Procreate Animation: Make Fun GIFs & Videos (Original)

1. Class Introduction: Hey, my name is Rich Armstrong from TAPTAPKABOOM.com If you've taken one of my classes in the past, you'll know that I love animated GIFs, doodling and stop motion animation. I'm also in love with Procreate and the idea of an iPad only workflow. All that equates to this class, where I show you how to create a fun looping animation in Procreate, how to export it as a GIF, and then how to convert that GIF into a looping video all on your iPad. Been able to animate is fantastic and a super versatile skill to have in your tool belt, even if it's only animating a few frames in Procreate. With this new skill, you'll be able to create storyboards with the awesome Procreate tool set, breathe life and movement into your illustrations and create fun animations to bring your work more attention and engagements. If you're new to the world of animation, do not fear. I break everything down and explain things in an approachable, Procreate centric way. In a nutshell, this class covers, animation basics, Procreate animation preparation, creating sweet looping animations, animating existing artwork, exporting GIFs and videos all on your iPad and a bunch of Procreate tips and tricks. If introducing movement and life into your work sounds like fun, come take this class. 2. New Version of This Class!: Okay, big news. There is a new version of this class, while the animation concepts and the class are still spot on, Procreate has changed. It's got a lot better and the way I do things has changed. So I created an updated version of this class to reflect these two things. In the new version of the class, two more hours of content. There's over an hour of example Videos and a lot more material on working with the print files, exporting videos, and making videos loop. And the whole class covers working with the animation Assist panel in addition to the Layers panel. So I love to see you enroll in this new class and publish your project there. But if you want to watch this class and post your project here, that's totally cool. Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing what you create. 3. An Animation Primer: Let's cover some animation basics. The theoretical aspects are really important, but the gag are really boring, so I'll keep it short. An animation is an illusion of motion. It's a bunch of images passing by your eyes really quickly to trick your eyes into thinking there's movements. Those movements attracts our attention and keeps us engaged. An example of this is a flip book animation. I'm sure you've tried this out and at least one of your notebooks or on a bunch of Post-its at some point in your life. In the digital world, the pages in the flip book animation are called frames and in procreate, we can create these frames and export them as a video and as an animated GIF, which is actually an image format. This brings us to frame rates. We're used to watching videos between 25 and 60 images per second. The animation term for this is frames per second and it's the videos frame rates. The frame rates of handmade GIFs is normally a lot slower and ranges between 5 and 15 frames per second. In procreate, we can preview our animations, add more frames, and adjust the frame rate as we go. This is a super powerful animation feature for a digital art tool. Most film in animation were used to as a linear format. It has a start and end points but in this class we're going to create looping animations. You've probably come across them in the form of online GIFs and Instagram videos. They are special because they loop forever and let the viewer decide when they're over. Technically, a looping animation is one that plays from start to end over and over. We can take advantage of this repetition and turn a loop into a seamless looping animation. A seamless loop can be visualized as a circle with its last and first frames leading on from each other, just like other frames in the timeline. What's awesome it's that procreate exports looping GIFs. This means that by creating only a few frames, we can create a seamless never-ending looping animation. All we need to do is ensure that each frame leads on from the previous frame and that the first frame leads on from the last frame. So that's a bit of theory. If you want to learn more, check out some other classes and do your own research. In the next lesson, we're going to get practical, yeah. 4. Animating in Procreate: Now let's get on to creating a basic animation in Procreate. I'm going to start by creating a new Canvas and Instagram, square size, which is 1080 by 1080 pixels and it's pretty versatile. I'm going to zoom out a little bit and start by just writing frame 1. Now in procreate, there are two ways to create a frame, the first is by a top-level layer, and the second is by a top-level group. I'm going to cover layers first, and then get onto groups. Now Layers panel, you'll see that frame one correlates with layer 1. When we create a new layer, it creates a new frame. Then I'm going to reduce the opacity of layer 1 or frame 1 and use it as a reference layer for our next frame. In the animation world, this is called onion skinning. There are a fair amount of ways to do this in procreate and an other animation applications. Once we've done this, I can trace the word frame, and this produces really nice wiggly animation feel, which I really like. We've got frame, and then I'm going to change this to frame 2. Once I've done this, I'll create a new frame or a new layer and then hide my previous layer and I'm going to trace frame again, and replace the one with a three. Then I'm going to do this twice more so that I have five frames. Once I've got five frames, I can turn on the visibility of all my layers or all my frames and make sure that my layer i, its opacity is all the way at 100 percent again. Now, with a visibility of all the layers turned on, it really looks like a dog's breakfast, but this is okay. Now we're going to export our animation. You go to actions, make sure you're on the Share tab and then go down to Share layers and there are a few ways to share your layers. I'm going to show you how to export your animation as an animated GIF and an MP4, which is a video format. We go for an animated GIF first, and you'll see that this is a little preview window, it's a little bit small, but you can have a good sense of higher animation is