ToonSquid: Bouncy Heart Valentine

1. Course Introduction and What You'll Create: Hi, I'm Jonah, and my heart jumps for joy with this next project. This next project takes on one of the key animation exercises that you start off with in your animation journey, which is called the bouncy ball. However, with a Valentine's twist, we are going to be creating a bouncy heart animation. I will walk you through the process of working with a reference image, building your color palette, and working on a spacing timing chart. By utilizing this, we plan out our key frames and the intertwining poses of our bouncy heart character. This helps make our animation smooth and a little more realistic. And we're going to go the next step. It'll squash and stretch, and we're going to step into the next thing, which is a secondary action. So a secondary action is where something else occurs within a scene. This will help you get started working with arcs. Throughout this class, we will be utilizing both frame by frame animation and key frames. So this is a great way to expand your animation techniques and approaches, and I can't wait to see what you will do with your heart animation. So let's get our iPad, Apple Pencil, and ToonSquid and join me in this class. 2. Opening Your Project Files in ToonSquid: The first thing we're going to do with our project is open our project. Now I have attached our first starter project to the classroom, so be sure to download it. It's already in a ToonSquid format. All it requires you to do is download it onto your iPad and open it and it will import directly into ToonSquid. I'm just going to show you how that looks. The project files will be available in the class through a zip file. Once you've downloaded the ZIP file into iPad and extract it, you will see a folder called Project Files. And these two files here, the project start is the ToonSquid file that you would tap and it would immediately import into ToonSquid. The dot palette is the color palette that is available in case for some reason the project file didn't. When you open up the project, you're going to see this hand drawn image, which is a reference image. It's going to be on a layer called sketch and there is a color palette reference. Make sure you have both in place before you get started and let's dig into this. 3. Setting Up Your Color Palette: So on your iPad, open the ToonSquid file, and it will mutely import ToonSquid. Let's take a look at what's inside this file. Once your file has been imported in in ToonSquid, you should see this a graphic background. And when we open our timeline, we would see once a tap the e here, the sketch drawing. With this color background, we can actually build our palette. So by going up to the color palette, I already have it made. If it did not open within your project, then this next step is what you would follow. We're going to click the Plus and using the color picker tool over here, we're just going to highlight each color. Once I've done that, I tap, to add that color. Next color picker, choose the face, add it. Another picker, then the cheeks. How you have it arranged, make sure you're choosing the color palette selections to what makes sense to you. Mine is arranged in a way that makes sense to me. As you see here, I have from lights to darks. Let's do another color picker, have the accent. Now there's another reason I added this picture is because the darker color is right here for the outline, so we can just grab that and add as well. You see, even with my new color palette, it looks different than the one here. If we tap these three dots, we can rename it. I will have to name it something different. Otherwise it's going to conflict. Bouncy Heart two, just for sake now that color palette is ready for us to look at the next step. 4. Creating the Heart Shape and Layer Groups: So let's get started with our heart characters body. So within my timeline above the sketch layer, I'm just going to tap the sketch layer, tap the plus and create a new layer, it's okay if we don't name it right now. And for the brush tool, we're going to make sure that we are on rough ink and that I selected this very first color here. Brush size is up to you. I have mine just above 80 and we're just going to follow the line here. That's okay if you deviate a bit from this design. There we go. Just want to make sure we close our line there. Now with the paint tool or the fill tool, I should say, if we tap these three dots, we get additional settings. Now, I'm tapping away just to demonstrate without changing anything, when we fill, we notice that there's a bit of a line halo. But now when we tap the three dots, we can adjust to expand it, which allows that fill color just to go a little further, do around six pixels and then blur it. Around two. Now when we fill it in, it almost fills it in seamless. It's up to me if I want to fine tune the line there, but this looks great. I'm going to go to my layers. Tap this little icon here, rename and name it to Heart. Fill. If you forget to rename, that's okay. The project will still work, but make sure you do. You get in the habit of labeling your layers just for organization's sake. Now we're going to choose this darker red color here and I may need to lower that pen and I'm still using rough ink just to follow the outside of the heart. There we are. Now we have both the fill and the outline colors. Again, I can go to the layer and rename it art Outline. Now we're going to look at grouping these two layers together. There's certainly more than one way to do this. The easiest