Procreate Dreams - A Complete Guide to 2D Animation

1. Introduction: Procreate Dreams now allows you to create stunning, fully finished animation clips inside of one powerful app. My name is Shavon. I'm an artist and animator, and I'm a top teacher here on Skillshare. I have over 15 years experience working as an artist in the animation industry. And today, I'll be your guide to show you not only how to use procreate dreams, but also to teach you the core foundational principles of classical TD animation. In this class, you'll first learn all about procreate dreams, about the timeline and the stage, about the powerful gestures that make your workflow literally a dream. From there, we'll go through the 12 principles of classical animation. Then I'm going to introduce you to walk cycles. Walk cycles are the cornerstone for any character animation. A walk cycle will teach you nearly every principle of animation in one project. We'll animate a robot character in a looped walk. We'll add a background and create a fully polished fully finished clip. And finally, you'll learn about run cycles. I'll show you the structure of a run, we'll break it down and we'll animate a Ninja character running through a snowy forest. So by the end of the class, you'll have gone from not knowing how to animate something to being completely versed in the principles that will help you to animate anything. I'm really excited for you to become appropriate Dreams pro and to start your two d animation journey today. So if you're ready, grab your iPad and let's dive in. 2. Your Class Projects: In this class, you're going to learn the entire workflow within procreate dreams, as well as the foundational principles of two D animation. Along the way, you're going to get to work on three main projects, the bouncing ball, the looped walk, and the looped run cycle. There's a lot of information laid out here in this class for you. I really want you to take your time going through the lesson and don't feel rushed or feel that you need to complete the class in one go. This entire class is intended to be a lifetime resource for you. Something that you can come back to and refer to over again as you grow and develop this new skill set. So I know from my own vast personal experience, that animation is not a skill you can pick up and start using in half an hour. It really takes a bit of practice, and some of the principals do need time to sink in and to make sense. So work at your own pace. Take it one step at a time. Feel free to watch all of the lessons right the way through and then start working on your projects, or you can follow along with me step by step. I'd love to see all of your projects, but you can also choose to just post one of your projects up for review in the project section of the class. That way, I get to see your work, I get to give you feedback, and you'll have a chance to look at other students work too. If you have any questions at all, be sure to pop them in the discussion tab and let me know if anything is unclear. Up next, in the next lesson, let's open up procreate dreams and get to know the app. 3. Intro to Procreate Dreams: So Let's dive into procreate dreams and take a look around the interface. If you're already familiar with the app, then you can skip ahead. But if you'd like a refresher, then in this lesson, I'm going to explain the main features that you need to know for the class. Let's first open it up. When you first open up Procreate dreams, this screen here is called a theater. This is where you can access all of your files. It's also where you can delete files or group them and duplicate or share them. You can create a new file by hitting the plus button, and from here, you can choose your format. I usually tend to go for a wide screen, and you can also tap this button here to set your project to HD or four K. For this class, I will be keeping my projects at HD that's plenty big enough for our purposes. Then click on empty and right away, you're into the animation space. The space is separated into the stage and the timeline. The stage is where you'll draw everything, and the timeline is where you will set your animation. If I click on the drawing icon, I can access drawing mode just like in procreate. When you're in drawing mode, you've got all of your colors up here, the brushes, you've got the eraser and the smudge tool. You also have layers inside of your drawing, which we'll be using a little bit later on in the lessons. The square on the stage is, well, this is the stage really. In other words, it's the frame of your movie, and the area around it or outside of it is the backstage where you can just have assets sitting there and they can animate on and off screen. Now, if you click off the drawing icon, you're back into the timeline. There are a few buttons over here that we need to look at that are very important. This theater icon brings you back out to that first screen I showed you. If you tap on the title of your project, you can then pull up the properties for this document. You can set properties for the stage, the timeline. The only thing that I've really changed in these preferences are Within the document is that I've toggle enable painting with finger so that my file only will recognize painting with the Apple pencil. I find that very useful because if I lean my hand on the surface of my iPad, I don't want that to be registered as a paint mark. The other thing I do is I toggle off this button here so that Procreate doesn't make a key frame at the beginning of the track whenever I add a key frame. Then click Done and go back to the timeline again. Now, the time code here, if you tap on this, this is where you access the all important onion skin. This tool is really important. It's a very important function that will help you to basically see your previous frames and your subsequent frames when you're animating. More of that later, obviously. On the timeline itself, you're going to have all of your content and your tracks. The content is where we add keyframes, where we are able to move our drawings around on the stage. When you're working with content on the timeline, you can drag it around. You can grab the end of any piece of content and extend it out either way. If you click on this button here, this is the timeline edit button. With this enabled, you can then grab multiple content and tracks, and you can group them together, which will allow you to actually add further animation on top of that. I will say, once we start animating our projects, all of these tools and functions and the entire interface will become much more clear and you'll learn and understand them more in the application of each of them. It all becomes very intuitive very quickly, but I wanted to give you a broad overview just before we start out. Speaking of working intuitively, in the next lesson, I'm going to show you the gestures in procreate dreams. When you're ready, I'll see you there. 4. Using the Gestures in Procreate Dreams: The gestures in procreate dreams are designed to make your workflow feel very intuitive and easy, and it's one of the standout features of the app. I think you'll quickly get very used to these gestures and learn how to navigate through the UI and through your projects with what seems almost like a magical touch. In this lesson, I'm going to highlight the main gestures that I use continuously and the ones that I think you need to know about for this class. The first one is using two fingers to move either your stage or your timeline. This is called the pan, and you can easily move content around or move your drawing if you want to see something on the stage or something on the timeline like this. If you want to zoom in at any point, just use two fingers to pinch out and you can zoom into an area on your stage. You can also zoom in to the timeline like this if you wanted to see some of your frames a bit more clearly. To zoom out, just pinch in again, and that's how you can zoom back out. In the timeline, in order to say increase the height of any of the tracks, if you wanted to see one track a bit better, use three fingers and scroll up like this. Or use three fingers to scroll down and you can collapse your timeline down if you wanted to be able to see everything from a bird's eye view. You can also use three fingers horizontally. If you scroll horizontally, that will allow you to zoom into a specific area, or if you scroll the other way, then again, you can zoom out. If ever you need to undo an action, that gesture is two fingers tapping, is a two finger tap on the screen. So two finger tap will undo the last action that you did, and if you want to redo that, simply use a three finger tap to redo. When you're working on the stage, if you're drawing and painting, you can tilt the screen using two fingers to rotate, and that it can be very useful when you're drawing if you want to get a better angle. Then lastly, another gesture that I really like is to tap the stage with four fingers. When you're playing back your animation, that will enable full screen mode, and you can watch your animation in full screen like this. In this mode, you can also use one finger on the screen to scrub through your timeline back and forth. And that gives you the opportunity to really look at your animation up close frame by frame. So those are the main gestures that I use, and I think that you'll get used to working with them very quickly, and it does make the app feel really natural and easy. Have a go practicing all of these gestures and get used to the UI, and then when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. The 12 Principles of Animation: You've probably heard a lot of people mention or talk about the 12 principles of animation. These principles are the foundation of all good character animation. And in this lesson, I want to explain what these principles are and how you can understand them and apply them in your work. So when animation was first developed way back in the day, studios like Disney were tasked with making animation learnable so that they could teach it to others and dreamline their process and their workflow in order to get big film productions done in a timely manner. And that's why they came up with this code or this set of principles that explains and defines what good animation is. So, these 12 principles all support each other. They all make sort of a framework for animating. I'll quickly explain each one. But what I want to stress at the outset is that you don't have to worry about achieving all of these straight away. Once you start learning animation and get into character animation, These principles will start to make a lot more sense. But I think it's really important to have a bit of an overview at the beginning to know what they are, and to have that as a context. The other very important thing that I want you to note is that these 12 principles are really all about how you can give the illusion of life. What we're talking about is not motion graphics. These principles don't apply necessarily to just moving objects around or animating text, or even adding motion onto an illustration. These principles relate specifically to character animation. The first one is squash and stretch. Now, squash and stretch is all about changing the shape or the structure of a character or an object in order to give it a sense of flexibility of weight and of vitality. Anticipation refers to the fact that any sort of realistic action or motion that a character does is often preceded by a smaller counter motion. That small counter motion sets up the main action, and it makes the whole animation a lot more readable. Think of a baseball player pitching a ball. Throwing the ball is the main action, but that wind up at the beginning is the preceding anticipation. The third principle is the principle of staging, and that means how you present your action or your idea in a very clear and visually understandable way. The fourth principle, straight ahead, action or post pose action, you can choose to animate by drawing each frame in sequence, capturing a continuous flow of movement, or you can choose to do your animation by first of all, plotting out the key poses and then going back to fill in the in betweens. The fifth principle is follow through and overlapping action. When a main action stops, then some parts of the character might still continue to move. Think of like if someone's running, parts of their clothing might still move when they come to a stop. The sixth principle is the principle of slow in and slow out. So most actions, if they are natural and organic, will have gradual acceleration and gradual deceleration. This principle is something that we're going to look into a lot in our projects, especially in the bouncing ball project. Even seventh principle is the principle of arcs, and that really governs the way that any natural or realistic motion will travel in an arc. You can think of your arms swinging by your side? Those are in arcs, or when you're running, your feet make arcs. If your animation ever looks a little bit off or jumpy, the first thing that you should check is your arcs is the thing that you're traveling in a nice smooth arc. The eighth principle is that of secondary action. This is just action that supports or complements the main action. The ninth principle is timing that determines the appropriate speed or rhythm of an action. Again, timing goes hand in hand with spacing, and this is something that we'll be looking at in great detail later on. The tenth principle is the principle of exaggeration, and this is where you would enhance or emphasize actions in order to make them read much more clearly. All right. And then the last two principles, solid drawing and appeal really refer to how animators back in the day used to draw their characters. Solid drawing means you need to be able to draw a character in, you know, different poses or from different angles and be able to stay consistent and to stay on model. And appeal really means that you're able to draw or design your characters that are appealing and liable. And this is very evident in any Disney animation that you look at. Characters are always super cute and liable. And it comes directly from this principle, the principle of appeal. That's a really quick, brief overview of the 12 principles of animation. And if any of this is really interesting to you, then you should definitely research this further. I would suggest looking at a book called the Illusion of Life, which charts all of the development of animation from the very first days in the Walt Disney Studio. Okay, the principles that we're going to focus on in this class are going to be timing and spacing, easing in and out, squash and stretch and animating in arcs. We'll also look at animating straight ahead, as well as animating pose to pose. By no means, do you have to apply all of these principles to your work, and we'll be focusing on just a few of the principles in the projects of this class. But you should definitely bookmark this lesson and refer back to it over time. As you develop as an animator, these principles will start to make much more sense. 