Frame by Frame Animation Using Photoshop, After Effects, Cinema4D

1. INTRO: Hello everyone, My name is Karen, and in this course I will teach you how to create a frame-by-frame animation using Photoshop After Effects Cinema 4D and the screen tablet. I will start by showing you some free resources that you can download and how to use Mixamo to animate your 3D characters. Then I will show you how to create your first animation in cinema 4D and use it as a reference to draw all the frames in Photoshop using a screen tablet or a graphic tablet. After you export all the frames, we will move to after effects to make our animation more trippy and do some final adjustments. The end, I will show you some alternative ways to create a frame-by-frame animation without using Cinema 4D. 2. 01 Examples and Resources: Here is a simplified version of a step-by-step guide on how to create this frame-by-frame animation. On the left side we can see the 3D animation that was done using Mixamo and cinema 4D. And then I use that as a reference to draw on top of it. And for that I use Photoshop, of course, graphic tablet or a screen tablet. And then the third step is finalizing everything and after effects by adding a texture, adding the glow effect and the background. But here we will go in more depth later. For now, I will also show you how to download the resources that we need. You will go to this link. You will have it in the description, but yeah, it's clients.com, row.com. And then you will go to this to this one right here. Let's click on it. Put the price 0 For Chase and you already put my email on it, get view content. And then you just download it. I already have downloaded it. And yeah, you can save these files so you can use them later. 3. 02 Mixamo 3D Characters: Now we are in mixed amount.com. And of course, if you don't have an account, you can create one and login. And here you will see some pre-made animations that you can apply to your characters. Here we have two options. If you don't have any characters. On top, you can go here to characters and here you will see some that are created from Mixamo. You can scroll down and see them all and see if you like Kenny, for example, this one, yeah, we can go use this character. Here it is in T-pose. There are plenty of other ones that you can see and you can use based on what you want to create or what your purposes. Then after you decide about your character, you can go to animations. And here you can find some pre-made one, for example, defeated. You can see how it is applied. Let's go to this one reaction. On the right side, you can see some changes that you can make. For example, you can change the value here and see how the animation changes. Hit intensity. You can increase that overdrive character arm space trim here you can decrease the frames. For example, right now it is around 90 frames. Now it is shorter. This is different for each animation. For example, if we go to dying, you can see that there are other options. Of course there is also a mirror. Now it will go the other side. Yeah. The other option, if you want to use your own character is to go to Upload character. You can select character file. Here you can use one of the vj's that upgraded or if you have something else on your own, of course you can use that. Let's open. Now we need to do the rigging process, which is basically adding some key points to the body. And let's use these options here to orientate. Now click Next. And here's an example of what you should do. The blue one goes to the chin, so I'll do that. The green one to the wrist. So here we go. The elbow, the knees, and growing. Next. This is the outer rigor. Now that this is done, we can go to next, next. And here we will have our character. Now the next step is just to find the animation that you like. We can search here, for example, running. Of course, you can test all these. I will see what I find them, then decide for a final option and then I will download it. Something else you should have in mind is for example, in this running, you should check this in place. Now it stays in place and this is something that we need to do for our animation. I'm thinking to go with this one, drunk walk. I made sure to check this in place. Here we have the overdrive character arm space. I think that's okay. One thing that I see when I choose an animation is to make sure that it is a loop. In this case it is, it is also short 90 frames. And now the next step is just to download this. We will leave this as it is download. We will put this in a folder and then open it in Cinema 4D. 4. 03 Cinema4D Animation: Now we are in cinema 4D. And here I will not go into much depth on how to use cinema for D and things like that. I will just show you what I do to create the frame-by-frame animation. So what I do in Cinema 4D for that, and of course, the first thing I do is open the animation that we just downloaded, the drunk walk. I will open it. Click. Okay. And here's the timeline. It is 90 frames. We can click play. On the right side. We can see, let's say the layers of the 3D object. If we click on each of them, it will highlight what it represents. If you want to remove any of them, you can just click on it and click on these points right here. You have to click two times, so it becomes red, and now it becomes invisible. We don't have to do that. So let's undo. And now we need to add the camera. And to change the camera position, you have these options right here. You can click on this option right here to move on the left, on the right, up