doing just by previewing it in this little window. The first thing that we can adjust as our frames per second, and if we go to one or slower, it feels like a slide show or a storyboard. It's really cool for displaying different artwork, and maybe different illustrations at this frame rate. As soon as you start to increase it, maybe to something like five frames per second, it starts to feel like an actual animation. You'll see that the word frame, it feels like an element that wiggling and moving. If we go and put this at about 10 frames per second, which I really like is my preferred frame rate and feels handmade, it feels like the word frame is an actual element and a really feels like an animation now. If we go to about 15 frames or 14 frames per second, it speeds up a little bit and the word frame, it feels like it's moving around a little bit quicker and it really feels like it's its own element now. This can get a little bit quick for me though. When you increases to something like 30, it starts to move a little bit quick, but you may want to animate at the speed. You can go all the way up to 60 frames per second, which in my opinion is just mental. I'm going to reduce this all way down to 10 frames per second. The next option is to opt for a transparent background and the reason why you may want to do this is to export your GIF to use online, and online you can change your background color behind your GIF to whatever color you want. Pretty versatile. But for now, I'm not going to use that. The final two options is to export your GIF as a web ready version, or as a full resolution version. If you're concerned about file size, go for the web ready version. It'll export a smaller file, but the quality won't be as good. I'm going to go for that version and we can compare it to a full resolution version. The next thing I do is, I save the image so that I can open it up on my photos app and just preview it, checked that it all looks good. Let's go for an animated GIF again, but a full resolution version. I'll Save it again. Finally, let's go for an animated MP4. Again, you can adjust your frames per second and export a web ready one and a full resolution one. I'm going go for a full resolution one and Save it. Now, let's go do some comparing. Open up photos, let's check our web ready version out. Yeah, it looks pretty good, but when you compare it to your full resolution one man, the quality is just amazing when you look at this full resolution one. You can see it's a little bit blurry, but it's still good. But man, this one's really crispy and the quality of our video will be pretty similar to our animated GIF at full resolution quality. But we're going to press Play, and it stops and Play, and then it stops. This is the big problem with exporting an animation from procreate. It doesn't loop, but we'll cover how to get around this later in the class. Right now I'm going to go back and open Procreate, and I'm going to show you how to use top-level groups, four frames. On layer 1, if we create a new layer, which would be creating a new frame, if I then put a square over here and I hold down and I tap, is going to create a perfect square. I have got something new to animate. If I group these two layers, it creates a frame. If I go for animated GIF, you'll see that on frame 1, there's a square, which is really cool. It means that inside of a group, I can add as many layers as I like and I can animate them on a frame by frame basis. Let's animate this one, we're going to duplicate it, we're going to move it out of that frame, out of that group. Select these two layers and group them and create a frame from those two layers. I'm then going to animate this or move it slightly to the right and create an illusion of motion. I'm going to keep on doing this for all five frames. Once I've done this for all five frames, things begin to look quite messy. There's now a lot of layers. They look really similar. I don't really have an idea of what's going on and like, how far to the right is this one and which layer is that one? It can get a bit confusing. To help myself out, what I like to do is just collapsed the layers and then rename each one of these groups, something like frame 1 and frame 2 and so on. Now that I've named my layers, I feel a little bit more at ease, a little bit more comfortable. There's some organization in my document. Now, when I export this as an animated GIF or an MP4, a R-squares moving from the left to the right and if we increase the frames per second to ten or more, a really looks like the square is moving. It's amazing. Now the final thing I want to show you in this video is the slight difference between layers and groups. Besides the fact that you can have multiple layers inside of a group, we create a New layer, New frame, and we put the word, Hey, right over here. When we export it as an animated GIF on MP4, you'll see that there is a frame that says, "Hey", which is to be expected. But if we hide this layer and we do an export, there's no hey and there's no blank frame, which is great. But if we have to create a new layer and put something like Yo in it and turn on hey and then group these, export this yo hey, as a new frame, which is to be expected and then we hide this group or this frame when we exported as an animated GIF or an MP4. This blank frame. This can cause some frustrations when you're animating your like, "Where is this blank frame coming from, I'm not sure what's going on." Well, there is a slight difference between an invisible group and an invisible layer. What often happens is the while I'm animating our perhaps be tracing frame 1 on frame 5 and then I'm like, "Yeah, let's have a quick look" and there's a whole bunch of missing frames and I'm like "What is going on?" That's just something to be aware of. Another great use of a layer I'm going to delete this is like I showed you in the beginning, we had our frame one and then I traced it by reducing the opacity of the text of layer 1. Now, another way of doing this is by creating a layer in between two frames and then selecting the background color and filling the layer and reducing the opacity of a layer to 80 or 70 percent. This is another way to onion skin between two different frames. Now when I see frame 2, you can see the frame to contents, but you can also see the frame 1 contents. Then if I'm animating between frame 3 and frame 2, what I can do is I can put my onion skin layer between those two frames. This is really versatile and it means I can also just turn off that layer, turn off these other layers and export and there's no blank frame anyway, there are no clutches. That is the basics of frame-by-frame animation in procreate. What I really like about this is that inside any frame that's a top-level group, you can add as many layers, add as many elements as you like, and you can animate them on a frame by frame basis. 