6. Timing and Spacing Part 1: In this lesson, I'm going to explain timing, key frames, and spacing. In procreate dreams, I'm going to first of all, create a new document by tapping on the plus button. Then on the three dots here, I'm just going to open this up to show you that the settings I'm using are 24 frames per second, and the duration for this document is 5 seconds. You don't have to worry too much about this right now because in this lesson, I'm just going to be explaining some of the concepts. You don't necessarily have to follow along with me. You can just watch this for now. But then I'll click on empty and I'm into a brand new blank document. The two main cornerstones of animation are timing, which is represented here by the timeline. This is your duration of time for your animation and spacing, and that is essentially the position of the object that you're animating. That is what you said up here on the stage, it's where your animation starts and where it stops in space. Those two things are really the defining features of motion for animators. They're essentially what makes animation. So Let's look first at the concept or the idea of timing. On our timeline here, you can see that the number of seconds is clearly marked at the top. If I hit on this little icon here, that'll bring me into draw and paint mode. I'm going to go ahead and just choose a brush and choose a color and I'm going to make a drawing on the stage. Now as soon as I do that, this drawing on the stage has now produced one frame down here in the timeline. If I double tap, I can get in a bit closer and take a look at this frame. So this is just one frame. Afterwards, it disappears. If I double tap again, you can actually see the number of frames that any drawing has, and you can see that this drawing in particular has a duration of one frame. In animation, 1 second of animation is comprised of 24 frames, you can just about see the frame numbers up here on the timeline alongside the seconds. Now, let's say I wanted to make this ball travel from point A to point B. Well, what I'm going to do is click and hold the edge of this single frame, and I'm going to drag it all the way out to the 1 second mark. Now I've got a drawing that lasts on my stage for 1 second, but it doesn't move anywhere, it's static, and if I go beyond the 1 second, it disappears. That drawing just has a duration of 1 second. If I want to put some movement onto this, then I'm going to go over to the start of the drawing, and I'm going to tap on the playhead and then tap on the move and scale parameter. Doing that, I'm now able to give this drawing a keyframe, which basically sets its position. You can see that the playhead there changes, the icon changes, and as well as that there's a key frame now in the timeline. There's also a little key frame track that appears underneath the content, and it has just one key frame on it. Okay, so then I'll go to the end of this pizza content and I'll create a second keyframe. And now what I need to do is change the position on the stage for that second keyframe. So because it's selected on the track, I can just go ahead and move the ball down. What I like to do is once I've started to move it, I'm going to tap the screen with my finger, and that turns snapping on, and it means that I can just drag down in a straight line. That's its new position. Now I've got two key frames and I've got some animation. It's not great animation, but it's definitely moving. Now, I don't know if you can tell just yet by looking at this, but you can get very used to spotting things as you progress as an animator, and you'll start to notice subtleties and differences in motion. And right now, what I'm seeing here is that there's a slight ease in and out on this motion. If I drag through the timeline slowly, you might be able to see it a bit better. What happens is is that the ball, it starts off slow, it speeds up in the middle, and then it goes slow towards the end. So what's that all about? Well, essentially, an ease in and an ease out defines a natural feeling motion. Nothing in reality ever goes from being stock still to moving very fast and then back to a dead stop. Things naturally just start off slow going from a stop before they pick up speed and they'll also slow down before they come into a stop. This principle is called the principle of inertia, and it basically governs the way things move. And that's why animators always like to have an ease in. They always like to have an ease on their animation because it gives that natural feeling. And so in procreate dreams, easing is something that's often on your animation by default. However, an ease in and out is not necessarily something that you want to have on everything that's moving. Moreover, it is something that you should learn how to control and apply yourself. That's actually what we're going to be learning in this course anyway. For now for this very simple exercise, what I'm going to do is just get rid of that easing. I'm going to click anywhere in between the two keys, and I'm going to choose set all easings to linear. Now I've just got a very simple, very straightforward, smooth and even motion. That's what I would like you to start experimenting with now. Just play around with creating an object on the stage, moving it around with a linear easing, and creating spacing and setting your key frames. 7. Timing and Spacing Part 2: Now the next thing that I want to explain is this. We've got this motion here. We've got a starting position and an ending position, and we've got something moving on our stage. However, the point that I think that you need to know about is that this ball is not actually moving. It looks like it's moving. But what's happening is that we're just seeing if I double tap on the timeline here and zoom in, what we're seeing is just one frame at a time. One frame in a different position from the previous, and that is how motion is captured on screen. It's a you are actually seeing something moving. You're only ever really seeing a bunch of frames that captured the position of the object. In this case, because I set my document originally to 24 frames per second, it means that there are actually 24 little pictures here all the way to the end, and that's why when we play it back, 24 frames per second gives the illusion of motion. This law or this principle is called the persistence of vision. It's really the basis of, animation of film, movies, anything that is captured on screen. Nothing is ever moving. The camera lies 24 frames per second. The camera captures the movement in one frame at a time. When those frames are played back at the same speed, in other words, at 24 frames per second, it feels like natural motion. To demonstrate that, if you don't believe me, because it is a bit of a mind bending concept. I'm just going to come down to the time code, tap on that, and turn on onion skin. With onion skinning turned on, you can see all of the previous frames and all of the subsequent frames. If I zoom in closer, these ones are all the ones that I've gone previously, these are all the subsequent frames. Now, let's go back to our timeline and let's actually set all the easings to ease in and out, which is the way we had it before. Now you see a different picture altogether in the animation. You can see that the spacing has changed. The drawings that are in the middle are now a little bit further apart. If I go to the beginning, you can see that the drawings are much closer together. This is important. You need to know that drawings that are spaced close together will create a slower motion, and drawings that are placed further apart will create a fast motion. This is basically what we'll be exploring throughout this class and you'll get to learn exactly how to work with these principles yourself and you'll get to know a lot more about the subtleties and the nuances of motion. But for now, for this lesson, I really want you to just get comfortable with timing. Get used to creating key frames, creating a drawing, moving it, and seeing how that works out for yourself. In the next S and I'm then going to show you how to create those in betweens that I was talking about, and how we as animators can control the ease in and out ourselves. Plus, I'm also going to show you that you will be able to cut your workload in half by animating just 12 drawings instead of 24 and you'll have the same effect. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. How to Create Even Spacing: In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through the process of how to create spacing within your own animation yourself. So this is vital to know and understand because it's actually the aspect of animation where you get to determine the feeling or the quality of any given motion. How you determine the speed or the slowness of any action is what will give that action its unique quality. So rather than relying on a preset, I want to show you how you can be able to do this yourself. Okay, so I'll just go ahead and delete this content. Next up, I'm going to go into settings, and I'm going to change the frames per second to 12. So if you're following along with me, just do that, make sure that you're on the same frames per second as me. Now, the reason for that is because if we animate on 24 frames per second, we're going to have to make 24 drawings because there's that many frames in 1 second. That in animation is called animating on ones. However, we can actually make a drawing on every second frame, and it still reads and plays back perfectly fine. That's called animating on twos. It's where every second frame has a drawing. And this is how most animation is created. Any TV animation that you see or cartoon shows are usually always animated on twos. It cuts the workload in half and it allows you to get through a lot of character animation very, very quickly. You, you could keep your document at 24 frames per second and then just simply drag each or extend each frame out for two frames. But for this exercise, I think it's just easier. Let's just set the frames per second to 12 at the beginning. It gives you the same effect and you don't have to worry too much about adjusting your frames in the timeline. Okay, so with all of that out of the way, I'm just going to grab a brush and make my first drawing. Now, if I zoom in, you'll see that, as I said, we just need 12 frames to make up this 1 second. So I'm going to have my starting post here. And what I'm going to do is duplicate this drawing. So tap on hold, click duplicate. And then I'm going to drag the second drawing all the way down here. So now I've got a starting pose and an ending pose. So to explain how you're going to create your in betweens. What I'm going to do is quickly just draw a little animation chart and give you a visual idea. This is a rough explanation. Basically, you've got your first key pose here, and this line represents the action, and this is the end pose. So in the middle, there's going to be a pose around here. That's your middle breakdown drawing. Now I know I've got a start pose, I've got an end pose, and I've got my pose in the middle. This middle drawing tells me more or less the momentum of the animation because it's right in the middle. So it's kind of even Now, all I need to do is work out that since I have three drawings already, I will need five in betweens on my first half and four in betweens on the second half because in total, that will make up 12 drawings. So essentially, that's my plan for this very simple animation. So I'll drag my guide out to 1 second. And then for my drawings, I'm going to select this first one. I'm going to duplicate it. And then on the stage, I'll just simply drag the drawing down into the middle. Okay. I've got my three poses nicely done on the stage, and in the timeline. And I'll drag that last drawing out to 1 second and drag my middle frame into the middle of the timeline. Then go back to the first drawing, and now here you can start to add your in betweens. So we'll just duplicate the frame. We're not going to redraw everything. I just want you to practice timing and spacing here. So let's just focus on duplicating, d, drag the drawing down ever so slightly and repeat the process throughout all of the frames. What I'm doing is trying to eyeball the space between each drawing and try to keep it as evenly as possible in order to give a smooth motion. If I moved one of these in an unequal spacing compared to the previous ones, it'll look a bit jumpy. So I want something that's very even. Now, you can adjust the positions as you go and just make sure that the space is equal. If you spot that your spaces are a little bit uneven, you can always go back and just adjust each frame manually. There you go. That is a very nice smooth and even motion. And we did that in a couple of minutes. So that's pretty good, and you should have a very clear understanding now of how to make keyposes and how to use the onion skin to place your drawings. So have a go with this and experiment with this process. And then when you're ready in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how you can add an ease to your motion and change the spacing of your in between. 