen, that you start something and then you realize, oh, this is not not slow enough, not fast enough. Making stuff faster is always a bit easier because you just have to take out drawings. And now you can see there's a nice in-between state for the hand going back. I really like his little stubby fingers there. And again, I'm only focusing on the arm. I didn't even draw the body. Now I want to get this right first. And now that I'm happy with it, I can pay attention to other things like the facial features. Not too much distance to cover for the breakdown. But yeah, you can see it very clearly in the eye. We have an ease in favoring the green line. And then we look on the other side of the breakdown, which is suppose that he's coming from. And there we also have a favoring this time for the red lines, you know, the drill by now, right? That was already everything for the org. Let's focus next on the goblin.
17. Inbetweens for the goblin: The first book motion for the goblin that we have to make is when he comes from just observing the meat to the breakdown and then the post like, oh, how could you for this, I decided I wanted an overshoot. I wanted the green post the oh my God, how could you I want that to be overshot and then end on it. So I did the timing chart accordingly that the key that we drew so far is going to be I'm number three. And yeah, The Bacchae that we're starting with this one. And I'm going to do a new overshoot frame, which is called frame 21. And then we have breakdown eases, all the usual stuff. You can see my computer crashing couple of times to the desktop. Here's the actual overshoot. One thing that's always good to track for something like this is the nose. Do you see how the nose is overshooting and the eyes? They are overshooting the key. And then coming back starting from the first key, we have a little East frame here. And you can see I'm doing the nose is first because they help me to guide the entire arc of the motion and the night dry everything else around it, tests there's a couple of times and if we happy with this, we can conclude all the ys's that we planned for this motion for the actual head of the goblin. We already had all the frames drawn previously. This is something that can also happen that, you know, you're planning your animation and you're putting in key, anticipation is breakdown is key. And you might realize that if you put them on twos, that's all that you want. That's exactly the timing that you need for this speed of this particular motion. And here we already had a little ease when the motion started. Then we have the hit. And then we were just looping these frames and that timing was already fine, so we don't have to add any more in-betweens there. Now we're doing the moment with the goblins looking up at the fist of the ORC. And the breakdown we designed here is actually more of an ease because I really wanted to make sure that the eyes are already looking up while the rest of the body is still reacting while the ears are coming down. Which might not be the most fortunate break down. Oh, also a missing the eyebrows here. But this might not be the most fortunate breakdown. So when I flesh this out, I probably want to have a frame for the ears that is more of a breakdown exactly in the middle between this one and this one. But first, we are doing the ys coming from the red one. We have some friends that are really close to the previous line. Now going on to the ease into the green polis, into the health position. And here we're doing our IR drop, just how I would like it to be. So we included the frame that we designed as a breakdown as more of an in-between. Next up, we are doing the motion where he comes back up from the ground. Of course, we need to continue that arc that we were planning first. I also do an overshoot here. I want him to overshoot the moment where he came up and so he wobbles a little bit back and forth. Yeah, The arc in this case is very important. It's always important, but you know, super important in this case at as well, we have that new overshoot frame 29 that we can have a lot of fun with where he is. Yeah. You see him overshooting the green key and you can give him some extra dizzy ice here. And yeah, then we need to think about how he actually gets there. This is one of the easiest way you can see that his head is still pointing in the direction where he came from. The arc is still a C-shape. And the overshoot frame actually reverses this C-shape and this helps to give it this extra wobble effect. And here we have an easing into the frame that we actually want to hold where we can see that he's dizzy, have the eyes come in with a little bit of an ease. And yeah. And here we have the Ease Out of the overshoot frame where he's coming into the key position. One of the trickiest thing was to actually find the correct directions 0. And then I'm adding the stars and I'm adding the stars straight ahead. I'm going over the frames that already have and I make them pop out of him. One frame after the other, one star after the other. And then we have the moment in the end where the goblin shakes himself out of the dizziness and goes back to the first pose. And I thought it would be nice to have an overshoot here. You can see that he's overshooting the position and then returning to the key, which is the first pose of the entire animation. On the way to it from the shake to going up, we have this very classic breakdown right here. Look at the nose, how it's in a C-shape going up. And then we have them going in and out of the overshoot with an 0s. Here we have the east into the first pose. And one important detail that I thought was kind of fun is that the tongue is still pointing in an upward direction, the direction it came from, from the overshoot. And that adds some nice little flavor to the animation. And everything else is relatively close to the green line. Have very classic ease in that regard. And that's it. All the extreme poses, the end of the patients and the overshoots and all the in-betweens doing the easing that I wanted to do are there now, there's one thing you could tweak if you wanted to. I noticed in the end that the motions from my Orc, they were still kind of fast. You could in theory at some more easing to the 4k because, you know, bigger, heavier characters, they tend to move slower, so we could push that even more. But for now I'm going to leave it like this. And now we can make it pretty and give it some color. In the next step.