5. What To Animate: Now that you know how to create frames in Procreate and export them, let me give you a quick rundown of basic things you can animate frame by frame with Procreate. The easiest thing to animate as an element's position by repositioning a layer frame by frame, you can create the illusion of movement. The next thing you can animate is an element's rotation. When you rotate in Procreate, you may need to reposition it as well so that it looks more lifelike by rotating from the correct point. An example of this would be an arm rotating from the shoulder and not from the center of a layer. You can also animate an element's scale. But remember that when you make an element bigger, the quality won't be as good, so always start at the biggest size and make elements smaller and smaller. A fun tool to use for animation is the liquefied tool. If you want to make something look like it's blowing in the wind or moving with a bit of attitude, try it out, frame by frame. The next is by redrawing an element. This can create a lovely wiggly, handmade field. It's great for typography and for adding subtle movement to print pieces. I'm a big fan of this technique. The final way is by redrawing elements frame by frame, but also moving, rotating and scalling them as you do. This is very similar to creating our very own flip book animation. It is the most time consuming, but it's also the most fun. What's really cool is that on each frame, you can animate using a combination of all of these methods. Procreate exports a looping GIF but it won't look like seamless loop unless you turn it into one. This means each frame needs to lead on to the next frame, and the last frame needs to lead on to the first. There are multiple ways of doing this and in some cases, it's a lot easier to achieve than others. If you've got hand-drawn type, it's pretty easy to trace the first frame over and over on new layers and it we'll feel like it loops pretty well. If you've got an element that's moving, it needs to end up a frame away from where it started on frame one. One easy way to do this is to create a few frames of an element moving in one direction and then duplicate the frames and reorder them to make it move back to where it started. Okay. That's the basics of frame-by-frame animation in Procreate. I'd suggest playing around and having some fun with simple animations before trying something more ambitious. Over the next few lessons, I'm going to cover topics that will make creating animations in Procreate way easier. We'll chat about quality, GIF limitations, dimensions, converting GIFs to videos, organization, preparation and resizing your procreate documents, and I'll show you my process of creating an animated GIF. 6. Size + Quality: In this lesson, I'm going to cover animation preparation, animation quality, document dimensions, and file size. Your animations purpose and final destination will determine how you go about animating and exporting your animation. We will also help you decide on your documents dimensions, and on how many frames and colors to use. What I recommend doing before starting any animation is asking, how long do you want or have to spend animating? Sometimes animating takes a lot longer than expected, especially if you're animating multiple elements or you want to do something fancy. Knowing how much time you have may change what and how you animate. There are three things that help determine the answer. The first is the reason you're making this animation: to have some fun, to promote yourself, to add life to an illustration for your portfolio. The second is it's destination: is it going on your website, Instagram, Dribbble, Behance, YouTube? The third is what you're animating. Animating an octopus may take a little longer in a single wiggly word. GIFs can have a maximum of 256 colors. That may sound like a lot. But if you're doing complex digital painting using gradients and textures or using a lot of frames with different colors, your exported GIFs may not look the same as they did in Procreate. Have a look at this GIF, inside of Procreate, and outsider of Procreate. Can you see how the quality isn't as good? Procreate manages and discards extra colors when you export it at GIF. The simpler your artwork and the flatter your colors are, the closer your GIF outside of Procreate will be to your artwork inside a Procreate. If your off to super high-quality animations, more colors and more control, I'd suggest exporting your layers from Procreate and importing them into Photoshop or After Effects for animation. We're not going to cover this option here though. Next up is document dimensions. Animation we create on Procreate are digital. We use pixels to measure them, not inches, not millimeters, but pixels. If you're used to work in print sizes, you'll be pleased to know that animation dimensions are usually a lot smaller. Although GIFs and videos can be created at any size, there are a few dimensions that make more sense than others. They're shown in comparison to the amount of pixels in a 300 DPI A4 document, which is similar to a standard letter size, 1280 by 720 pixels. This is lower quality HD. It's fine for YouTube. 1920 by 1080 pixels: this is high-quality HD. Most YouTube and Vimeo videos are at this size. 1080 by 1920 pixels: this is the size of an Instagram story. 1080 by 1350 pixels: this is the size of an Instagram post. 800 by 600 pixels: this is the size of an animated GIF on Dribbble. All documents created in Procreate have a pixel measurements. But if you create the document using physical measurements like inches or millimeters, the pixel value will be calculated by physical dimensions and the DPI. This isn't a problem, but resizing your document to the correct size in pixels can be tricky. We'll cover this later in the class. The final thing to consider is the file size of your animations. If you're creating videos for Instagram or YouTube, file size won't matter. But if you're making a GIF for websites or if you're making an animation for people who live where Internet speeds are slow, please consider the file size. There are three things that increase an animation's file size. The first is dimensions. The larger the dimensions are, the larger the file size. The second is color count. The more colors, the larger the file size. The third is frame counts. The more frames there are, the larger the file size. That was a lot to consider. Your head may be ready to explode. Let's get practical again. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to convert an animated GIF into a video. 7. Exporting Looping Videos: By now, you'll have realized that animation is awesome and so our gifs. But some platforms don't support animated gifs. However, they do support videos. In this lesson, I'll cover getting your animation from procreate into a looping video. We can export videos straight from procreates, which is awesome some of the time. But it doesn't export it as a looping video. It means that for three frame animation our video will only have three frames. Which would mean that it's not even one second long if its frame rate is 10 frames per second. In other words, it's really short. If you're wanting to post a video on Instagram, for example, it needs to be at least three seconds along. What's cool about Instagram is that our loops videos is longer than three seconds in default posts. If your animation is longer than three seconds and all you want do is posted it on Instagram as a default post, then export it as an MP4 from procreate. But Instagram doesn't loop videos and stories, and YouTube certainly doesn't look any of the videos. How do we make our videos loop? Well, there are a few overly complicated ways of doing this on your iPad with exported video. What I suggest doing is exposing a gif, and using an app called gif cracker to convert the gif into a video. It's free and has a cheap paid upgrade to access a few more features, and it's easy to use. Visit this link in a browser on your iPad. It will bring up the gif cracker page in the app store. Once you've downloaded gif cracker from the app store and exported your gif from procreates, open up the gif cracker app. Make sure to choose gif to video at the bottom of your screen, then select your gif. If you don't see your gif, press the refresh button at the top left. Increase the loops to the maximums so that your video doesn't play only once. Choose your size and then export it. Once it's exported, you can save or share it. I normally save and have a look at what it looks like before sharing or going back and doing some tweaks. If you've got the free version of gif cracker, you'll only be able to choose a maximum of half the size when converting. I'd recommend paying the small upgrade fee. You'll have no adverts, be able to choose the full size when exporting, and you'll be supporting a developer. But if you'd rather not spend any money, there is a sneaky way around us. All you need to do is, resize your canvas and procreate to double its current size. Export to gif, and then choose half size in gif cracker to end up with the original size video. Tada. 8. Structure + Organisation: Animation files can get messy so let's discuss structure and organization. Fun stuff, I know, but it will make your life way better. At the outset of a project, I create a single original file that I mentioned could be for print so that I can print and animate it, or it could be set for animation from the very beginning. Either way, if I intend to animate it, I make sure to separate my layers as much as possible, but keep them well organized. This means I can always go back and make changes really easily. For example, for this arm, I have several layers that make it up. I don't do too much layer naming at this point, but I do try group them and name them something descriptive, like arm left. When I'm happy with the original, I duplicate it and rename it animation. Find need to and if the file size is measured in pixels are resizes animation document, top actions than Canvas, then crop and resize, turn re-sampling on if you want to resize the contents. Otherwise, it will change the size of your canvas without altering the contents and a crop will occur. You may have to use the crop and resize to twice or more to get exactly the size you want. Once the animation document is at the right size, merge and flattened similar layers to that you're not duplicating tones of layers for each frame. Here's how I suggest you do this process. Keep all elements that are going to be moved, scaled, or rotated on their own separate layers. All layers of a specific type or color that are getting redrawn on each frame, can be merged into a single layer. You may need to use more than one if the layer order is important, then you can merge all the elements you're not animating into one static layer. Again, use more than one layer if the layer order is important. If you don't need to keep a mask or clipping mask, flatten it. Once you've got all your layers merged and flattened, name them, then group or your layers and call the group frame 1. Then duplicate that group and rename it frame 2. Make changes, redraw elements, and so on. If the original document isn't measured in pixels, do not worry. There is a way around it, but can be tricky. To start with, I create an intermediate file called Prep by duplicating the original file. In this prep file, I'll do all the layer merging I showed you a few moments ago. I do this so that there is fewer layers to move into our next step. Once a layers are merged, I create a new file at the correct dimensions in pixels and then I go to my profile and drag all the layers into this new file. Let me show you how to do this. Select your Layers, press down, and then drag the layers from this document to the new one. You may need to reorganize your layers. Once the layers have copied across, procreate may have pasted them in the wrong order. This process is a little bit tricky, but it works. The simplest way to avoid doing this over and over again is to create all future canvases in pixels. It will make life much easier. 