9. How to Create Easing: Now let's work on adding easing into our animation. I'll show you in a lesson how to space out your drawings to achieve that. Basically, because we're animating a ball bouncing, I'm going to put in a ground plane. I'm just literally going to draw a line across the stage like this, and that'll be the ground where the ball makes contact. Then I'm going to drag the content all the way out here to about 1 second and then make a new track, and now I can go ahead and in my ball. So we want this ball to bounce up and down on the spot and give it that feeling of a realistic bounce rather than just a simple mechanical motion like we did in the last lesson. I'm guessing that this bounce here is going to be a total of 1 second. I think in my mind, the way I visualize it that feels right, so I'm going to have the same drawing at the start and at the end. I'll just duplicate that frame and drag it out to the end here. This is where the animation will loop back on itself. That's frame 12 because in this document, we have 12 frames making up 1 second. So that means that a round about here in the middle of the timeline, this is going to be the contact position or the place where the ball makes contact with the ground where it bounces. So that makes it about around seven frames in given that we've got 12 frames in total. Then on my stage, I'm going to drag the drawing and just move it all the way down to the ground. Then I'm going to duplicate the first frame again and drag this down just a tiny tiny bit, keeping it like nearly almost as close to the first pose as possible, but just a slight shift in position. Now, do the same for the next one, drag it down a tiny bit, but maybe start to space it out a little bit. I'm going to drag it down a bit further again, increasing the space. That's the first half of our balance. Now we just need to animate the second half. Go back to the halfway mark. Now we're going to actually just copy these drawings over. So all you have to do is tap on hold and then Go ahead in the timeline and paste. Now the way I like to do this is when I'm copying frames in my timeline, I turn off the visibility on the frame that I've copied so that I don't lose my place when I come back. It's just a handy little trick to know about. I'll paste this frame and then I know that this is the next frame that I need to copy. I'll copy, turn off the visibility, go ahead and paste it. You can see that not only are we copying frames in the timeline, but the position of each of those drawings on the stage is the exact same as well. Now, we don't actually want to have this last drawing here, this end frame, because it's the exact same frame as the beginning, which will make the animation stall or hold at that point when we play it. What we want is for the animation to loop back on itself and just to seamlessly go through the cycle again. So that's how you do any looping animation. You always want your animation to end on a frame just before the first one starts again. Just go ahead and delete that last frame. Now if we play it back, you'll see it's a very nice, very smooth and even bounce with a little bit of ease at the top and a little bit of speed through the drop here. That's perfect. That's what you would call a natural motion as compared to the mechanical even motion that we did in the last lesson. But wait, there's even more that you can add onto this to make it look even more realistic, to add a little bit more character and a little bit more personality to the spans. And that's called squash and stretch. So meet me in the next lesson and I'll show you exactly how to do that. 10. The Principle of Squash and Stretch: So I've compiled two animations in this document. This animation here is the one that we did in the previous lesson. It's got a nice ease on the motion. It looks very nice and realistic as a bounce. And on this animation here, this is the one that we did according to a more linear motion. So there's no. It's completely even and, and you can see that there's no slowing down at the top or anything like that. Whereas something that has an ease on it looks a lot more sort of believable, a lot more natural. And ultimately, as I keep saying, that's what we're trying to do with our animation, we're trying to give it a sense of believability so that it feels real. We're essentially trying to give life to static drawings. Be to animate literally means to give life to something. So that's the key thing to always try and achieve in your work or at least to have it in mind as a character animator that you're bringing your drawings to life. The way that you speed up or modulate or the inflection of any action or motion is actually the thing that will give you this sense of believability. But there's also one other very crucial thing that will make an action feel real when you watch it back. And that is, if you can manipulate the actual structure or the shape of your character or this object in order to give it a sense of flexibility. In common terms, what I'm talking about is squash and stretch. So it's a concept that was developed in the early days of animation way back at the beginning of the industry when animators realized that if they squashed objects or characters on impact, or if they stretched them out during fast actions, that gave the whole action another level of feeling real. So I'll demonstrate this for you now. What I'm going to do is just copy this group and paste it again, drag it back over here. And here, I've got the bounce, that's the exact same as the previous one with the ease. But what I'll do now is if I go into the frames themselves and right around here where the action speeds up, I'm going to squeeze this shape. So with the frame selected, I'm just going to push and pull and get it into this nice, elongated shape, and then I'll do it with the same with the next frame. So now it's stretching as it drops from, you know, the force of gravity. It's plummeting towards the ground. So that's good. And then on this drawing here where it contacts the ground. Here, I'm just going to squash it down as if it's hit the ground with such force that it really gets squashed out like this. So be sure to apply your squash and stretch on both sides of the ball so that you don't lose the overall volume. That's something that you will get used to over time, but I just want you to be aware that you need to make sure that you're maintaining volume when you change up the shape like this. All right. And then let's do the same on the other side of the bounce, and you can move the poses around if you feel you need to. So eventually, the ball slowly goes back to a normal shape as it reaches the top in it slows down. Alright, let's have a look at this. So you can instantly see that it's got much more character and appeal, it's much more bouncy, just with those few tweaks. It's not like you really noticed the quashan stretch, too much. It's more of a feeling in the animation. So these are all the three examples lined up. This one is the even spacing, very monotonous, very mechanical. This one in the middle has some ease on it, looks very sort of realistic. But this third animation has easing plus squash and stretch, and it looks like very cartoony, very full of character and life. Okay. Now, what I want you to note is that all three animations have the exact same timing. I know it's hard to believe, but they're all the exact same timing. Each is just 1 second, and each of these hits the ground at the same time. It's just the spacing that is different, and that is what gives each of these such a different feeling. Okay, now, let's put this to use in an actual proper animation project. Up next, we're going to animate a ball bouncing across the screen. So when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. Okay. 11. The Bouncing Ball Rough Pass: What we went through in the last few lessons was choosing a time duration for our animation, and we also went through spacing, which is choosing how we spread out our drawings within that time frame. What we're going to do now is create an animation where the ball bounces across the screen from left to right, with smaller and smaller bounces and then rolls off screen. This is a project that's essentially the first project for any beginner animator. It's one of the first projects that you do when you're studying in any animation curriculum. It might seem like a bit of a boring project at first, but surprisingly, this very simple animation contains the most important animation principles, timing, spacing, squash and stretch, and post pose animation. And these are the foundations for classical two D animation. And because the ball is such a simple shape, it's a really nice project to experiment with these concepts to test them out for yourself. So let's create a brand new document. And for this project, what I want you to do is set the frames for second to 24. Now we'll still be animating on twos, and we're going to make each of our drawings for two frames. But having the documents set at 24 instead of 12 will also give us the flexibility to use single frames as well, and I'm going to show you exactly all of that once we get into it. But for now, just set your document to 24 and duration three or 5 seconds is fine. Whenever you start a brand new animation project, the first thing that you want to do is figure out your timing. So you have to sort of imagine the action in your head first. You could actually set a timer and experiment with a real ball. Otherwise, you can just play the action out in your head and sort of feel through the timing. So I imagine that this ball bouncing across is going to be about three bounces, and I think it's going to be about 1 second per bounce. So that's my starting point. It could change, but let's go with that for now. So come down to the timeline, add a new track, and now I'm going to draw my ground plane so that I've got something where I know the ball is bouncing. So just draw a line at the bottom of the screen like this. Then tap and hold on the frame in your timeline and choose fill duration. So that will fill the content out to the end. And then if your document is longer than 3 seconds, what you can do is just tap on the playhead over here, choose edit, choose split, and simply delete the part that you don't want. In this project, we're going to do it in two phases. We're going to first of all do our rough rough animation, where we just simply plot and plan our animation out, and then we're going to go back and refine it and do what's called the cleanup phase. The next step then is to draw a guide. Now, this is really important. I don't want you to overlook this step. Having a guide is really necessary in nearly anything that you want to animate. In this project, it's really important to have a guide because the bouncing ball, we wanted to stay consistent through each of the bounces and follow a nice arc or curve. So I'm going to make a new track, maybe grab a different color this time, and just draw three or four bounces across the screen. There is a really good way to plot out your action as well to practice staging and composing your animation within the frame. The ball is going to come on screen from here, it's going to drop quickly to the ground, bounce up once, maybe bounce again, and then roll off screen. I can see now, simply from this very quick guide that I've done that the second bounce is going to be way too low, so I'll just erase that out and make it higher. Okay, so that's my rough guide. And, if necessary, we can change it. But for now, this is great for us to follow. Okay. So I'll just drag that frame out to the end. And then what I like to do is lower the opacity down of my guide. To do that, I'll go to the beginning, click on filter, and I'll add an opacity filter here and drag that down to about 30%. Next, if you want to consolidate these tracks and give yourself a bit more room in the timeline, click on the timeline edit button and drag across all of the content, and then just click and hold and group them. So now on a new track above, we're going to start drawing. Again, this is the rough phase, so don't worry too much about being super neat and tidy. You can be as rough as you like really. To do my drawing, I'm going to grab the handle of the timeline and drag it up so that I'm in flip book mode and start drawing my drawing a really rough shape of the ball. If you want to adjust the position, then come back out of your flipbook mode and simply move the ball on the screen, make sure that it's following the guide. I like to have the guide in the middle. Then go back into flipbook. And now add a new frame by clicking on this plus button and draw the next. Now, don't worry too much about being exact or precise. This is the rough pass. So you can be a little bit more messy, a little bit more rough with this. It's more about just simply figuring out or getting the placement of the object not so much about drawing it exactly right at this point. Following my previous drawing and going ahead and drawing the next pose. And this time I'm going to make sure that the space is slightly further apart. Then go forwards again on this pose, and now I'm going to stretch the drawing out like this because this is going to be the fastest section. Go ahead again. Draw a really stretched pose here. In fact, I actually want this drawing, going to move it so that it's touching the ground. This is not really the contact position, but I found that if you have this really stretched pose here, slightly just touching the ground before the squashed pose, it actually makes the impact really hit hard. It's good tip to do that in your bouncing ball project, and you'll see how that plays out when we play it back. Now I'm going to draw the actual contact position, and this is going to be a very squashed pose this way. It's like the force of gravity is just really squashing our ball into the ground. The next pose is where the ball now springs up again, and that's going to be stretched, and then we'll come into the top of this bounce. And here is where your animation needs to slow down. So we want the shape to come back to normal, and we want our drawings to be closer or tighter together on either side of the top of this arc. Now, I want you to try to make sure that you've got the exact same number of drawings on either side of the very top drawing. Now for the last two small bounces, I'm not going to do any stretch poses. I'm just going to do a little hop. We don't need to stretch the poses at this point since the momentum is really slowing down. Then the last bit, the ball is just going to roll off screen so you could just duplicate