and down, right here to zoom in and zoom out. And this other option to rotate. Now before I add the camera, I will also change the size of the frame right here. So to do that, we need to go to Render Settings, which is right here. And on the output we have the width and the height. I will go with the width to thousandths and the height 2500. And now I will click on the camera. And when you change the position of the camera, makes sure you check the camera. You need to check this square right here. And here on the timeline. Let's make sure we are on the first frame. Now we can make the changes like rotating it, zooming in and moving the camera. When you decide about the final position, you need to click on this key right here. Record active objects. But while making sure that you have checked the camera. So it is highlighted. Let's try it. Let's click Play. This is the animation that we have with this camera position. And something else that I like to do is change the focal length. To do that, you need to click on the camera, go to objects and on the focal length, go from classic to portrait. And you can see that it zooms in. We need to zoom out a little bit. So we click on this option right here and zoom out. I can change the position a little bit rotated. To use this camera instead of what it was, we need to click again on this key. And now it saves this camera option. Let's click Play. Maybe what I can do is put it a little bit forward, like this. Let's click again on the key icon and let's click Play. I think it is okay, like that. So on the next video, I will show you how to add materials, light, and render the video so we can use it as a reference to do the frame-by-frame animation. 5. 04 3D Materials and Rendering: Now we will add the material and some light source. Before we do that, we can just see how the render looks like. So we can go to Render View. This is what it looks like. First we can add some light source and to do that, we go to floor, we hold click and go to physical sky. Let's click again. And what this does is add some shadow. Of course, you can change the shadow by changing the position of the physical sky or all of the sudden. You have this rotation here. In case you don't have this, you can go and highlight this rotate. As we move that we can see that the shadow also changes. Let's take also the render view. And I think I'll keep it like that then. Now I will just apply a material, this object to create a material, you can just double-click on this empty space right here. Double-click and yeah, we have the material right now. We can apply to each layer like that. Hold and drag, and applied to these four layers. Now when we double-click, we have all the properties of the material. And what is checked is just the color and the reflectance. As I said, I will not go into much depth some Cinema 4D because we don't need to worry a lot about the material as we saw in this example. On the final result, what we will see mostly is the frames that we will do in Photoshop. So we don't have to worry about the light or the reflectance of the 3D model. In this case, I used octane render, but not everyone has that. So this is why I'm keeping it simple here with standard render of Cinema 4D. Let's see again the render view. What I can do is just change the color, for example, to something blue. Also on the reflectance, I can increase the specular strength. You can see on the preview what it does also on the material here. This is the only change that I'm doing. I'm not going too much details. And let's click again the render view. Yeah, I think it is. Okay. And now we need to render this. So we go to Render settings. The first thing that we need to change the frame rate right now it is 30. And the total frames of this animation is 90. For the frame-by-frame animations, usually I go with a frame rate six, so from 36. And what this does is it comes up with an animation from 90 frames to 18 frames. And let's go to Save Now. Format should be PNG. Something else that is important is to make sure to check the Alpha channel. This way we will have a transparent background. Now go to file to these three points and let's select a folder where we can save it. So PNG, Let's put a name trunk. These are the only two places where we need to go on the Save. Just make sure the format is PNG Alpha channel and a place where to save it. And on the output, the width and the height, frame rate, six. And frame range from 0 to 90, which is the length of the animation. And now we just go to Render. Now we wait for the render to finish. Here it shows with a background, but if we go to the folder where it is saving, you will see that it is transparent. So let's just wait for the render and then we will move to Photoshop. 6. 