way I found is first make sure it's selected. Notice this little light blue glow. If I tap on the next one, that's techniqually selected. Select more than one layer, we just either tap with the pin, so tap and swipe and now it's selected tap and swipe selects. With them both selected like this, we can tap the plus and then group. Now this neat little feature and some of these features are actually in the latest version of ToonSquid. If you don't see these available, make sure you update as soon as you can. Now this group I can tap and rename and now I have the hard body. 5. Drawing the Heart's Face: So next, we're going to look at creating a face for our heart. We're going to choose the rough ink brush, and then this black color and then make sure we are in the group of the body and then go into layer, and we're going to tap and rename this two eyes. There we go. Now with this, we're going to make our eyes. With eyes, we're going to make an oval maybe another oval shape like this. We can add a little bit of a shine to the eyes. We can make that a new layer and just do highlight. For this, we don't have to necessarily pick a color for a palette, we can just choose actual white for the highlight, we're just going to add a little bit of a dot here and a little bit of a dot here. Next, we will create another layer and we're going to rename this mouth. We want to use our palettes. We're going to go back to palettes, choose this black color again, and then just make a smile. Looking really good. We're going to add one more detail and I'm going to rename this cheeks. The heart. We're going to choose this really light pink here and now make little tiny circles. Make the cheeks like so. Our last step to practice with our groups. I'm just going to touch and swipe each of these layers like that, tap the plus and then group, rename to face. Now we have our face for our heart. O. 6. Animating the Downward Motion with Ease Out: So next we're going to plan out our initial we're going to plan out the first part to our heart bounce animation. I want to do here is I'm going to go to layer and create a new layer and tap rename. I'm going to call this timing chart, which is used in animation to plan out the flow of our animation. To plan that out, I'm going to go to Brush tool, make sure I'm on six B and then I picked a gray. Timing chart is just a guide for how we want our animation to flow. I'm going to draw a straight line like this for me to visualize the fact that this heart is going to fall from top to bottom. My first starting position. And last. These are going to be our key poses. I'm going to write one because I want to start on the first frame and I'm going to be ending up around the 11th frame. The reason is I'm using what's called the odd rule. For every three frames, two, three drawings, I'm changing the drawing. With the odd rule, because we're animating 12 frames per second, the last drawing will be landing on the ground around frame 11. To help me see this guide all along my animation, I'm going to jump to frame 12, make sure my timing chart is selected and tap extend. Tap my first drawing, copy. Frame 11 paste. We have one more problem. We're showing each drawing only for one frame, which is a very quick animation. We're going to animate on what's called two, the picture is going to stay on the screen for about two frames. To do this, I am now selecting the one empty spot next to my first drawing and tapping extend, and then frame 11 doing the same. Now my drawings are showing for two frames before changing. The next thing is I want to position my heart where it should be on the first frame or for the first drawing. I'm going to tap and drag this to the very top. Some around there, it could be higher. Now, as you may have noticed, there's some additional color happening on my screen, but that's because I have onion skin enabled. If I press and hold onion skin, it allows me to see how many drawings in the future I want to see and how many drawings prior do I want to see. It's a great tool for planning animations as well. The light green heart show me where the heart lands and where my heart starts. Now I just want to hide my sketch layer so I'm only seeing my current animation. So now that we planned out our first and 11th drawing, how do we know where things are going to be in the rest of our animation? On the heart layer, your own timing chart layer. We're going to draw position about halfway between the first and 11th drawing. What this does is we're picking a halfway point. We're making a guess on how fast this heart is actually falling to the ground. Instead of figuring it out math wise, that's why the odd rule helps us. We get pretty close. 11 doesn't really divide half very easily around the seventh drawing or seventh frame. Our heart should be at the midpoint. Back to the heart layer, tap and paste and make sure it is two drawings. Now I'm going to move it up to about halfway between the first and the 11th drawing. Now when I play my animation, we do have big gaps. However, if I tap and drag this over just to see the motion a little quicker, it looks like this. It does have good motion. It's linear motion. I'm going to undo to bring those back to where they belong. We're going to use what's called ease out. What that means is we need a few drawings close together just to slow down the heart before it makes a quick jump. To plan that out, we're going to use halves again and this should be our fifth drawing. Tap, s the heart, go around frame five and paste, drag it down about halfway between the first