18. Coloring: We have already colored a couple of things before, so you already know the basics. You have to right-click in the parallel area, create a new style. And here we pick a color for the work. If you've been using vector layers, the cool thing is that these colors stay linked. So should your later on the site that you want your arc to be in a different color, you can just change that color, style. And it will change in every frame that you've already created. To do the actual coloring, you need to use the paint bucket tool and you can either just click into a shape or to rack over multiple to color them in one big swoosh. You might be noticing that sometimes the software isn't able to fill shapes with a gap in it. If you try to fill, this will not work. There are a few ways to fix this. You could either take a brush and add another brushstroke to close the shape. And we should now be able to fill this. Or you can use the contour point editor to make sure that those points connect. It's important that the software only sees the middle line. If you do something like this, it looks like the shape is closed, but it's actually not crossing the lines. So for the software, there's still a gap here. However, there is an auto gap closing feature. So if you take the paint bucket and click yeah, it is able to fill small gaps and you can even increase the sensitivity of how large of a gap should be close to buy the software. You shouldn't set the maximum gap value too high because it could happen that when lines are getting very close together, it might think that there's a gap and close it off before the lines actually meet. So there would be a little triangle that doesn't get colored. And this is something that you need to keep an eye on if you heavily rely on the order gap close feature. There's a little preview tool that can show you what open tunes sees as a gap that it can fill. To see that you need to go to View gap check. And now if you're moving the control points, you can see that there are moments where it starts to detect a gap that it can fill. And sometimes there are moments where you think like, hey, why can't fill this, but not this, for example. So sometimes it can really help to just go into the control point Editor, move something a little bit, and then you have a gap that can be filled by your coloring. You can use dot and comma on the timeline to jump to the next drawing. This way you can jump over even large distances and get to the next drawing that you have to color. So we're going on through that animation frame by frame. And we're doing only one color first. So we can do one color after the other. And here's something interesting with the loops. Open tune sometimes has a hard time too. Although everything is closed, like the line is crossing. Over itself, it has a hard time to fill this because of the way how films work in open tunes. Sometimes it's not possible to fill these lines. And if that happens, you could just make another brushstroke shape in the middle of it, and now we can fill it. You could also use that first invisible color at the very left. That's not a white color, that's actually an invisible color. To create an invisible line. Here we do that. That then can be filled or not. Here I am making sure that the line is closed and there it's failed. We go on until all frames are filled with that color, and then we can create the next color style and continue. Here, we actually need to erase a line that we don't want to have. And sometimes if you're lucky, a fill that we already did might spill into the right spot there and give us the complete picture here. Moving on to the next color this time, I'm doing the eyebrow in the frames where I forgot to color the eyebrow there and here. And OH, I need to pay attention to not a drag my mouse too far. And here our final frame where I actually forgot the eyebrow. It's amazing that sometimes during coloring, you will realize that there are moments where you forgot to put in an element and oh, well, now we have to draw it real quick. Next I'm filling the body of the Copland and each level, each stack of drawings and open tunes has its own color palette. So we need to make sure that we are in the right, on the right column on the goblin level to create new colors styles that are meant for the goblins because we cannot see the color palette of the 4k when we have the goblin layer selected. So I'm going on here. Goblin is a little bit more delicate. We have to zoom in a little bit more and fix some crossing lines. I even go in using the control point editor to make sure nothing is sticking in, but ideally still crossing paths with that other line at the loop where the goblin is hitting the arc, we really have an advantage that all the drawings are still linked. And once we have all of these drawings colored, Well, even the repeating drawings are completely colored. Here. I tried to get the fill for that little bit that's sticking out there. And yeah, actually I have to fix it quite a