05 Illustrating Frames in Photoshop: Okay, Now that the render is finished, we can see all the images here. And we will open them in Photoshop. One way to open them all in one file is to go to File, Script, load files into stack, browse. And we will go, let's go to the folder. Select them all. You can click on the first one, hold Shift and click on the last one or you can just select them. Click Okay. They are all loaded here. And let's just click Okay and weight. Now the loading is finished and you can see that all the layers are here from frame 0 to frame 18. Yeah, now we can add a background, so I'll create a new layer on this plus sign right here. Let's go to Paint Bucket Tool. Apply the black background and I'll put it below everything by holding and dragging down. What I do next is unselect everything. Just keeps the first one. Go to the brush tool. Let's put the size. Actually, the size depends on what the size of the image is. So I'll just test something. Let's create a new layer first. Let's use the white color. Maybe a little bit more, maybe 12. I think that's okay to a 100%. Personally, I'm not really good at drawing, so I just tried to freestyle in a way. If you are good at drawing, that's a plus for you. But for me, this is why I use references. I just draw on top of it and maybe he had some science or some abstract shapes, just simple things. So at this point I'll just start using my screen tablet and start to draw. Before I do that, I'll do one more thing. I'll create another layer between the image reference and the layer that I will draw. I'll create a new layer. Let's call this darken, and I'll apply a black color to it and decrease the opacity. Yeah, I think that's okay. Just to create more contrast from the white color, I will use. You can see now I will start using my screen tablet. And the first thing that I will do is draw the outline of this reference that I have. And then on top of it I'll see what I can do. Draw abstract shapes and things like that. As I mentioned now you are free to do what you like, depending also on the animation that you have downloaded and depending on how good you are at drawing or creating shapes. Also, I need to make sure that the hardness is a 100%. Now that I drew the outline or the basic shape of it, what I can do next is just add new elements. Make sure to divide them into different shapes. For example, as you can see right here, there are pens and I can apply a color to them. Same thing here. Just have that in mind whenever you draw shapes. So on some of them you can apply color. Now I will continue to add new shapes. Okay, I'm keeping it simple. In this case. Now the next step is to fill some of these shapes with the white color. For that, you go to the Paint Bucket tool and make sure you have selected these options here. And you just apply inside of the shape which is closed like that. Here. Also here. Yeah, now you decide which one do you feel? Again, I'll apply it here to. Also here. Now, if I zoom in, you can see that there are these areas right here that needs to be fixed. So for that I will just use the brush tool and fill it a little bit. The other ones, it's not a problem since we will also use the glow effect and it can be fixed this way. But here I will apply this white color. And as always, make sure you are on the right layer like that. Now I can uncheck this and also uncheck the layer which is related to the drawing that we did. And let's go to the second frame. I'll create a new layer and do the same thing. If you want to use the layer below as a reference, for example, to keep the same ground level, you can decrease the opacity a little bit like that. Go to the layer three, to the new layer. And let's draw Just the ground, just to have it as a reference. Or if you want to keep the sun shape or whatever you have created that you want to keep in the same position. You can just decrease the opacity a little bit and use it as a reference to draw on top of it. I will decrease, I can increase the opacity and just uncheck the layer, go to the next layer and do the same steps. As you can see. It's the same thing with the second frame I just drew on top of it and edit also these lines to do something different from the previous ones, also added these knives. Let's say. Something else that I did to make it continuous is changed the moon-shaped, let's say, to another phase of the moon and then I'll make it half of it and so on. Also did something different here on the ground. Is you're going to see it's like a kid drew it. It's not like I'm doing something special, but when you make it as a frame-by-frame in the end, it will look nice because of the character. Will continue like that until I finished. And then I will show you how to export everything. But before I do that, let's just save it for now. Okay, and now I will continue with the third frame. 8. 07 Photoshop Export PNGs: Okay. So I finally reached the final frame. This took me a while to do, but yeah, that's the hardest part or the main part of this tutorial, I would say, yeah, let's see again, what we created here are all the layers. I need to uncheck this 1 first so we can see only the illustrations. You can see them all based on the animation that you did. And now comes the fun part, how I'd say when we see the animation. First of all, let's save this just in case. And now what do you need to do is export all these PNG files, all these illustrations. Let's start with this one. Makes sure the opacity is a 100%. Yeah, we need to have a transparent background and we go with File Save As. Let's create a new folder. Now, you need to be aware of the name of the filename for it to open as a PNG sequence. In. After Effects, we need to put the filenames in order. For example, we put this 11. Yes, save as a copy. So it can be a PNG. The next one will be filename two and so on. So let's go with Save. Click. Okay, and I'll do the same thing with the other ones. I will uncheck this and check. The second one, increase the opacity. Save it again. As a PNG, make sure it is in the same folder. And PNG, saving the last one. Let's save the project. And now we are done with Photoshop. We will move to After Effects to do the animation. 9. 