9. Resizing Your GIF: Sometimes you need to resize your animation to meet an exact dimensional requirement. For example, Dribbble GIF's need to be 800 by 600 pixels. Other times, you need to reduce the file size of your GIF. Exporting your web ready GIF could help, but sometimes it doesn't. In this lesson I'll show you how to resize your animations in Procreate and how to use GIF cracker to create proportionally smaller GIF's. Let's use the Dribbble example as our scenario. We have this animation file and if I go into it, you can have a quick look at what it looks like. But now I want to resize it for Dribbble. I'm going to create a duplicate and I'm going to call it Dribbble. Then inside I'm going to just wait until it loads, there we go. Then go to my canvas, crop and re-size. Now, Dribbble is 800 by 600. I'm going to do resampling. Let's put on 600. So 800 by 600 done for now and then I'm going to crop and resize once again and change this to 800 by 600 and reposition it. There we go, and it is ready for Dribbble. When I share it as a GIF, there we go. It works in the Dribbble format. If all you need is a smaller version of your animation, but still at the same ratio, use GIF cracker. Open up GIF cracker, choose GIF to GIF at the bottom and select your GIF. Then choose a smaller size convert it, and then save it. The benefit of this option is that you don't have to have another version of the same file in Procreate for smaller files. For your class projects, if you're struggling to upload your GIF because of file size reasons, try the second approach. Which leads really nicely onto the topic of our class project, which we'll cover in the next lesson. 10. Animation Assist: Hey guys, so you may be wondering why I look different now, why I've got a cap on and glasses, and the background is different. Well, time has passed. While time has been passing, Procreate have been bringing our feature after feature after feature. In this lesson, I'm going to be introducing you to Procreate Animate Assist. It is amazing, it makes animating in Procreate a lot quicker and a lot easier. Let's dive into it. I'm going to create a new document or a new canvas. I'm just going to go for a screen size, first option here. To bring up Procreate Animate Assist, tap on the cog icon and you go to Canvas and you turn on Animation Assist. There we go. You'll see at the bottom there's this tiny little bar with Play, Settings, and Add Frame buttons, and to turn that off you can just tap that toggle button. There we go, toggle it back on. On Layers you'll see there's only one layer, but if you go bam and add a frame you'll see that there's another layer added. This is super quick; super powerful, but it only works with layers. If you've got a group, it doesn't add a whole new group. It just adds a frame which is just a layer. What does this do? Well, check this out. On frame 1 which you can navigate to really easily down here; let's close that, we'll go and do a big frame 1. Then on frame 2, add frame and we'll go and do five frames here. When we press "Play", boom, it plays really quickly. Pause that. If you go to Settings now; whoa, you can change a whole bunch of stuff here. Let's go for five frames per second, and I'm gong to tap out of here, press "Play". You can see that it goes 1-5 and then back to one. Pause that. What we can do now is go to Ping-Pong, and I really like this. This plays 1-5 and back to one, so I'm going to pause that. Let's change this to one frame per second. Play, so 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and then back to 2, 3, etc. That's what Ping-Pong is, and One Shot, well, you may guess this. If you go frame number 1 and press "Play" it goes all the way to frame number 5, and then it stops and goes back to the last frame. You can see that it's really easy to navigate between frames, and it does all of the heavy lifting in terms of creating new layers, and hiding them, and showing them so that is powerful. I'm going to go back to Ping-Pong because that is amazing, it makes creating seamless looping animations super easy. The other thing over here that's really cool is Onion skin frames. You'll see that you can see all of the frames, but they're faded out. Well, you can change how many onion skins you can see so you can say none. You're just seeing the current frame, or I like to just see the frame in front. This means it's a lot clearer. I can go to number 2 and I can see the frame before and a frame in front. If I go to three, I can see two and four. If I go to four, I can see three and five. But you may be wondering like, "Oh, it's pretty easy now because it says frame 5 and frame 3, but what happens if there are no numbers and I'm animating something more complex?" Well, you can go for Color secondary frames, and the frames behind on are read, the frames in front are green. If we change the Onion skins back to four or all the way to max; I'm going to go for three or four, you'll see that five is green and then 1, and 2, and 3 are red. If we go to frame 1 number 1 is black, and then 2, 3, 4 are green. You'll see that the further away the frame is, the more faded out it gets. We can change that too. The Onion skin opacity is not really dark or you can make it really light. This all depends on what you like. I would experiment with the settings. This Blend primary frame it's a weird one, and honestly I don't think it works too well. Let's go to frame number 3. If we go to Settings and you turn on Blend primary frame, what it does is it makes that the same color as you're working with. What it's meant to do, is it's meant to make it faded out. If you turn off Color secondary frames, you can't really see what blend primary frame does. It just does nothing. That's a bit of a weird setting. I don't really use it at all so I'm going to turn that off. Color secondary frames; I don't use it too much, but it can be really helpful. What we have here is five frames. You can then play it 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then it goes backwards. Let's pause that. What's really cool is background and foreground layers. I'm going to add a frame and then hold it and drag it to the front there, and I'm going to create a background frame now. I'm going to go for an orange and let's create some mountains here. You can also use this as a reference frame or a reference layer, and then delete it. Then what you do here is you tap on it, and you can say, "Boom, turn into background." You see, it looks different now. When you play it, it's going to stay at the back which is really cool. It's not going to be animated, but it is going to be a background layer that's visible on every single