and the seventh drawing. Somewhere around there. Even now when I play it, you can see how the heart slowly moves, has a bit of a slow motion before it makes a big jump to the ground. We're going to do one more right here, three. Back to the heart, paste and I'll move that halfway between frame one and frame three. What we've done here is we've created our first set of motion here 1-3, that's a key in between, key, and then I have a bigger going here and here, going key this is the breakdown and then the key again. We can always rough the parentheses. Now we have our ease out. That's looking a lot better. By creating those first three drawings and putting them closer together, we get a bit of a slow motion before it makes a big jump to the ground, which gives the illusion of the heart moving very quickly. And there we go. Now that we've created our first part of our animation, we're ready to look at the next step, making the heart jump back up. 7. Animating the Upward Motion with Ease In: Now that we've created the sequence of our heart falling to the ground, we're going to now do the second part of this loop, which is the heart bouncing back up to the sky. Since the heart has gained momentum, it's going to use a similar timing chart, but this time using ease in for the bounce up. It's going to start here at 13. Jump back up and around frame 23, the heart should be at the peak. Let's create our key frames. Go to frame 23 paste. Extend our timing chart just to make sure we can see it. Change the position, move our key frame here. Now we have our two keyframes. Same step. We're going to plan out our midpoint, which is about halfway. That's probably going to be probably around 17 because that's about halfway. Move our heart up to around 17 and now figure out the halfway. We're going to start at frame 1919, move it in between, and we can even add that to our timing chart rate about here, 19 and then 21. 21 will be halfway 19-23 about here. Our drawings are a little off centers, t's quickly line them up and line it up. And then set an end loop. Let's extend that time frame a little longer and do play. Now our heart bounces down and bounces back up. Because you see the heart is slowing down when it reaches the height and then comes back down, creating a nice seamless loop. Although there's still areas for improvement. Make sure our ground is running all the way play. Now our animation is ready for us to move on to the next step of refining this bounce. 8. Adding Squash and Stretch Effects: We want to look at our timing, which has to do with actually the spacing. Right now, we do have some gaps in our art where the illusion of it falling and bouncing back up isn't as refined yet. The first thing I want to do is apply the squash and stretch to our as the heart is falling, it's going to hit the ground. Here, once it lands on the ground, it jumps back up. With this drawing here, we're going to go to the transform tool, tap on the scaling mode and choose free form. Make sure our onion skins enabled and we're just going to use this top handlebar and squish it like that. So that now bounces back up. With that slide adjustments, we'll see how that looks. Now, the other thing to help with the spacing is where these first three images are. They are still quite far apart. I'm going to move my third drawing just a little closer to the first one and the fifth one a little closer. That way, the image is a bit smoother. There we go. To make that adjustment, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to move that up and move that up in preview. One more spacing or timing we could do is there is a gap for 2 seconds here. We could experiment with stretching this to be three frames, drop this one down to one. Same for this, drop down to one and use the handlebar three. That's looking really good. We still have a bit of a gap there. With our drawings, we do have these handlebars, as I just demonstrated. These handlebars allow us with Apple Pencil. You have to be careful because it does do weird things. Once I press and quickly press and move the handlebars over, I can extend drawings to be either two frames, three frames, or four frames. Holding it for three disallows our eyes to see it longer before it jumps to the next one. Now, we can tap these empty ones and delete and then see how this looks. Now by eliminating those space gaps, the animation looks really smooth and bouncy. Now, one more thing we can do just to add to that squash and stretch is the fact that the heart is falling down with a bit of momentum. To demonstrate this, I could choose which drawing to stretch. Let's go drawing three, stretch it a little bit. Same with five, and then here at seventh drawing, then it lands. Let's see how that looks. Now to reverse that, I could bring this back to maybe midpoints squant with a stretch. Or another way to do this would be let's undo those. Delete frames falling, but here because it's at the peak of the fall, it could be bit stretch here. I am noticing that things are not quite aligned, so I'm just going to readjust that now. It's subtle, but the heart with that stretch gives that motion. We could do the same for when the heart bounces up here, stretch. With those subtle changes, our heart now has a little more life to it and we can now change R and loop. I'm noticing that the heart isn't quite a line in the endless loop and one way we could do that is to copy slash drawing and put it after we can make adjustments. What that will do is make it look like a slight arch to its bounce. Now we've added squash and stretch, adjusted