08 After Effects Animation: Okay, Now we are in After Effects and I'll create a new project. Yeah, this is the layout of after effects. On the left side, we can put projects are the layers or whatever we open from After Effects right here in the center, we will see the footage. On the right side there are the effects and at the bottom there is the timeline. So to open the images that we created, we need to make sure that we are on this project section and on this empty space, we just need to double-click. And you have first we can open the PNGs from cinema 4D. We can click on the first one. Make sure that PNG sequence is checked. And just by clicking the first one, everything will open. It will organism animation because the names that are in order. So I'll click Import. You can see that it is from 0 to 18, meaning that there are 19 frames. We can create a new composition by just click and drag to the new composition. And here's also the timeline. If we hit the space, we can see how it plays. Let's also open the illustrations and then we will work with timeline with speed of the animation and so on. Let's click on the first one, make sure that PNG sequence is checked and click Import. Now we can click and drag on the timeline here. And we can see how it is aligned. We will work on it later because right now it is too fast. Something else that we need to add is also a texture. So I'll double-click again. And we can open this one, or this one. I think I'll go with this one. Click Import again, PNG sequence. Yeah, the first thing that we need to do is change the length of the video right now it is just 19 frames because it is done like that automatically, since also our animation is 19 frames. I'll go to the timeline, right-click and go to composition settings. On the duration. It starts from 0 and ends on 19 frames. I think I'll go with a IT seconds or something like that. We can change it again later. Click Okay. And here we can kind of zoom out and see the timeline. And the next thing that I do is change the speed of the animations. Because right now it is too fast. To do that. We need to go to the first layer. And here I will right-click go to time, time stretch. We can either change the stretch factor or change the duration here, for example, if we wanted to make it let's say two seconds. Also, the stretch factor is 300, so it means that it is three times slower, around three times. We can test it like that and see how it looks like. I will uncheck the layer on top for now. Click play. I think I can make it a little bit slower at this point. I just try it and see how it looks and then decide. I'll do the same thing with a layer on top. I'll check it. Right-click time, times stretch. On the new iteration we go with 215 frames, exactly what it was below. So I'll click okay. And yeah, you can see that they have the same length. Now, this is the animation that we have created. I think it looks nice. Now at this point, I don't really need to see the 3D animation that I've done. So for that, I will make it a little bit darker. I'll go to effects and presets. In case you don't see this, you can go to Windows and make sure the effects and presets it gets check is the same thing for every thing you see in After Effects. In case you don't see it, you just go here. And I'll look for color balance, hue, lightness and saturation. I'll drag this into this layer. And here we have the hue, lightness and saturation. The same thing as it is in Photoshop. And I'll just decrease the saturation and also decrease the lightness like that. Let's click plate. Now what I will do, I will add the texture to these wide shapes. I'll let the glow and then I'll just duplicate these so it fills the whole length. 10. 09 Animated Texture: Now we will use the texture and I'll show you how to apply the texture on these white shapes. It's basically the idea of the clipping mask in Photoshop. We will open this and drag it here. Now, I'll make sure it fills the whole space like that. You can just go to Transform here and scale it. Now for the texture to be applied to the white shapes. Make sure that the texture is below the white shapes. And make sure you have these toggle switches and nodes like that. On this nun, you'll go to alpha made. And what this does is it is applied to the shapes on top of it. Yeah, As you can see, let's click plate. 11. 10 Loop Animation: Now we need to split the layer where the animation ends. We need to split the layer of the texture. So for that we need to click Control or Command Shift D. Yeah, we can delete the rest that doesn't align with the animation that we have on top. So I'll just click Delete. And now we need to make this as one layer instead of two because we need to apply an effect on it. We need to make sure that this is unchecked. So I'll click on the first layer. Hold Shift, click on the second one, right-click and go to pre-compose. Make sure to check these two options and click Okay. This is like grouping layers. So here we have it as one layer. Now, if you want to change anything, you can just double-click and it will open the two layers that are part of this group. For example, I can see that some parts are dark because this is how the texture is. And for that I'll click on the texture. I'll apply the color balance. You liked the sense iteration and I'll increase the lightness a little bit like that. In cases where the texture is black, it can be a little bit lighter. Yeah. Now, let us go back to the previous one. You can go from this document to this main document here. Now I'll apply the glow effect. So I'll go again to Effects and Presets, search for glow. Under the stylized here you have the glow effect I will