frame. That was your background layer, so you can turn that off and on. Let's tap that again. You can also duplicate a layer and delete a layer and we'll get onto whole duration in just a second, but let's turn that back on. Then on frame 5 we're going to add a foreground layer, and here I'll go for a green and let's put in some clouds. I'm putting this on top so that you can see that it's a foreground layer, then I'm going to tap on this and select "Foreground". You'll see there's a slight gap between the background and the rest of the frames, and a slight gap between the foreground and the rest of the frames and that's to differentiate the background and the foreground. Something to be said here is that only this first frame can be a background layer and only this last layer can be a foreground layer. Let's play this, and you'll see that there's now a background and a foreground layer. This is pretty cool, I think it could be a lot more powerful. I think that the foreground and background layers, they could be animated. That would be amazing, so let's hope that Procreate come out with something like that in the future. If we go to frame number 3 and tap that; there we go, we can then change the whole duration to something like 25 or three. Let's go for 10. This holds it for 10 frames which is really cool. Instead of having to duplicate this 10 times, we can just set the whole duration to 10. If we're going to frame number 1; press "Play", you'll see that it just stays here for 10 frames which is about 10 seconds at the moment and once it gets to the end it will continue playing which is pretty cool. Now, it's going back and it's going to hold again for 10 frames; ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, and it will continue to play. That is pretty cool. I'm just going to change that to none again. What I don't like about the whole duration is that well you can't then make it wiggle or whatever, it just stays exactly the same. But it still saves a lot of time if you want to create a whole frame animation or a segment of your animation. That is Procreate Animate Assist or Animation Assist. Remember you can go to it by pressing this cog icon and then going to canvas and turning it off and on, and it will create all of the layers for you. What I said in the beginning is that this doesn't really work if you're creating groups with layers inside of them. I wanted to create one over here; select these two and group, and I wanted to do a little bit of drawing here. This is on two different layers. If I then go "Add Frame" and if we go back to the layers, it just ads and layer. It doesn't add a whole group. If you're going to be working with groups I recommend creating your groups beforehand, and going back to the way that we've been doing the animation in Procreate in the rest of the class by creating new layers and new groups, and then hiding and showing the different layers or groups. There we go. This is powerful. When you export now; let me go, go to Share, if we go for MP4 or an animated GIF it will then export it with your current settings. Here there should be a long delay if you've got a long delay, and then it also is playing it backwards and forwards which is the Ping-Pong effect. You can then go for Web Ready, you can go for Max Resolution, and you can change your frames per second here which again super powerful. It means that you didn't have to set your frames per second in your documents, and then go forward with those frames per second here. You can change it as you're exporting it. That's it for this Procreate animation edition, I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you're not too off put by new me, new background, new new stuff. I will see you soon. Bye for now. 11. Your Project: Okay. It's time for your class projects. What I want you to do if you haven't done so already is create at least one looping GIF with 3-10 frames and share it with us. Upload it to your project space on Skillshare and share any experiments or animation doodles you made. Tell us what you learned and what you found most fun about the process. If you're stuck, why not animates a saying from your home country or home town, or maybe a favorite word or saying. Use a style you're comfortable with. If you're going to post on social media and you want to get my attention. If you post a suites looping video on Instagram or a rag GIF on Dribbble. Mention me. I'm @TAPTAPKABOOM or you can use the #TAPTAPKABOOM student hashtag. At this points in the class, I'd love it if you left a review. It means a lot to me. What I'm going to do next is show you my process of creating an animated GIF from start to finish. So see you in the next video. 12. Rich's Animated GIF: To start off with, let me consider my time and how long I want to be animating for. What's the reason I'm creating this animation? Well, I want to make somebody smile as they're scrolling through their feed. It doesn't need to be fancy. Where's the animation going? I want to post it on Instagram and Dribbble, so working with 1,080 pixel square is a good idea. I can resize it to work as an Instagram story, Instagram post, and as a Dribbble post once I've created the animation. Then, what am I animating? I want to animate a character with a saying, and I'm going to use a simple but textured handmade style. The answers to these questions translate into me trying to spend less than an hour on the animation. Hopefully enough time to get a smile out of people. The first thing I do is to create a new Canvas, I'm going to go for an IG square size because it's just so versatile. Then I'd like to do a little bit of planning. What I'm going to do is illustrate a saying that goes, sun's out, guns out. It basically means that when it's sunny you got to show your guns, which are your arms, your muscles. So this going to be a sun, and he's going to have some shades, some sunglasses, and then have some under reflections, and he's going to have a smile. This maybe a little bit big, perhaps we can do that with uniform selected. Yeah, that looks good. Then he's going to have this big muscles like so. Something like that, and then sun's out, guns out. Then I'll create a new layer with this one's at the top, decrease the opacity and use this as a reference layer, and then group everything together so that at any point in time I can just move the entire group with all the layers. Pretty easy. Then my layer 