the timing and spacing of our drawings to bring more life. 9. Creating a Confetti Heart: So now we're going to start planning out the Heart confetti timing. And so we're going to go to our timeline here and around this frame, which is drawing frame ten and 11 is where the Cafetti heart will come back out. So to do this, we're going to create a new layer. And I'm just going to tap and rename and call this confetti path. Choose a choose my color for sketching and make sure I'm on my sketching path, pencil and just hide the other. So for this, I'm going to picture that the confetti is going to come back from behind the heart. And fall like this. So it's going to shoot up and fall down with gravity. So I'm thinking about halfway here is the first initial quick burst. So the heart should start here about halfway here, it's going to do ease out, something like that, and the drawings can be definitely closer. And then from here, they're going to it's going to fall linear. So we're going to do an actual ease out. Ease in, and then fall like that. Now, I could go linear where here it starts slowing down. So this doesn't ease in and ease out as well. Something like that. So there is our path, and I'm thinking these hearts are falling for the remainder of the animation till the heart reaches back up. So they should be on the ground by the time the heart bounces up. And I'm anticipating that there'll be timing adjustments in this, as well. So next, we're going to create the first layer of our hearts, go to our color palette. So for now, let's work with darker. And since the drawings, I'm going to tap and rename my layer and do unfeti Heart. And there will be multiple of these, and I'll walk you through how to work with each one. So with this cafetti heart, we can actually jump over to the rough ink and as min. Let's hide our main heart for now and do a very simple Heart and just fill it in like that. And so we can see because I had tunes with setup, it is already created for two frames, so I'm going to jump to frame 13, which means the heart should be up here. Now, I could challenge myself and actually hand draw the heart or you can use that approach of duplicating the drawing. So it's going to be about here. All you take this approach. It's called hand drawn iteration because each version of the heart will be slightly different. So I'm actually using my fingers to pinch it. Alright, so let's draw this one. Actually, this one, I'm going to have still in this mold. Gonna adjust heart sizes as time goes on. Then as I'm creating the drawings, I'm realizing that this motion path is fine, and I may except that the timing is a little longer than I initially anticipated. So as we move forward, we can just use that handlebar to extend the drawing longer to help us keep moving forward. Then send that drawing. One more. So now we are going to set by tapping on frame 32 and loop, and let's just hide the timing chart for that. Show the heart and just see how this heart burst confetti looks. Because my heart bounces and extending all the frames, I'm now just going to look at shortening the loop by tapping on frame eight and changing the start loop and now watching. That looks really good. Now, of course, you can always adjust the timing to how you want your heart flow. For example, we could go to use the transform tool and actually size down the heart for each frame just to give it more of a like, how it's coming into the scene like that. And now we have one part of our confetti hearts. 10. Duplicating the Confetti Hearts: So we're going to add more cafeti hearts to our scene. To do that, we're going to tap on our cafeti heart symbol and duplicate it helps to move further along in the sequence and then using the transform tool, just off center it however you want. It's okay when it disappears, tap duplicate. Then off center again. Tap, duplicate, let's add one more. That's looking really good. Our ground is disappearing, which can be fixed by extending that background a little longer. Go to frame 32 and extend. There we go. Now it's your turn. Go ahead and keep adding more confetti hearts to your scene and we'll move on to the next step. 11. Converting Hearts to Symbols: So in this next step, we're just going to set up both our cafeti Heart and our Valentine Heart to be able to have a loop and to help with our scene organization. The first thing I'm going to do is with this heart here, we're going to rename and call this Heart. Then we're going to tap on that and choose Create symbol. Next, we're going to go to CafetiHart and tap and create symbol. Symbols just allows us to reuse the animation and even repeat the animation. In the case of this heart bounce, if I go down to that heart, touch apart and move it over. Now that heart will keep bouncing. For the cafeti hearts, we will need to edit that further. We're going to go to the cafeti hearts here. Once we select the layer, we're going to go tap on the clip tap on the link and choose edit clip. The reason for this is I'm going to zoom out is I actually want to move this towards the beginning of this timeline and then place the hearts where I want them to appear in the main scene. To do that, I'm just going to tap on this empty cell here, choose Select multiple, and then click and drag to select them all, tap and hold, and drag to the front. Now when I go to my main scene, it does shift the hearts more here, but now they repeat. To help with that is we're going to look for where the heart stops. We're going to go to the end and move this hand of over. It looks like the heart stops there. Now with all that in place, we just tap and drag this over to where the heart should start and our scene moves forward just like we planned. One more step we'll do is we're going to tap and drag this underneath my heart this way now, it will burst out from behind. Now our scene is ready for us to refine. 