the drawing and drag it out gradually, it just slowly goes off like that. Perfect. So this is where you can check the placement of your drawing. Make any adjustments, make sure that your ball is following the arcs. I think in this arc here, for example, I need to add another drawing in. So now to add a frame into your animation. What you can do is come down to the timeline. Click and hold on the edge of this frame. Then hold your other finger onto the screen and drag that one single frame out. Then grab the end and it back and that makes space for an empty frame here. Now you can add a new drawing in here. I really want this to slow down on this bounce. I'll add another drawing on the other side as well just to keep it, make sure it's symmetrical. I. Perfect. So I think the rest of the drawings look okay. But what I'm noticing is that this drawing is slightly out of arc. So I'll just fix that, make sure that it's on the arc. Okay. And now it's all good, that's nice and smooth and it follows the arcs, and the slow sections are good and the fist sections are good. Now, this is all animated on ones, meaning that every drawing is just on one frame. When I play it back at this point, it's very speedy. It's a bit too fast. So click on the timeline edit button, select everything in your timeline. Then double tap so that you can get down to where you actually see the number of frames. Now with everything still selected, if I click and hold on the edge of one frame and then place my finger down on the screen and drag out that frame, I can now make every drawing in my timeline two frames long. That essentially doubles our animation in length. Now our animation is on twos. Let's play it back. And that's much much better. That's really nice. It's a really good, even steady bounce. Why didn't we just do this on a document with 12 frames per second? The thing about working in a document with 24 frames per second is that you've got flexibility to have some of your drawings be on one frame and some of them on two frames. That's what's going to make all the difference. Right now, everything is on twos, but I'm going to come down to where the fastest section is. If I grab the edge of this frame and drag it in by one, and this frame as well, and this is a fast frame, so we're going to make this on one. And this from here, I'll hold it for one. Now let's see. I definitely see a difference. I think that's much more springy. It's very nice. It's not so monotonous. Let's see what it looks like if we extend the slow drawings at the very beginning. These top drawings here. I could have more slowness here to really make the action. So I'll drag this drawing out to three frames, and this one out to three. And that looks way better. That's got a very nice modulation in the action and the motion, and it just feels much better. That's a perfect balancing ball, and hopefully you've been able to follow along with me and you're also at this point. In the next ss, we're going to c and add a bit of color and just tidy up the linework. When you're ready, meet me in the next ss for the clean phase. 12. The Bouncing Ball Clean Up: So as I said before, the formula or the set of steps for any animation that you want to do, usually always go something like this. You'll do your thumbnail of your action, and that includes drawing your guides and placing your keys. Then secondly, you animate a rough pass. And then you might even animate a second rough pass or what's called a tie down, where you really kind decide on your key frames and your in betweens and your breakdowns. And then the third and final stage is to do what you would call a cleanup pass, where you make proper clean lines and you add color. In this lesson, we're going to do our cleanup. To do that, I'm going to lower the opacity of my rough animation. Essentially, because we've literally figured out our entire animation, all we need to do from here is trace over our roughs. So I'm going to add a new track and go in and start to redraw this. Now, don't worry. I'm going to show you a way of doing this that it's not so tedious that we have to redraw each and every frame. We're going to be copying each drawing across. So what we need to do is just make sure that we match the timing of the rough animation. So I flip book, I'm going to make one drawing. I'm going to use a smooth brush for the outline. Then once I've got my outline done, I'm going to go up to the layers here. Click on new layer, then tap and drag, tap hold on that layer and drag it underneath the line. And if you want to be ultra organized and impress your supervising animator, you can name your layers. So I might rename this layer as line, and this layer here as color or fill, something like that. Then I'm going to choose the fill layer, choose a color, and just paint it in. Now, tidy it up if you need to because this drawing is going to be your final design for the ball to make sure it's as good as you want it to be. Perfect. Now we've got our final ball design. Now come back out to the timeline and just match it up to the individual frames frame by frame throughout the animation. You can move the rough track above if it's if it's easier for you to reference. All you do is just drag that frame, late, and move on to the next drawing or the next position. Now, I would recommend turning off onion skin for this process so that you don't have too many things confusing, between the roughs and the onion skin. It's just easier to follow the rough drawings. Now, when it comes to the stretch pose, what you need to do is squash the ball, but as I said, make sure that you maintain the same volume. If you're having issues squashing the ball, make sure that your pivot point is in the middle. So what you do is tap on these three dots here. And as you can see, my pivot point is all the way over here, so we just need to drag it back into the middle of the ball. And now, if I apply squash and stretch or the transform parameter, it's a lot easier. And then obviously rotated to match the orientation of the arc. Remember, these fast poses are on ones, so make sure that your frame matches the timing of the roughs. Then just continue on with each frame. For the squashed pose, I'll rotate sideways, and I'm just going to keep going, duplicating, and matching up those poses and making sure that each one matches the timing. Oh, okay, perfect. So now let's play it back and see how it looks. And that looks awesome. I think that looks great. That's a really nice bouncy bounce. So now we can delete these rough drawings. I don't need them anymore. But if you wanted to, you could just, you know, turn off the visibility. And then I'll go into my guide group and turn off the arcs. That's a great little animation. If you want, you can use four fingers to tap on the screen and enter full screen mode, and you can watch it like that. You can also use your finger just to scrub through the timeline and check your drawings. I might have to fix this one frame because the volume looks a bit off. I just need to scale this one up. But I think other than that, this is perfect. Now I want you to have a go at this because this is, as I said, a really important project. It does seem so simple, but as you can see, we've applied a lot of the animation principles here. Also, we've used a document with 24 frames per second, which allowed us to play around with animating on ones and animating on twos in the same animation. 13. The Mechanics of a Walk: In this lesson, I want to introduce you to the walk cycle. So a walk cycle in two D animation is an important project to do because it really literally sets you up for character animation, and it gets you used to animating a proper full character rig. Plus the walk cycle is a very complex piece of animation. So it's a really good one to know and understand from the very beginning. In this lesson, let's just take a look at what goes into making a walk. What I've done here is I've drawn a very simple stick figure taking two steps, so one step here and then another. In the first step and the second step, you have to have the exact same poses, but think of them as being poses for one step, and then different poses for the next step. Let's look at those poses and see what poses make up a step. The first one is called the contact position. This is where both feet are contacting the ground. You're going to a or always start a walk with two contact positions, representing the start and the end of a step. Now, this is a regular normal walk. With the contact positions like this, the arms will always be opposing the legs. If the left leg or the blue leg is forwards, then the left arm or the blue arm is back. Now, in between these two contact positions are three main poses that you need to have. If the contact positions are key poses, then these three poses inside of the step are also key poses. They're not in betweens. Those three poses are the down pose, the up pose, and the passing pose. So the downpose is always the second drawing in a step. From the contact position, what happens is the foot moves down to being flat on the ground, and because this happens, it causes the whole character to move down. Another way to think of the downpose is to think of it as an anticipation before the character propels forwards, but it's definitely a little bit lower down than your starting pose. And on this pose, it's also important to note that this is where the arms are at their widest in the swing. From the down pose, the next important key pose is the passing pose. This is where the leg straightens up. The arms now start to swing back towards the body. It's a little bit slightly higher than the first contact position. After the passing pose, the character goes into what's called the up pose. This is the highest pose in the cycle. This is where the position of the character moves from being flat footed on the ground to being up on the toes, a little bit like this, and this is what makes the whole pose a little bit higher. Then finally, from the up pose, the character then moves into the second contact position. With all of these poses, you've got a structure of a normal regular step. A step always has a contact pose, oppose going down, oppose passing, and oppose going up to the highest point, and then coming back and landing down in the second contact pose. From here, if you wanted to, this is where you could now add some in between drawings in to slow down the walk or smooth out some of the poses. Personally, I chose to draw an in between between the down pose and the passing and one drawing between the up pose and the contact position. That's where I felt the walk needed to just slow down a little bit, so that's where I added two in betweens. Then you essentially do the exact same thing on the other side. So by the time that you get to the end, you now have a complete cycle made up of two steps. With these two steps, you can now start to build up a longer animation just by copying those two steps over and over again. If you wanted to, you could just simply copy this group over and shift the animation itself to match up. That's how you would animate a character walking off screen. But now let's look at this together, Let's move through this animation step by step. No pun intended. Let's meet in the next lesson, and we're going to animate a looping walk cycle. 14. Animating a Looped Walk Cycle: In this lesson, we're going to animate a looped walk cycle together so we can learn the basic points of a walk, as I described them in the previous lesson. Once we've applied those to a simple walk cycle with a stick figure, we're going to move on and animate a full character rig of a robot and animate a fully finished piece of character animation. So in a new document, I'm going to first ground plane as usual. I'm going to extend that out to the end of the timeline. And then once that's done, I'm going to pull up the flip book, and I'm going to start to just draw my stick figure character. So you can take a bit of time just to get this right. If you want, it took me a little bit to kind of really get a proper stick figure character done. What I did was I actually did a really rough drawing, and then once that was done, I went ahead and I redrew it just to make sure it's a little bit more clean and not so rough and messy. The other thing that I'm doing here is I'm making the opposing legs and arms a different color. I'm going to make this leg blue and this arm blue, and that's going to help me identify which leg is in front. Okay, happy with that. Now I'm going to go and center the drawing into the middle of the screen. This is important because we're making a looped walk, and I want everything to be nice and centered and make sure that he's going to be walking on the spot. Now I'm just going to go ahead and add a new frame. This second frame is where I'm going to draw the final pose in one step. In other words, I'm going to draw my second contact position. All you need to do is draw it in the exact same way, but make sure that onion skin is turned on because you're essentially just tracing that first drawing. Only this time, swap the legs and the arms. Now I've got my two key poses for one step. Let's just recap. The poses that we need to hit are the contact, the down, the passing pose, and the up pose. We've already got our two contact positions. We just need these three. Now, if I draw a simple chart, it's going to look something like this. One contact position here, one contact here. I'm going to do a down, a passing and an up. So these dots are all the main poses that I'm going to hit. But then in between the down and the passing, I'm going to put one in between. And that's represented by this line and between the passing and or the up and the next contact, one in between as well. So that's just a little rough guide if you want to keep that on screen to reference. Okay. Back in my animation, I'm going to go to the first drawing, add a new frame, and I'm going to draw the down pose. First thing that I do is I trace the head and the body because this I want to keep consistent and keep this on model throughout the animation. I don't want it to change. So just making that exact, then I'll just slightly ng it down a little bit. You don't want to overdo it too much. Just make this down pose slightly lower than the first pose. Now that I have that in