lot because the goblin layer cannot see the line of the ORC and it's not taking that to to fill. I have to make sure that all the lines from the goblin layer make a shape that can be felt. And it takes me a moment, but yeah, Eventually I get it filled. A similar problem we have here. I cannot actually fill the goblin body and I was looking like half. Why, why is this shape not closed? Why does and doesn't work? And then I realized that, oh, well, the drawing of the fist is on another layer, so this shape is not actually closed. I switch off the ORC, and now I can see that I have to add a line up here to make sure that the body of the goblin is closed. Right? And so it goes on. There are only a few moments that are a little bit special. Well, I can nose or eye doesn't want to fill right. And I mess with the lines a little bit until I can fill them. I also want to make sure I fill the parts that are actually supposed to be white. And to make sure that I have really get everything, I create a new background layer and I put just very notable color into the background. Yeah, fill it here so I can see what places I've already colored. And four, I still have two color. Of course, I need to make sure that the exposure goes over the entire animation. And now I'm creating some more colors. As you can see, I am carefully naming them and it's important that you are not naming them, like just, not just like green or blue because you could tweak them to be a different color, but to make sure that you name them what they are, what element they are. And here I'm really preparing my pellet and going through all the possible colors that I want for my org. Now I pick the pupil to color it in next. And the pupil is pretty cool because it's very close in all frames. So I can just flip through the drawings. I don't have to move my mouse cursor a lot. I can just keep clicking except for when I didn't close that line and I need to manually close it. There we go. The goblin I'm doing in a similar fashion, creating all the possible colors that I want to use in the goblin layer. And then I start going through the animation. I like doing coloring for my frame-by-frame animations. It's a good relaxing time if you put on some music or listen to a podcast. And then you will be through the entire animation before you know it. And this is how my animation looks after it's fully colored. And if you're happy with how it looks, you're ready to export it, put it in a video file, and I'll show you in the next video how you can do that.
19. Export as MP4 video file: Now that your animation is fully colored, you can be very proud of it and show it around to your friends and family. That means that you need to get your animation out of open tunes into a video file that you can then share on social media upload to YouTube or sand around via Messenger. Unfortunately, open tunes by default can only export image sequences. And that would only be each frame 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 as a single file and you can't play that anywhere. A video file would be much better. Open tunes can export videos, but needs the help of a third party software called FFmpeg that you need to download first and then tell open tunes where it is. So it can use it to string those frames together to add video file in an MP4 format that you can then distributed everywhere. You find this video encoder on the website FFmpeg.org. There's a download button here. Do not hit this big Download button because this is only the source code that is not the program that you can run to encode your video. Instead, you select down here with the packages and executable files, you need to find your operating system. I am taking this link right here, and I think this is the download that we want. I'm not sure myself, we going to have to try it. You download it, you will get a zip file. And this file, you need to unzip in a location where you can always find it. Personally, I like to put FFmpeg installations just on my C drive so I can just leave them there and all software that needs to access it can access it there. All I have to do an open tunes is telling it where it is through the file preferences and they're in the section import, export. You can find the folder that we just unzipped. And there's a bin file, an InDesign file. They are the files that open tunes needs to create mp4 videos. And after you have all of this setup and can just hit Render, hit fast render to mp4, and it will render it on your desktop. Now I'd be very curious to see what you animated. Please share with us on social media with the hashtag, enemies or Ireland or uploaded as a project below, I'm very curious to see what you did. And if you like this course, please, please, please write a review. I'll be very happy about feedback. Also, if there are things that I can approve, please let me know. And yeah, I hope you had a good time during this tutorial. And I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next class.
Ferdinand Engländer