12. Organizing Confetti with Timeline Groups: Using our groups, we can actually duplicate tab, duplicate the group, and then flip it horizontal. What that does is now we have confetti hearts busting out from both sides of the heart and utilizing the groups, the same way symbols because we can technically duplicate and move it and make any adjustments we want to add volume to our hearts. So All they look uniform? This is looking really good. 13. Adding the Background: All right, so the last step I'm going to do here is we're going to change the color for the background to our light pink. That's very light pink. And we're going to go to this layer. And we're going to choose our palette. This is actually a I'm just going to carefully draw each side of my rectangle and using the feature where if you hold down the pen, it straightens it out. Now with the fill bucket, I can fill it in. I will just go through and color over my pencil drawing here. Now with our background in places, we can see how this looks. We have one more layer adjustment, which is move this white part of our background down above the floor like that to put the floor where it belongs. There we go. That is looking really good. 14. Creating a Seamless Animation Loop: So we're just going to talk about how to refine. Right now, our loop is the heart starts up here, drops down here, when it loops, it's going to end up back in the sky again and that will throw off our audience. What we probably want to do is look through and try to bring it. It's probably around 3 seconds. Just keep going until you get it close to it's about there and we're going to set and loop and watch. To help again with this change, extend to that and send back ground, it's probably going to there. There we go. Now we have a seamless loop of our heart bouncing up and down. 15. Giving Your Heart Expressions: So in this, we're going to look at how to make a heart more expressive in its jump. Because right now it's looking at looking straight ahead and dispounces. But we can definitely add more expression. To do this, we're going to go to layers, tap and edit clip, and then go through our drawings. So help the audience see where the hearts going, we're going to look at the eyes. Up here, we're going to go and find our eye layer and we have a highlight. For this drawing, I am going to move my highlight down to show that the heart is looking down and go through and do the same for each drawing. The heart is going down. Let's look in the direction. What's going and here it bounces. I hits the ground. For this, we're going to take a different approach and show that the eyes are close. We're going to create a new layer. Just rough out where the eyes are. I will blink right about here and then delete the eyes blink. They open and just cleaning up my drawings. Here we could do the same thing. Where the eyes look up. For this, I'm make sure there's a drawing layer here. To help with this is the eyes should point up just a little bit, as well as the highlight looking where they are and same thing, I'm cleaning up my drawing layer. Somehow I've just move it slightly up. Onion skin doesn't really help here because you would have to hide layers, and here it's okay because here the heart reached the top and besides that, sketch drawing, which now I'm going through and cleaning up, it's not uncommon in animation to go through and realize you left something in your drawings that were not supposed to be there and you're doing clean. Now you can watch how that looks. And we can even do the same for the mouth. Here for the mouth, what I can do is maybe the heart is really enjoying this and so I can actually just give it more of a smile like it's really enjoying this. Now it squishes and goes. Now again, up here, what I could do is maybe the heart is pushing down again. If I wanted to give that work with that, I would do the same thing. I would create that the closed eye, the hearts about to push them. And I would even do the same for the mouth. The fall sequence looks something like this. Now to add to that, we can actually go to the main body, make sure we're on free form and just squish it a little bit, it's working really hard. Now we'll see. Nice. Now we've made our heart a little more lively and expressive. When we go back to our main scene, it plays out like this. Now with this approach, you can fine tune it how you want, maybe change the expressions, it's up to you. What 16. Exporting Your Animation: Okay, so let's take a look at how to export our animation. To export our animation, we go up to Actions, tap on Export. Choose video. Don't forget to name it. And once you're done, you click Export, then choose a place on your iPad, you want to save it and share it from there. 17. Thank You & Next Steps: This was a fun class of designing a bouncy heart and with the additional confetti hearts behind it with such a joy to create this for you and I really hope you enjoyed this class. I would love to see what you create, what you've done with your heart and your scene, be sure to share it here on Skillshare and tag me along the way. Don't forget to come and visit me at Wilber andbrg.ca. The link is in the description of this class and thank you for having me in your journey as an artist.