place, it's actually easier to draw the legs. The first front leg, make sure that the foot is flat on the ground and also remember it's coming in a little bit towards the center because we're looping. Don't leave it in the exact same position. Think of this character as though it's walking on a treadmill. Next up, draw the arms. They're at their widest remember in this pose. Now I'm going to go to the next frame and that's the passing pose. First of all, draw the head and body and move that up very slightly. And now draw the legs. Again, this leg is coming in slightly, so it's almost directly underneath the body, and the other leg is passing through the arc and swinging forwards. Next pose is the up, and it's the same drill. Draw the head of the body first and move that into position where you want it to be. And then draw the legs. Remember, this is the highest pose, so the leg is going to be or the foot, I should say, is going to be on the toes. Once you've got that done, you've basically got all of your main poses. Now just go back and add in those two in betweens. I want to add an in between between the down pose and the passing pose. Just add another frame. If you wanted to, you could just adjust the onion skin so that it only shows you the previous and the subsequent frame. You can just focus on those two frames for your onion skin and go ahead and literally an in for the legs by drawing each one in between what you see and the onion skin and do exact same with the arms. Now, finally, go to the up pose, add one in between here. Then that's one step fully animated. If I play it back, it's obviously super fast, and that's because we drew everything on ones. What you can do is just select everything, stretch the frames out to twos, or you could do that at the very end, doesn't matter, but that's fine. Now I'm going to go ahead and do the next step. For the next step, what you're going to do is grab go to the first frame it and paste it at the end so that you've got that end pose to refer to. Now you know where your second step is going to. And the process then is the exact same. Do it the way that we did it for the first step, making sure that you're tracing the head and the body first, moving that into the position that you want and then drawing the legs and arms, that's the easiest way to do it. And when you've got all of the main key poses done, go back and add your two in betweens. Just make sure that as you're doing this, that all of your drawings are two frames long since if you're following me step by step, I moved everything out to be on twos. Okay, so let's now play back. As I mentioned, you'll notice the animation is a little bit here at the end. That's because the last frame is the exact same as the first one. So go ahead now and that. And now you've created a seamless loop cycle. I'd encourage you to go through that process a couple of times just to get familiar with it and to get comfortable making those poses and looping the walk and making sure that the character is walking on the spot. But if you're ready, if you're excited to move ahead, then join me in the next lesson, and we're going to work on doing a character rig of a robot and walking on the spot. So when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. Robot Walk Cycle Roughs Part 1: So in this lesson, we're going to start a project of a robot walk cycle. In a new document, 24 frames per second, I'm just going to start out with the very first pose, and that's going to be that first contact position of the walk. So I'm really sketching a very, very rough drawing for this pose. And then I will go back and redraw again with less lines. But my first drawing or my first sketch is always very, very rough. What I want to do here, what I want to work out is what is the pose going to look like with both legs in contact with the ground. What you want to do right now is avoid being precise or being detailed. You just want to try and loosely jot down a pose. And then afterwards, what we'll do is go back in and clean it up. So I'm keeping this design quite simple. The head and torso of the robot and the pelvis is actually going to be one unit, and I'm going to just move that around. I'm only really going to animate the legs and the arms. And to do that, I'm just keeping it very simple by using round shape for the kneecaps and keeping the limbs or the legs very stylized and simple, just basic shapes, basically a rectangle and a elongated triangle. And the exact same for the arms. I'm going to use the round shape at the elbow. That's going to help me just to swing the arms naturally and loosely without having to worry too much about being precise and detailed. So once I've got the character more or less sorted or figured out in this pose, I'm going to leave the arms for a little bit later. And right now I'm going to go into the timeline, duplicate this drawing, so I've got it on two separate tracks. I've got two drawings that are the exact same. Um, on each on a separate track. And all I'm going to do is erase out the upper body on one track and erase out the legs on the other track. And that way, I have two tracks in my timeline. One is the legs, and one is the upper body. And the reason that I do this is because, as I said, I want to be able to just copy the upper body along for each new pose and then just redraw the legs. As you can see, I've got the torso head and torso on the top track, and I've got the legs on the track underneath. What I'll do from here is rename the content in my tracks just so that I don't get confused. You can do this if you like. It's not entirely necessary, but I'm going to just rename this content as legs. And this top track is going to be the upper body of the robot. All right. And then when that's done, I'm going to duplicate that. I'm going to duplicate the upper body, zoom in a little bit and simply drag it down. Remember, this is going to be our down pose. That's the first one that we want to do. Dragging it down ever so slightly. Make sure your onion skin is turned on so you can see exactly where you're going, what your previous frame was or what your subsequent frames are going to be. You can always adjust that in the settings. But you need to be able to reference so that you're staying consistent. Okay. Now I'm going to go down to the track below, making sure I'm on the legs, track, and go into flip book, and now I'm going to draw the pose for the legs. So that makes it really, really easy to do. All you're really redrawing are going to be the leg poses. And the legs with this character design are very simple, rectangle shapes, and a triangle shape. Now, remember the legs will be moving in. Think of this character as walking on a treadmill. We want the legs to be moving in towards the center. Draw the foot flat. Then you can fill in the rest of the leg, very simple and do the same for the other leg. The other leg, the foot is going to come up onto the toe. It will still be in contact with the ground, but the knee will be bent. If I scrub back and forth, that looks very good, very consistent, both the upper body and the legs moving nicely. Then go to the upper body again and simply duplicate or copy that frame over, shift the position slightly. Remember this is now the passing pose. The upper body is going to be slightly higher than our first pose. You can adjust your onion skin if you need to see that first frame again. Then I'll hop down to the lower track and dragging up flip book. I can now draw in my legs. Again, foot is flat on the ground. We haven't gone into the up position just yet. I'll keep the foot flat, but I'll start to move it so that it's in the center underneath the body, and then just fill in the rest of the leg like so. Let's continue on. Come out of flip book, go through the same drill, go up to the top track, duplicate the upper body. Come out of draw mode and shift the upper body just slightly higher, but we want this to be slightly higher. And then I'll come back down to the lower track and draw in the legs. This the robot is on the toes of the foot. We have a little bit of creative leeway with the design. But that's what's so good about doing animation like this by hand, frame by frame, instead of animating a very static object and just moving it. Because when you're redrawing frames, you can make these small tiny adjustments as you go. And I think this is what makes the whole animation feel much more organic. And then that back leg is now swinging way forward so that it comes in we need it to meet this position here. That's our next contact pose. Then once you have that, you need to just draw the next contact position where this leg is all the way back and the front leg is now in contact with the ground. That's the second contact position. Then once you've done that, you have a full step. 16. Robot Walk Cycle Roughs Part 2: Next up, we're going to go and do the second step. Now remember, because this is a looped cycle, you want that last pose to hook up with the first pose in order for it to loop back on itself. Therefore, you need to copy this pose and paste it ahead in the timeline like this. Copy the upper body over and then copy the legs over. This will now give you a reference or something in your onion skin to look at so that you know where you need to go with your drawings. Then go back to the previous pose. Now, because we need to draw our poses in between, what you're going to do is on the upper body, tap on hold and duplicate that frame just like we did before. But then on the lower track, on the legs, tap hold and duplicate, but then go ahead and delete that because now you've got a blank space in which to draw. So go to the upper body and now move it down into the position that you want. Once you've done that, come back down to the timeline, and in the blank space, now you can redraw the legs for the down pose. Remember now that we're on the second step, so it's the same poses as before, but the legs are switched. Again, all of this is the same process, copying the position of the upper body across to the next frame, moving it into the pose that you want, and then coming down to redraw the legs. Because you have the last contact position at the end of your animation, you are really just inserting a frame in order to draw the legs. Do that by duplicating the leg pose and then deleting it. And then you've got a blank space for your drawing. All right. Now, if I play everything back, if I scrub or scroll the timeline over to the edge here so I can loop it as I play it. If I scrub through, you can see the legs are working. I'm going to hit play and it looks good to me. This is obviously very fast because it's on ones. I haven't adjusted it yet, but I think everything is working fine. Hit timeline edit, group everything, where I can see the frames, and I'm going to just drag everything out by one frame so that now every drawing is hell for two frames. Okay. All right. Let's play it back now at a normal speed. This end frame, I'm going to delete, because as you can see, it's the exact same as the first one, and that's why it looks a little bit jittery at the end. Let's go to the very beginning and play, and that's smooth. That's very, very even, really nice. I'm happy enough with that. I think this character is walking perfectly. The last thing I'm going to do is draw in the arms. I want the arms to be swinging normally, like he's just strolling along through his robot landscape. But I think in terms of the legs and the upper body, everything is working perfectly. Next up, I will put in the arm swing. And for that, I'm going to do it on a separate track just as before. And I'll probably I think I'll choose a different color just so that I can see everything a bit clearer. I'm going to choose blue for the arms. And for this, I'm just going to do one frame at a time. After each drawing, make sure that you extend your drawing out to two frames so that it matches the rest of the animation. So I'm going to go ahead and just fly through these very quickly. It's the exact same process as before. Use your onion skin to make sure that your drawings are nice and evenly spaced and that they're staying in a consistent arc. Okay. So now I think I'm nearly done with my rough animation. I'm gonna play this back and see how it looks with the arms and everything. And that's pretty cool. I think that's great. I do think the arm facing us, the robot's right arm is a little bit too long. I kind of overshot the scale or the volume there. But I'm going to fix that up when I go to clean up. But as far as the animation goes, this is perfect. It's done. I've figured everything out, and I've made this robot walk. So in the next lesson, join me, and I'm going to start painting up the character and bringing this to a n cleaned up finished animation. 