apply. Here you will see many options, but what I work with are just these three main options. Go threshold, glow, radius, and low intensity. You can play around with them to see what each of them does. Go radius and glow intensity. First, I will increase the glow radius. Basically I just play around with them and see how they look here on the preview because it also depends on the texture that you have. So I cannot say for sure what kind of values do you need to put here? I'll click play. I think can increase the intensity more. And of course in case sudden like this texture, I can go again. Here. Go to the project section and I can try also the other texture. Let's click on the first one and click Import. And I'll just drag here below. And again, change the size of it. Go to alpha matte and I'll uncheck this layer below. This one is more playful, so maybe I'll go with this one. Let's see how it looks with a globe. I think I like this more. Now. What I can do next is just duplicate this so it fills the whole timeline. To duplicate them. You can click them both and then click Command Control D. Now, drag them. I'll do it one more time. I can see that it ends here on 715. So right-click composition settings. And let's make this 714. Now if I click Play, you will see that it is a loop. Now that we also apply the texture, the next thing that we can do is add a simple background, can do some post-production and export. It. 12. 11 Animated Background Post Production: Okay, Now I will show you how to create a simple background. Of course, you can also leave it like that all black or add whatever you like. Usually I like to add stars are just really simple backgrounds. So this is what I'm going to show you now. First you need to go on the layers. Right-click new, solid. The color doesn't matter. Click Okay. And just make sure you drag this and put it below all the layers as a background. And now you need to add this fractal noise, go to effects and presets and search for it. Now, drag and apply it on the solid to just create it. And now we need to transform this black and gray cloud to something else. And here are all the effects. I'll try to make it as dark background with just some small white shapes like stars or like a grain thing. But let me just show it to you. We have the brightness and contrast. I'll increase the contrast a lot and decrease the brightness. Like that. Now these white shapes should be smaller. So for that I go to transform and decrease the scale. Now I want less white shapes, so I guess I need to decrease the brightness more like that. Increase the contrast. Now if we click Play, nothing happens, it stays static. And we need to change that. So for that, I go to evolution options. And on this random seed, I need to animate this. I need to make sure that I'm on the first frame. Click on this clock icon right here to animate it. And now it is on the 0 option. I go to the end and now increase it like that. I don't know. I will see how fast it plays to see if I need to change this again. But for now, just leave it like that. Let's start from the beginning and click Play. I think it plays too fast. So let's go to the end. Let's try to 70. Let's go again from the start. I think it is nice right now just to have something on the background. And now the last thing that I do before I export it is again right-click new adjustment layer. Here the adjustment layer should be on top. So all the effects I apply here affect all the layers below is the same logic as Photoshop. Here I just add the color balance you lightness and saturation. Drag it on the Adjustment Layer and I just animated the hue. Make sure I'm on the first frame. Click on the hue, go to the end, and click one, so it makes one full rotation. Now let's click Play. We can see how the colors change. If you want. You can also increase the lightness a little bit to make it more gray. If you want to make it more retro, let's say you can also add Grain. Go to add grain and drag it again below the color balance. Here you see a preview of the grain. Now on the viewing mode, you can see the final output. You can see how it looks like. Here what you can change is the intensity, size and softness. The intensity if you increase it, you can see what it does in this case. I think I'll put it 0.70.7 on the size. I think I need to decrease it a little bit. 0.6. And the softness, I think it is okay like that. Let's quickly. Now it will take a little bit to load, makes sure you save it. This is how it looks like and I think I like it. Yeah, now, we will just need to export this. 13. 12 Video Export: Okay, Now we will need to export this as a video, and I will export it as an mp4. So to do that, I go to File, export that and add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue, I click on it. And now this shows up and you will need to click on this Match Source and high bitrate. Now let's work with the export settings on the format you need to make sure to put it on H.264. The purpose of this is to export it as an mp4 and on the preset will leave it as it is. Of course, you have also options like presets for Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. But we will just leave it as it is on the output name. We'll click on it to select the folder where we want to save the video. Now on the basic video settings, what I will change is the size. Usually what I do with my daily artworks is export them in two versions. The first version is where the size is met. It is like two thousand and two thousand and five hundred. And the second