2, well, I'm going to start with yellowish color, maybe a little bit more orange, and the brushes that I'm using are custom brushes, but most of the time they're replicas or variations of dry ink, or ink bleed, and there's a couple of grunge ones up here that I've made by myself. I'm going to use a ink bleed which is a little bit bigger. It just makes creating base shapes a lot easier. I don't really like using this full technique because you'll see that when I zoom in, there's this little weird edge. I'd like to hand color absolutely everything, which takes a little bit longer but I think the quality definitely pays off. Let's do this and perhaps, I can increase the brush size a little bit. There we go. I have my body. When I decrease the brush size again, I'm going to then create the rays, so let's go for something a little bit more dark, there we go, and start creating the sun rays. Then I can pop the body in front again and just make sure that all of these are colored in. It looks good behind the actual body. I'm using a really rough brush that gives it a really nice handmade look and feel, but you don't have to do this. That looks pretty good. Looks like a sunflower. It's just a little bit of extra body there that I don't want to erase it, and then we're going to go put back the reference layer. Let's get some sunnys. Sunny left, and sunny right. Yeah. It's pretty good. Change it to a small ink bleed just for the bridge of the sunnys, the shades. That's fantastic. Then I'm going to use a clipping mask so that I can make use of these reflective things, and I can color out the lines without having to be really precise. The one on the left is a little bit weird, so let's do that again. That looks great. Then let's draw mouth. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Next up are the arms. I didn't think I saved this color, so I will reselect it, and I've got a new layer created. You can't really see what I'm doing over here, so I'm going to hide those. That looks pretty good. Let's use the ink bleed big. Let's create a new layer 4 on the left. The reason why I'm going all the way into the actual arm and not just stopping this is because I'm going to be rotating them, and I'm going to be rotating them from this point here so I really like it to be round throughout and not have this square jetting out piece as I'm animating it. Let's turn back those things. I'm going to put these down here. The reason why I don't put them all the way at the bottom is because it takes them outside of the group, which is a little bit frustrating. That's looking pretty good. I think the arms are a little bit big, so let's do some adjusting there. First, I'll just do that and then, yap use that ink bleed. It's really important to get your basic or your original illustration correct before you do any animating otherwise you spend a lot of time reanimating, or re-illustrating. Sorry. Then a little back just so it fills, handmade again. Feels like he's got a bigger muscles on this side, which is perfectly natural I guess. He looks like a big buff Sun chap. We can put a little bit more in there. Yeah, that's looking good. You can see what I've done here is I've actually done a little bit of illustrating on the wrong layer. I'm just going to cut that and paste it, and merge down on the right hand. The next thing is to do sun's out, guns out, so I'd like to do that at the top, and we can use this ink bleed I think. Yeah, that looks good. Suns out. We can move it a little bit to the left I think, and rotate it just a smudge. We can see what it looks like once the reference layer is drawn. Create a new layer for guns out. Sun's out, guns out. How does that look? I think it looks pretty good. Yeah, maybe can rotate this a little bit more, switch it over. Yeah, that looks good. I'm going to do a little bit of texturing now, so I'm going to create a new layer and make it a clipping mask. Give it a multiply blend mode, and then I'm going to try select, there we are, we select this color and use a really grungy kind of a brush. Just put that on top of them and then use the same eraser, the grunge capacity eraser. I call this the bad hoover technique. So I'm really just trying to pick up some of that I've put down. This creates a really nice kind of a texture. I can do this over and over, and it works out really, really nicely. Then I'm going to create a new layer, do clipping mask again, and then select black as the color and use the same technique. Just to add a little bit more texture. Don't want too much black, but this one came out with a little bit of dirt. There we go. That looks good. Then I'm going to do the same thing for the rays, so clipping mask, but I'm not going to use any black this time. So let's do a quick color swap. There we go. What we haven't done is, we needed a multiply layer, okay, something like that looks really good. Then finally, on each of the arms, make it a multiply layer and make it a clipping mask, so I can go over the lines. It needs a multiply layer, but I was on the rays tool. Something like that, looking good, cool. Then finally, on the right one, clipping mask, make it multiply, use the brush. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. Suns out, guns out. That is our original. Fantastic. I'm going to go back to my gallery, but maybe before I do that, you can see that my layers are pretty messy. But I know what they are. I could group them, but there's not that many layers that I don't know what's going on. I'm going to go straight here and rename this one original and then duplicate it. Name this one animation and spell it correctly, and go straight into it. It means that now I can start to merge layers and flatten layers. So merge down. Select these, group them, and flatten. Yeah, let's merge down. Then I can delete my reference layer. These three layers I can group, flatten, and I'm going to call this one black because it's all the same color, and I'm going to redraw each of these elements. Then I've got my shades. So let's rename shades. This one can be the body, this can be can the rays, an arm left, why I keep on pressing Shift, I do not know and arm right. Okay. Then my group, I'm going to rename it frame 1. There we go. I have my first frame, which is fantastic. Now I can start animating. So suns out, guns out and his smile, I'm going to redraw those on every frame. His sunni's or his shades, I'm going to make them wiggle left to right, or maybe up and down. His arms and his mane or his rays and his body are all going to be rotating in some way or another. So let's get going, I will duplicate this, rename it frame 2. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to create an onion skin layer. I'll rename this onion and give it a background color of white. So let's fill that. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is clear this layer, and I'm going to select my black color again. You'll see that my mouth is not there. So what's going on here? Well, first thing we can do is just reduce the capacity of our onion skin layer, that looks pretty good, but we still can't see any mouth. It's got nothing to do with frame 1. But if we just take off the body and raise, now we can start to see things. So let's give our guy a mouth, not with that brush. Let's go for [inaudible] one. Then let's trace suns out. I'm not going to be too precious about doing this exactly, but at the same time, I don't want it to look really different to what it currently is. So no matter how hard I've tried to do this in the past, every single frame is going to be slightly different. But that's exactly what I want. So we've done that frame, the shades, let's move those, a little bit of rotation. You can see now that we can start to see where the shades are on the previous frame. Pretty cool. Then the body we can turn on. What I'm going to do here is the body, I'm going to rotate slightly to the left, so let's just go almost like one notch, or one ray width. Then the rays, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go slightly to the right but even less than the body. So just a smidge and I want this to really feel like it's rotating round. The problem with this though, is that if I were to do that, it wouldn't really feel like it's rotating because it would just look like it's slightly wiggling. So just a smudge, maybe even less, something like that. Then I'm going to hide my body and my rays in both of these frames. Now, going to give it a slight bit of rotation, and just realign it. A slight bit of rotation and realignment. So we've got all of these layers done. I'm going to uncheck my onion layer and then preview it. Maybe change this to 10 frames per second. Yeah, it looks pretty good right now. That's great. If it did look a little bit off, I'd export it and check it out in my photo gallery, but it's looking pretty good. So let's duplicate this, and what I'm going to do is rename this to frame 3 and then turn on my onion. Let's go up there. The first thing I want to do is clear the black layer, and just redo the text. Then to get the mouth and those two layers. There we go. Shades. Or we can rotate this the other way and maybe move it down a little bit. There we go. The body. Let's rotate this like so. Then you can see that that circle is not straight, but that's great. I did not want a perfect circle. Then the rays, we're going to move that slightly. Slightly to the right, yes. But I don't want to reference frame 1, I want to reference a frame 2. So let's do that again. There we go. That looks great. Then Arm Left and Arm Right. Again I want to reference frame 2. So let's give it a slight rotation. Great. Let's give this arm a slight rotation. Okay. Frame 3 is done. Let's have a look at what this looks like. So a GIF flashing everywhere. Let's put those layers back. Again flashing everywhere. What is going on here? Let's put those layers back. Okay. That's starting to look pretty good. I'm going to give it a full resolution export, save the image, and let's check it out. So there's a slight bit of like. That's because, yeah, it's going from frame 3 to frame 1 and especially the body or all the things that are rotating aren't really that similar when it goes from frame 3 to frame 1. But we'll sort that out once we've done all five frames. Okay. Procreate. Let's creates or duplicate frame 3 and rename it frame 4. There we go. We can turn off all of these except for frame 1. Move our onion up and I'll clear our black layer. Cool. Let's write our message once more. "SUN'S OUT, GUN'S OUT". Already, give him another smile. Then his shades can do some moving again, maybe a little bit to the left this time. Yeah, that looks good. Then his body. Which way is his body going to go? A little bit to the left again. Then the rays, where we want frame 3 and not frame 1. A smudge to the right. Okay. We're going to turn off Body and Rays, go Frame 3, turn off Body and Rays, and then start rotating our arms again. Just a smudge and a smudge. Looking good. So you've done all of that. Now let's do another export. Last one. So we're going to move our onion up again. Show it, clear this out. "SUN'S OUT, GUNS OUT". His lost smile. There we go, guy. Shades. That's good. It's body its rotated a little bit. That's trying to reveal some of the rays, which is problematic. So we can fix that in just a moment. The rays. I want to reference frame 4. Let's move this round and just as smudge. Now while we're at it, what we can do is just do a little bit of drawing so that we don't see the underside of the rays. Perhaps we can select this color. There we go and that looks pretty good. Then left and right again. Just a smudge. Okay. So that looks like everything. That's is five frames. Now when we animate it, we export our animation. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. So I'm going to export it as a full resolution just to double check that everything is okay. Yeah, looks really good. So now we're going make it loop, which is really really easy. So I don't really need my onion anymore. I'm going to delete it and then duplicate frame 4 and frame 3 and frame 2. Man, he looks like a lion now. Then export my animated GIF and there we go. He's moving back and forth. So let's export that at full resolution. Save the image and then check him out at Photos, and it's a looping GIF. "SUN'S OUT, GUNS OUT". 13. The End (Not For Looping GIFs): This is the end of the class, I hope you've had fun and learnt a few new things. Keep on playing and experimenting and having loads of fun and then please leave a review and be sure to follow me and sign up for updates on taptapkaboom.com. If the animation bug has bitten you and you want to do more than simple procreate animation, check on my other animation classes and have a look at the other awesome stuff on Skillshare. This is me signing off. Bye for now.