17. Robot Walk Clean Up and Color: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how I approach painting up and cleaning up this animation to be a fully finished character walking. So I've got everything in a group, and I'm going to go to the beginning of that group, and I'm going to apply an opacity filter so that it's reduced down and it's a little bit more faded out. And then I'm going to go to the track above that group and repaint So for example, the first thing is that I want to have a nice bruh, a clean brush, not something that's super textured, you know, something that has got a nice clean line for the outline of my artwork. And then I'm just going to go in and try and trace over my drawing using as few lines as possible. Okay. So I'm drawing the torso first, the upper body. This is something that much like we did in the rough drawing, it's just going to be copied and pasted over. I don't have to draw this again. Then once I'm happy with the linework, I'm going to go up to my layers and add a new layer. This layer here is where my linework is. If you want, you can tap on that and rename it linework just to make sure that everything is organized and neat. Then underneath that and the layer below, I'm going to add my color. I'll rename that to base layer. The reason I'm calling it base layers because I'm also going to add some painterly effects onto this design. I want to have a little bit of a textured look. I don't want it to be completely flat color. But I'll first of all put down a flat color and then build up some texture on top of it. I'll show you exactly how I do that. The way I do that is I simply outline the shapes again with color and then I'm going to drop using the color picker inside of procreate dreams inside of procreate dreams, I'm going to drop the color into the middle. Now I've got my line, I've got my base color, I'm going to add another layer. Where I'm going to paint on textures. But on this layer, I'm going to tap and hold, and I'm going to convert this to a clipping mask. What a clipping mask does is it clips itself to the pixels on the layer below so that anything you paint on this clipping mask layer will only show up within the boundaries of the layer that's below it. So I'm going to rename that texture, and I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by that. So go ahead and from your brushes, choose something that has a nice texture to it, and then go to your color and choose a darker tone than your base color. You can adjust the saturation if you want as well, but just make sure it's a slightly darker tone, and then start painting over the base color. As you can see, this darker tone is only going to be seen on top of that base layer. Even though I'm painting outside just to get a nice painterly brush effect going, none of those other marks are going to show up because it's a clipping mask that is clipped to the base layer. Then what I'm going to do is choose a brighter color than my base color. It's as simple as that. You choose a darker color for your shadows and then a lighter color just to give it a bit of a highlight effect. You can mix up your texture brushes. You can use a different texture brush, if you like, or just experiment with different brushes. It's not going to be hugely obvious. It's just to give that effect of a painterly feel so that it's not just a simple flat color that might look a little bit boring or a little bit too cartoony. We want to give it a bit more dimension. So that's how I do my painting process. And now my entire upper torso fourths robot character is done. And I'm going to use these exact colors for the legs and the arms. What I like to do is create reference for my painting process from this first painting that I've done here. I'm just literally going to just quickly make a little swatch beside my character here so that I can reference each of these colors and I'll keep them consistent. That orange there is my base color. This is my highlight color, and this is my shadow color. And I might even just put in my line work color. To reference that. I sometimes find with Procreate dreams that using the color picker swatches can be a little bit tricky. It sometimes doesn't quite pick up the exact color. Having these swatches beside my workspace is going to help me I'm just going to continue to select from them instead of selecting from the color menu. Now, let's move ahead and do the legs. And the legs I'm going to do in the same process. First of all, draw them with my line color. Just following the rough drawing exactly. Then when I've got them drawn in, I'm going to go up to my layers. I'm going to add another layer underneath the linework. I call that base and fill that with the base orange color. Once I've got the base orange color filled in, I'm going to create another layer, turn it into a clipping mask and add some textured highlights and textured shadows on top. So that's my first pose done. I'm going to drag it out to two frames because remember we're animating on twos. Then go ahead in the timeline, duplicate my torso layer. All I need to do is match it up to the rough drawing underneath. So if I o in really close, you can see, there's my rough drawing. I'll just move the torso for that frame, and now I'm going to go ahead and draw the legs. So the beauty of this method is that once you've got your rough animation done, which you sort of, you know, almost create without any pressure really because it's rough. But very often, your rough animation ends up being exactly spot on and exactly what you needed to be. Then when you go into clean up and make everything look perfect, super clean and add color and paint and all of that, you're not actually animating. You're simply following the underlying rough animation. So in animation terms, this phase called cleanup was usually traditionally given to a different artist than the person who animated it. And I suppose this is what's so awesome about procreate dreams is that you now get to do everything in one go. You don't have to rely on a separate program or a separate app or a separate person to do any of the other parts of the animation. You have got control over the rough animation, the tie down, the final cleaned up linework, and you've even got control yourself over the color and painting process. It just really takes a little bit of patience getting used to the level of work that's involved because it is a little bit time consuming to go through each of these things frame by frame. But it is so rewarding and so satisfying to have gotten through an entire animation yourself that you did by hand every single frame. That's what I really want you to come away with from this class is that This process it's pretty unique, and not a lot of people know how to do this. There's an awful lot of apps and AI solutions out there that will animate something very, very generically. But there's no animation out there that can match what you can animate. That's why, becoming an animator is so powerful because you be able to have complete control over your characters and your stories. And so I hope that you can find this process a little bit interesting, and you don't mind the time it takes to paint everything up. It really actually doesn't take that long. I think the total time for me to do this was maybe a couple of hours of work from start to finish, including the rough drawings. The last thing I'll say is that the beauty of this process is that once you've created a looked animation, then you can really start to have fun with how you present that looked animation within a scene. And obviously, I'm going to be showing you that later on. We're going to add this animation to a background and really bring it to life and give this character a setting and a world that it can live in. But before we do that, we have to get through this process. So I really hope that you're still with me and you've gotten this far. And if you have that is awesome. All that's left to do is to do the arm swing. Now, for the arm swing, we're going to approach it very or slightly differently than we did with the legs. And the reason being is because I wanted to give you another alternative or another option to how you would animate something over, you know, ten or 12 frames. So when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 18. Robot Walk Cycle Arm Swing: So in this lesson, I'm going to just finish off the animation by animating the arm swing. Now, I wanted to show you a second or an alternative way of animating the limbs other than the way we did the legs. So when we animated the legs, we literally every frame and did our in betweens all by hand. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a second way of animating, and we're going to do that on the arms. What we're going to do is just like we did with the torso upper body, we're going to draw the arm sections one at a time. Copy each frame across and rotate it. So I'll show you exactly how to do that. To go into flip book mode, the first thing I'm going to do is just draw my upper arm, let's say. Because I've kept this design very stylized and very, very simple. We literally using just a round shape for the joints, which is nice because it makes it easy to animate them rotating around a central pivot point. Simply draw this very simple shape, like so, with the line color. And just like we did, every other part of the robot, we'll just paint and add a little texture on top of that in the exact same ways we did before using different layers for the base color and for the textures. Once that's done, that's in its first position, according to our rough drawing. That's our first frame. We need to make this drawing two frames long. I'll just drag it out. There's my first p for the upper. Then I'm going to duplicate that pose. Well duplicate that drawing. Zoom in, and then for the dam position, I need to shift it down slightly, so I'm going to match it up with my underneath drawing. If you want to, you can turn off the visibility of the robot upper body because it might make it a bit easier just to see the rough drawing underneath. Then what you're going to do is come out of draw mode and click on these three dots. Again, if you don't see your pivot point, you might need to zoom all the way out But see if you can find your stray pivot point. I don't know why it goes straight at the beginning, but there's mine over there. And what I'm going to do is drag it so that it is lined up with the top shoulder. Let's call it a shoulder or the top rotation point of the arm. And that matches up the down position as I've drawn it in my rough animation. And then from here on, I'm going to do the same process. I'm going to duplicate that exact drawing. And for the next pose, I'm going to go ahead and shift it into position, line it up exactly with the underneath drawing, make sure that the shoulder or that round rotation joint is in the right place, and then I can grab it and rotate it into position. So this might be an easier way for you to animate rather than redrawing every frame exactly over and over again if you wanted to do that, and you still get to retain that hand drawn look because well, you've drawn the first frame. So it's up to you you could even do the legs in this way as well. I personally found it a bit easier to just draw the legs for each frame or each position. But if you wanted to keep everything completely consistent, then you could do this method on the legs as well. But it's a very useful way to animate, and it's just about, making sure that you can line the frames. If you copy a frame over, just making sure you can line it up with the previous frame or the underneath drawing so that it isn't floating around and losing its spot. You have to keep it very consistent, and that takes a little bit of practice. And then the only thing that you need to do is do the exact same for the lower arm. So once I've got all of my upper arm positions done, and that's sorted, I'm going to then go back and work on the positions of the lower arm. And in this case, I like this a lot because honestly, I would probably if I was to draw the arms for each frame throughout the animation, I would probably definitely end up going off model and maybe making the hand a bit weird and a few frames, and you know, maybe making the length of the arm too long. Because as you could see, in my rough animation, that's exactly what I did. I made the length of my arm way too long in my roughs. So for me, something like the arms, if they change shape, or if they change volume, or if the hand changes, it might jump out quite a lot in the final product. So for something like this, this method works amazingly. You're just copying the exact same drawing onto each frame and putting it into place properly. As I said, the only thing you have to really keep an eye on is the fact that are you lining it up correctly into the same pivot point as you know, into the pivot point that it needs to be? Okay. So I'm going to fly through the rest of the arm swings. The only other point I want to make is when you get to the position of the arms crossing the body, It can look very weird. The poses can look really strange, and you might think that you're doing it wrong. All I'll say is, no, no, don't worry. Those poses do look really odd in a walk cycle, especially with a character like this. So don't worry, if once you get through it and make sure your poses are correct, you can play it back, and you'll see. Alright, so here I am at the end. I've done all my arms. I've done the legs, and I've got a robot walking, and it's done, and I think that that works perfectly. It's a little bit robotic, I know, but obviously that's what we wanted to aim for. But it's a very nice, consistent and natural looking walk. I can't believe that we got to the end of the sup cycle. I hope you're still with me. I hope you're enjoying this process. And if you've gotten this far, congratulations, that's amazing. What we're going to do next is we're going to group this entire walk into one group, and we're going to add it into a background. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson, and I'll show you how to fully bring this simple animation to completion and set this robot character in its own world to create a fully finished scene. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. P. 19. Adding Background Art to Your Animation: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to add a background to the animation. I'm also going to show you how you can mask out some of the background to make it look like your character is walking behind elements within the background. But before I do any of that, I want to tidy up my timeline, and this is a good practice for any creative to do is to try and keep your files organized because in animation, things can get out of hand really quickly with lots of layers. And lots of tracks. You want to be able to always keep on top of things. That's all that I'm going to do now is just group everything together. I'm also going to name my groups, which you can do as well. There's a very handy thing that you can do is to color code your tracks. So if you wind up with a lot of animation, you might want to do this, give each of your tracks a different color, so that when you're all the way zoomed out, or you're trying to scroll through all of your content and identify where a certain section of your animation is, the color code will help a lot. So yeah, that's what I've done now. I've got everything nicely organized, the arms are on a separate layer. The legs or a separate track, I should say, the legs are on a separate track, and the torso is as well. That makes it incredibly easy and straightforward if I ever need to go back into my animation and change something up. I'll be able to find it very quickly. I'm now ready to add my background. To add a background or to add an image or anything into your document, it's super simple in Procreate dreams. Come over to the Plus button, tap on that and from here, just choose photos so that you can add from your own photo library. Now, hopefully you've downloaded this background image if you haven't, Simply go over to the projects and resources tab on a desktop or laptop and find this file that I've left for you and download it and then use Airdrop to get the image over to your iPad. So once you've brought it into your procreate dreams file, you'll see that it comes in a little bit. It's not quite the same proportions, but that's fine. All you have to do is just grab the corners and scale it up. Okay? So scale it up like that. And then because my animation is in one group, I can now move my entire animation around, so I'll just maybe grab it and move it over here. So the next thing we're going to do is duplicate the group so that we have enough animation to last the duration of our document, which is about 5 seconds. Tap on the group, click duplicate and duplicate again. All right. So for hit play, our animation is looping, but he's walking on the spot because that's how we animated this character. What I'm going to do is click on the Tline Edit button. I'm going to select everything and group this all as one group. Now I've got my groups within one group, and now I can animate this group. Basically, I'm going to go to the beginning, tap on the playhead over here and apply a move and scale keyframe. Let's see, I'm going to drag the character way off to the left because I want this character to be walking on screen and essentially he's going to come from over here. Now, I know at the moment he's on top of the background, and that's a bit weird, but I'm going to show you how to fix that. Let's go to the end first and create a moving scale at the end keyframe, and then just drag the character across the screen like so. Perfect. Now, effectively, the robot will be walking from one side of the screen to the other like essentially crossing across this entire scene. Lovely. Perfect. Now what I want to do is make it look like he's walking behind this element here in the foreground. This is going to look really effective once we do it, and it's always really nice to have these foreground elements in the background just to give that sense of depth. What you're going to do is add a new track above the animation, and then on that track, go into draw mode, pull up flip book. What I like to do is choose quite a bright or stand out color. I'm going to go with red or something. I'm going to now trace over the elements that I want to be masked out. Anything above the robots height doesn't really matter. It's really more so this element in here that I need to, I need to take care with. So I'm tracing around the outer edge of this element very carefully and coloring it in as I go. So all of these little areas here are where we'll see a glimpse of the robot. What the mask is doing is that it's going to only show the robot in those red areas. So that's why it's almost worth it to paint up the whole screen, but you don't have to, but certainly around this object here. So once you've got everything painted in, like that, what you're going to do is come back over to the frame on your timeline. Choose filled duration so that that mask essentially is filled out to the duration of the timeline, and then tap on hold and choose mask from the drop down menu. Then from there, I want you to choose the layer mask. Remember, we use clipping mask before in when we painted the robot to add textures. Well, in this instance, we're going to use layer mask to ensure that we mask out the layer of animation below us. Once you do that, you'll see that the content changes in your timeline. And if you scrub through, you'll see that the robot disappears completely once he goes behind the elements that we mask out. Okay. Let's zoom out and let's hip play and see how that looks. There you go. That is very effective. I really like that. That works, and then he walks off screen, and yep, that's it. So have a go at doing this, import the background into your animation, create a new layer above your animation and add a layer mask so that it looks like your character is embedded within this background scene. 20. Breaking Down a Run Cycle: So now that we've progressed through the all important bouncing ball project, we've done the walk cycle, and we've created an animated scene with our robot character and background. It's time to move on to the next really important project, and that's a run cycle. So this is actually very similar to a walk cycle, but it's actually a lot easier because you can think of it as a shortened version of the walk cycle. There isn't so many poses involved. So what I'm going to do is first break down the run cycle for you much like I did with the walk. I'll just use a simple figure running, and I'll show you the key poses, and I'm going to point out any notes that I think are important. So this is my little run, and as you can see, it's a fairly simple, very nice and snappy run. So let's take a look at the poses. I have the body and the legs on one track, and I've got the head on another track. But since we're just looking at the poses as a whole, I've got them all grouped out into one. So the first pose is the contact pose just like in a walk. But in a run, only 1 ft is in contact with the ground, not both. Then the next pose is the down position. That's when the character makes full contact with the ground, the foot comes down onto the ground, and the whole body sort of scrunches down into this position into this pose. After that, we have what's usually called the kick off. This is where the character literally springs up from the crouched position, but just note that the character hasn't quite left the ground yet, so the foot is still in contact a little bit here. After that, we've got a pose that is a bit unusual. This is the pose that this is what makes the run a run, really. And this is when we have both feet completely off the ground and the characters in the air. So let's call this pose the air pose. And the thing to note about the air pose is that this is where the arms are at their widest. If you recall in our walk cycle, we had the arms at the widest swing when the character was in the down position. But in a run, the arms in the down position are swinging close into the body in anticipation for that big kickoff and air pose. Okay. Then after the air Pose, you get straight into the next contact position. There are really only three poses in a regular run cycle and two contacts. So just to sum up, you've got a contact, down pose, kickoff, air, and your next contact pose. Now, to make it a cycle, you have to do the same exact poses again on the other leg. You need your kickoff and your last pose for the cycle is the air. So that will ensure that it loops back to the very beginning pose again. It will hook up, and it will loop seamlessly. Now, I want you to notice that there are no in betweens here. These are all the key poses, if you like, and that's very different to the walk cycle where we actually added in a couple of in betweens in between some of these key poses. But here it's just the keys, and it works perfectly even on twos as a very nice and cartooni run. So there you go. If you wanted to sort of change things up and modify this slightly, make your run a little bit more artiful. What you can do is experiment by, you know, taking out one of these poses or even adding an in between, say you added an in between around the air pose so that the characters up in the air just a little bit longer, that could give a different feeling to this run altogether. It would make it look a bit more like a springy jog or, you know, give that kind of skipping feeling. If you wanted to make it an even faster run, then what you could do is just take out either the kickoff pose or the air pose and that would make it a much faster run cycle. We can look at that later when we animate the Ninja character. Let's do that. Let's dive into the next lesson. Let's start roughing out our poses, for our run cycle, for the Ninja character. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 21. Ninja Run Cycle Rough Poses: In this project, we're going to animate a character of a Ninja running through snowy forest, and we're going to do it in the exact same ways. We've done it before. We'll start out with some rough poses just to get the idea of the character in these very distinct run cycle poses. Then we'll clean up our drawings and we'll add color to the animation, and then finally, we'll animate a background. The very first thing that I always like to do when I start out doing any character animation whatsoever, I try to thumbnail out ideas for character poses. And this is an excellent idea just to warm up as well as to get a feel for the character that you're about to start animating. It gives you a chance to experiment with what your poses might look like, gives you some sort of free flowing ideas about how to pose out your character. And a great way to do this is to draw in sort of almost like silhouettes. This trains you to understand poses much better if you see them in a silhouette, because you want your poses to read very clearly. A lot of beginner animators make the mistake of not drawing very clear, distinct poses. And so drawing characters in silhouette is a great practice to understand how to push a pose, how to exaggerate it, and most importantly, to know how to make it read clearly for whatever the action is that you're trying to portray. I said, this is just a little warm up exercise that I do, but I thought it was important to include this and to let you know that this is really part of the animators process as well. But I'm literally going to just lower the opacity, bring them over to the side, and I'm just going to place them there for reference. And then I'm going to dive in and start drawing my first pose in the run cycle. So the first pose is that contact pose, and I want to have 1 ft on the ground and 1 ft back. And I would encourage you when you're doing these poses, especially for a run is to really, you know, go don't try and make the poses in a sense small, and I could say, indistinct. You know, you want your poses to be very bold, almost exaggerated. So if you think that you're sort of drawing an exaggerated pose, Don't worry too much about it. It's actually more than likely going to read perfectly fine in the final animation. And you'll see that play out in this particular animation project, the way that the poses, which might seem hugely exaggerated, are actually quite fine in the end. That is my rough rough character design for the first contact position. Next, I'm going to add a new frame or jump onto the next frame following it directly, and in there, I'm going to draw the second contact position. It's the same pose more or less, but the legs and the arms are switched. Now the leg that was previously backwards, the leg that was previously forwards is now swung back and the same with either of the arms. Now, what I'll do is I'll go back in between these two poses. I'll go back to my very first drawing and add a frame in between these two poses. Then in here, I'm going to start drawing the down pose. This is where the character really fully makes contact with the ground. Now, after the down position, the next pose up is the kickoff. Now the character body is being propelled upwards so that back leg is completely straight, and I'm keeping the body at this distinct angle and just making the arms swing out and that back legs start to come forward. One or two points here to note is that remember, you want to keep your animation. You want to make sure that the character is going to stay in the same vertical plane. So because he's running on a spot, again, it's like he's on a treadmill, the upper body and the head will be in the exact same position more or less going up and down, and it's just the legs that are swinging through these arcs. The other thing I want to point out is that I'm drawing really rough, and I'm not worrying about whether or not, my lines are going to match up. That comes later. Right now, it's really just about making the poses work. So that is the air pose that I've done, and that's pretty much it, actually, because now I've got all five of the main poses. I've got my two contact positions, down position, kickoff and air. So if I scrub through the timeline, it's looking good. Now I just need to do the same poses on the other side. So I'll come back to my first pose. I am going to copy that because this is where I want my animation to end up looping back to. So I've got my contact positions over there. I'm going to then pull up my flip book and start to just quickly draw in the three poses on this other leg. Okay. I have now finally got all of my poses together. So I'm going to go to that final pose there, which is the last contact position, and I'm going to delete that because that's just a duplicate of the very first pose. If I play through the animation, it's very fast because I every on ones. So as usual, I'm going to select all of my drawings in the timeline using the timeline edit tool. Go down to the first frame, tap and hold on the edge and drag all of the frames out so that each drawing is two frames long. Now let's play it back, and that's great. My ground plane obviously, I didn't extend that out. So if I extend that out and play it back, that's looking really good. That's a fairly decent run. So yeah, that works perfectly. So now all I need to do is just tidy up my linework before moving into adding color. So when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 22. Ninja Run Cycle Tie Down: In this lesson, I really just want to clean up my line work, which is a very straightforward process, and you should be well used to it by now if you've worked through the other projects in this class, particularly the walk cycle. There's not much change. The only thing I do change in this pass on my animation is I'm giving a little bit more definition to the character. So he's wearing a mask around his head, things like you know, and like boots with laces on his legs and arms. So I'm just giving those sort of little details, a bit more definition in this pass before I move into the color phase. Making sure that I'm tracing over the existing rough drawings that I worked out in the previous past. Because those rough drawings worked fine when I played a back, I know that the run cycle is working, I know the animation is working. So this is just really all about cleaning up that linework. Because the run is not that long of an animation, it's just literally a few frames, this doesn't take that long at all. It's just a very quick process of redrawing. All I'm doing is reducing the opacity down of my roughs underneath and simply redrawing my frames over on top on a new track. So the one thing that is important, though, is that I'm I'm separating out the head and the body because I don't want the head to change whatsoever, I want to keep consistent. So I'm drawing the head on a track above the body, which will ensure that every time I make a new frame and get into the new pose, I just need to copy the head over and move that head into place, and that that in itself will ensure that then the animation stays consistent. It looks like it's staying on model, because, you know, realistically, the biggest thing that will jump out in any animation is the head, because that's what you're looking at the most when you're looking at character animation. So I always try to keep that consistent. And if you have a chance to just copy and paste rather than redrawing it, then you can be pretty sure that you're not going to mess it up too much. M. Alright, so let's play it back. Think it's working perfectly fine now. I think I'll just turn off my rough drawing underneath and play it back now, see if it's a bit clearer. Yeah, that looks really good. We've got a really decent run going and the character everything is working. Perfectly unmodeled throughout all of the poses. So fabulous. I'm really happy with that. All I'm going to do now is add some color and then we'll get into animating our background pan so that it looks like it's a proper scene with the character running through snowy forest. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 23. Ninja Run Cycle Adding Color: So in this lesson, I'm going to prepare for the next phase. Now, you could go through the cleanup phase again if you wanted to do another pass, if you wanted to have a super clean line. But I'm going to keep my animation intentionally like a bit sketchy. I wanted to really retain that hand drawn look and have the animation feel a little bit like it's been drawn by hand. But it's totally up to you if you wanted a very stylized character, a very cartoony version, then you could definitely work through the cleanup phase once more and bring your line down to just one solid line. Now, this color pass that I'm going to do right now is very, very straightforward. But it is necessary because at the moment, the only thing that I have here is linework. And if I wanted to put a background behind this character, then that would see through, and that would not be right. So I do need to add some color or some sort of color behind him. Now, there's a couple of ways that you could have done this. You could have gone through this whole process in the previous phase during the cleanup by simply just adding a new layer underneath your drawing each time. Remember how we did that with the robot character. But in this lesson, in this phase, what I'm going to do is just add another track underneath my line work, and I'm just going to add a piece of color on that track for each frame. But to start out, because we've got a white background here, it's going to be difficult to paint white on top of that and see what you're doing. So what you need to do is simply come down to the corner, tap on the time code of your document, and here I want you to just change up the background color change from white to something with a bit of tone, and that's going to be much easier to work with. Then go ahead, grab the white paint, and as you can see, that makes it much easier to see what you're doing. It's literally just tracing over each frame and making sure that your frame is two frames long, exactly like we've done in all of the previous processes. You also want to at this stage, put color in for the face. Since that's going to be obviously visible. Even though we just see this tiny part, it's important to do that. I'm only going to draw like an eyebrow like this to indicate the eyes. I think it will look weird if there isn't any eyes or if there aren't any eyes. But I also want to just make sure that I'm not putting in any detail because this isn't going to read. That's going to be very not really discernible, so you don't want something to jump out as being a bit strange. So just keep it simple, just give something to indicate where the eyes are. You can fly through that in a few minutes. It's not going to take long at all. As I said, it might seem like a bit of an extra step that we've taken. I would say that you could possibly do this at the same time as your cleanup line work, or even at the same time, if you're very good at drawing, you could do this during your phase. It doesn't really matter. I just wanted to separate the process out a bit so that you have an understanding of each of the stages that are involved. Finally, at the end of the day, here we are, you should end up with a little character like this in a perfect, cohesive and lovely run cycle, all painted, all ready to go. That's brilliant. If you've got this far, that's amazing, well done, we are now ready to finalize this project and to create a complete scene around this animation. So when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson, and we'll finalize this scene together. 24. How to Animate a Camera Pan: All right. So in this lesson, I'm going to show you how I would add a background to this animation, and I'd also add what's called an overlay. An overlay in animation terms is an element of background art that is overlaid on top of the animation, and it gives a sense of depth, gives a sense of the characters being embedded within the scene. And it also gives you the opportunity or the capability to animate the overlay at a separate speed to the rest of the background. And I'm going to show you all of that in this lesson. So, okay, so the first thing that I want to do is actually jump over to procreate, because I want to prep my background before I bring it in to this document. I want to make sure that there's parts of my background that are separate from each other. So let's hop into procreate, and I'm going to open up this file here. So what I've got here is a long background. It's not it's double the normal sort of length of a, a screen size, which is normally 1080 by 1910 80 by 1920, but I've gone ahead and doubled it so that I have enough of a background to use for a pan. And then if I open up my layer stack here, you can see that I even have trees on separate layers. So these trees that are in the foreground here, these are on separate layers from the rest of the background. Okay. So that's really all that I wanted to point out is that if you've got artwork that you wanted to use for your animation, make sure that you have prepared it properly within something like procreate so that when you go to import it into your animation file, you can have different elements on separate tracks. So I'm going to go ahead and merge these trees into into one layer because I don't need them. I don't need three separate tracks. I just need one track. So I'm going to go merge down, tap and hold on this tree, merge down. And there you go. I've got my foreground trees and my background layer. All right, so I have left this exact file for you to download in the Projects and Resources tab. So head over you have to be on a laptop or a desktop, but head over to that tab and you'll be able to download this file. And then what I would say is open it up first in Procreate, because I'm going to show you a cool way to bring your layers into Procreate dreams that will keep them on separate tracks. There are many ways to bring this artwork into Procreate dreams. But what I'm going to do is go into gallery, tap and hold on my file, swipe up, and going to procreate dreams. And then I'm going to just simply drag it underneath my animation and let go. Now, the cool thing about this is that what you can do is tap and hold on this entire element. Come up to this option here, which says convert layers to tracks. Tap on that, and it has now converted it into a group, which you can now open, and there you have it, your trees and your background are on separate tracks. So that's just a really handy thing to know if you've got a background or artwork that has multiple layers inside of Procrate. Instead of dragging everything over one layer at a time to ensure that you've got each of them on separate tracks, simply bring the whole project file into Procreate dreams, and then from there use that option of converting everything into tracks. Perfect. Next up, I'm going to just orient my animation and my background. I'm going to on the background layer, drag this over to the right so that it's at the edge there and the same with the trees layer. I'm going to drag that so it's more or less there. I'm just going to increase the size slightly so that there's no gaps. But now my character is on top of my foreground layer. What I should do really is ungroup my background art. Tap and hold, and I'm going to just choose ungroup, and then I'm going to tap and hold on trees and just drag it above my animation. Now, the ET track is there so I can just delete that. That is now very nice and orderly. Next up, I'm going to scale down my animation. It's too big. I want this to look like It's in scale, so I would imagine that makes the character way too small. Something about round about there is pretty good. Then you just need to decide where you want your character to be placed. If you want them in the center, That's a, you know, decent enough place to have the m, or you could just, you know, compose your shot so that the character is a little bit off center or even compose your shot so that the characters over to the left, and that might actually work for the camera pan. But the next thing that we need to do is make sure that our animation lasts for the length of time that we want our shot to last. So drag everything out here to 5 seconds and then duplicate the animation as many times as we need to to fill up the track. So I'm just tap and hold and hit duplicate. All right. I'm going to make my animation actually to 4 seconds. I'm going to delete d. Then come down to the background layer, go to the very beginning, tap on your playhead and add a move and scale key frame at the beginning. Go to the end and add your second movement scale and now move your background to the left. Let's hit play. That looks pretty good. Then lastly, I'm going to go to my trees layer, which is the overlay. I'm going to add a movement scale at the beginning, and one at the end. Now. Let's see what that looks like. There you have a pretty decent run through the snowy forest with our character, and it looks awesome. But let's do one more thing before we finish up just to make it look even more cinematic and atmospheric on our scene. What we're going to do is come down to our trees. I'm going to because we've added a move and scale onto our trees, we can't do. We can't add any more animation onto that. I want to add a tiny bit of a motion blur onto my overlay layer because I just to give that cinematic feeling, I want the foreground elements to be a little bit out of focus. What I'm going to do is add a track above my foreground layer, above my overlay layer. Then I'm going to simply jump into my brush mode and make some mark on that. I'm going to go tap and hold on the frame, I'm going to choose filteration. All right, then I'm going to click on the timeline edit button and group these two tracks. Now that I've got both of them grouped into one track, I'm actually going to go back and delete the drawing. Delete content. You can even delete that track. So I've essentially got my trees on sorry within a group. And that's where I wanted you to get to so that I can show you how to add a blur on top of your already existing key frames. So just to recap, my movement scale keyframes are inside on the content itself. They're moving nicely. We're working very well. I've then gone ahead and created a group that encompasses the tracks with those two keyframes. I'm now going to add a blur effect onto the group. Tap and hold on there, tap on filter, tap Gaussian blur, and drag up the blur amount. Now, you don't have to drag it up an awful lot. You'll see just at 1%. It's already made a difference. If I drag it up too much, even at 3%, you totally lose the lose it completely. So don't lose it. Keep it together, but just drag it up to about 1%. Let's see what that looks like. That's great. It just gives it that tiny little bit of blurriness that is enough to make it feel like it's out of focus. That is the end of our little animation project, our Ninja run, and I hope you've enjoyed this lesson. If you have, let me know if you've got any questions, let me know, and I will look out for you in the project section, and I can't wait to see your work. 25. Conclusion: Well, congratulations for making it to the end of the class. I couldn't be prouder of you. If you've made it here through all of the lessons, I think that in itself is a huge achievement. If you've gotten through any of the projects, then you've really knocked it out of the park. I think learning animation on your own is a really challenging process, but I know that your dedication and your commitment to get through this class, that in itself is a testament to your work ethic, and I think that will really stand to you as you build out your animation career. So remember, I'm here if you have any questions at all or about any of the information in the class. Simply add a discussion or tag me if you've got any questions. I'll also be looking out for you in the projects and resources to have. And I hope you pose some of your work there so that we can take a look at it and also take a look at other students work. So thank you so much for choosing to take this class. I'm really honored to share my perspective with you on your learning journey, and I hope in some way that the knowledge I've shared here helps to propel you further in your work and in your career. Good luck, and I'll see you in the next class.