one is where the size is optimized for Instagram. So I'll do this one now. I will have to uncheck this and change the height and make sure that this link is checked so you can maintain the frame aspect ratio while resizing. And the other is just change the height to 1 ninth to 0. The width will be changed automatically. Now the next thing that I do is make sure that the estimated file size is less than 20 megabytes. This depends on the length of the video and based on the target bitrate. Of course, no matter what you do here, instagram will compress the video anyway. But from my experience, if you put it less than 20 megabytes, you increase the chances to have the video less compressed. Let's say. If I increase it a lot, you'll see that the estimated file size will increase as well. So I think I'll go with something like 15. Yeah, the estimated file size is 14 megabytes. I will also check the use maximum render quality. Click Okay, and now just render. Now that this is done, we can go to the folder where we have this. Let's click on it. You can see that it is 15 megabytes. Yeah, This is the video. I think the quality is good, but we will also see it on Instagram that will be compressed. 14. 13 Other Variations: In this part, I will show you how to do the same kind of animation, but without having to use mixed them our cinema for d. In this case, you can use like real footage. I will show an example that I've done before and then I'll show you the steps of how you can do it as well. So I just found this footage of a couple. And as you can see, I've used these same steps, creating these outlines. And after some post-production, I did this thing. Basically it is a frame-by-frame animation by using this video as a reference where you can find free footage. Free video footage is on Paxos.com and of course you can also record your own footage, but I'm just saying some free resources. So you just need to go to videos. And for example, we can search for dancing. You can scroll down and see what you like. I'll just download something. The algaes go with this one. I'll just show you the steps, so it doesn't matter. I'll just go to Free Download. I'll wait for the download to finish. Then I'll open it to After Effects. Now we can create a new composition. So go to composition, new composition. And here you can decide about the width and the height. I can go with two thousand and two thousand and five hundred to keep the same ratio and the duration maybe let's make it eight seconds. Click Okay. And just drag this here. I'm going to increase the size you can click as, as a shortcut or go to Transform and Scale. Like that. Now click Play. Once you have the video, now, you can export it. I think I'm going to make this three seconds just to show you an example. In three seconds, you can see that you have 90 frames, because 1 second, 1 second is 30 frames. And that's a lot of frames to draw. What I usually do in these kind of cases is changed the bit-rate. So when you go to File export, Add to Render Queue. Here you have three options. First is output to which decides where you want to save the file. Let's create a new folder example. Now on the render settings. Here's the frame rate, and you can see that it is from start to the end, from 0 to two seconds and 29 frames. Usually what I do here is change the frame rate to five or six. Let's try it. Five. Yeah, when I export it, you will see the number of frames which won't be 90, but it will be 90 divided by six, because 30 divided by six gives five. But piano need to do the math here. You can just put the frame rate five or six. Let's click Okay. Now on the output module, let's click on it. Here on the format makes sure it is a PNG sequence. Here, RGB. In case it is a transparent video, you can go with RGB plus Alpha, but in this case it doesn't matter. So I'll just click. Okay. Now click render. Here you will see the number of frames, which is 15. This is why I need to change the frame rate because otherwise you will come up with 90 frames and it will be a lot of work. Now we can go to the folder. And here are the frames. Now, it is the same thing as we did with cinema for D, the same thing as we did here. You have these frames that you can open in Photoshop and use them as a reference to draw on top of them the same thing here. And then you export the outlines, open them in After Effects and do the same steps. So yeah, just thought I could share this with you in case you don't want to use Cinema 4D or in case you don't have it. Of course, another option is just to use one picture. For example, you can just use this picture and you can draw like 20 frames on top of it, just different versions. I'll find something on Instagram right now to show you. That's one example. You can see that this aesthetic, and I just drew some frames on top of it, maybe eight or nine. And you can do that as well by using photos. Pictures is the same step. You just do the illustrations in Photoshop, export all the PNGs, and do the rest in After Effects. So yeah, this is the steps that I take to achieve this kind of animation. As I said, I'm not really good at drawing. So I have to use references and just draw a normal shapes. But I thought I could just show you the process. And of course, you can do your own thing. If you are good at drawing. You have a lot of possibilities. And I would encourage you to experiment with it and share your work on Instagram. You can also tag me. So I can see and re-share and comment on it. And I hope you found it helpful and CEO 100 next courses, Bye.