1. Rotoscoping in Photoshop

i want to talk a little bit about file structure and file paths for your project you all should be doing this already it's really important to have a folder structure for your project so you keep them neat and organized in case something becomes unlinked you know how to set up your project and how to re-link files and so i'm gonna go up here to animation project one and inside of it you can see i have folders for after effects adobe illustrator footage etc so for after effects folder what i'm going to be saving in here is my after effects save files there's not going to be any extra assets in this folder i'm not going to be putting anything that i create create in any other program just my after effects save files but for illustrator and photoshop that's where i'm going to be putting my assets that i create so if i if i make an illustration or take a picture in photoshop um i'm going to place it in here footage that's where i like to put my movie files so i've already dragged in my hand file that we're going to be rotoscoping over top of i put it here in the footage file [Music] and renders of course anything that comes out of after effects we'll we'll have here down in renders now of course you might have extra folders you might have maya or cinema 4d any other folders just go ahead and you create a a new folder here for whatever you're working in uh keep it nice and organized sort of in this system of having your uh having your respective folders for different different softwares i think is a great way to do it okay today i'm going to be showing you the process of rotoscoping rotoscoping is a easy way to start getting into 2d animation it's the process of taking footage that we've already shot and then um tracing it up tracing over it in some sort of medium in this case digitally we'll be we'll be tracing it over in photoshop and um you you might have seen the series the amazon series undone that was that uses rotoscoping there's a movie a well-known movie called waking life and a scanner darkly both of those also use rotoscoping and rotoscoping has become much more popular throughout the years it's a method that i use a lot in my own animation unfortunately it is frame by frame and so it takes a little bit more time um it's a little bit tedious there are ways in which to cut the time and shorten it uh and i'll try and go over some of those tips for you all as we go through this project so let's go to create new 1920x1080 and when we open it up uh i want to have as much access to the layers as possible so i'll come up here i've already turned off properties you might have that on so i've turned off properties and then i'm going to go down to timeline turn that on and it gives us the option to create video timeline yours might say create frame animation i'm going to be showing you the timeline method um that's what i use and i want you all to become familiar with so make sure that you're creating a video timeline so we hit that and our timeline appears i'm going to drop in drag and drop my footage and it's as easy as that now you can see uh this lasts about 10 seconds long if we scrub through we have our video footage an alternative way of doing this is just going up to file open go to your footage hit open and here we go we have a new file it's already named for us and if we scrub through we've got our footage so either one works i'm gonna uh we we have to save as either way i'm just going to go back to our first and let's do file save as and i want to save it in our photoshop spot and one so i want to talk a little bit first about frame rates right down here we can see it is set to 29.97 frames per second if we play it back looks pretty smooth um if we come over here to the this button we can set the timeline frame rate and if you're going to be you should not really ever be animating at 29 frames per second that's too much work for you to do i personally like to animate sometimes at 12 or even 10 frames per second um if we set the option of 24 frames per second that gives us the option to do doubles work on sorry work on ones and twos we can work on ones and twos if we set at 24 frames per second and mostly you might be working on twos uh and then every now and then you might go to a one so that that's a pretty good that's a safe bet if you know that you want to work entirely on twos then you can just go to 12. so i'm gonna go to 12. now when we play this back we can tell it's a little bit more jerky uh and we can see that it's actually it's the same amount of time so when we're changing the frame rate we aren't doing anything to the time the computer is just slicing out the sections for the frame rate that we want if we actually want to change the amount of time uh and say use all of these frames that is that's in this footage but you use all these frames as 10 frames per second we're going to have to do something a little bit different we'll have to use an image sequence and we can do that in after effects and i'll show you how to do that but right now i just want you to know that the frame rate whatever you set it as it's not going to be adjusting the time at all it's only going to be slicing out a particular number of frames to hit that frame rate that you have selected i want to talk to you about something called video groups versus video layers some of you might have already animated in photoshop a little bit and you might have found it really tedious and and unorganized and annoying [Music] and that's because uh it doesn't really set it up for you to be working in a super efficient way and you have to know how to do that what you all might have been doing is you add a layer you shorten it you're gonna zoom in and you make some animation here on this layer it's a different color so we have a little a little bit of red there and then um you go over here and you add a new layer and you can see up here new layer added and you have to go back over here and shorten it and move it over and move over here and then you can make your circle um and so on and so forth just adding all these layers and honestly that it's super tedious um this whole timeline gets very unorganized eventually you have to start scrolling up and down which is a pain and we just want to want to keep it more organized and more tight so we need to create something called a video group and there's a couple ways to do that an easy way is just coming down to our layers that we have made and i'm going to drag this down to the same layer and we can see that layer has changed to video group same thing right here select this layer drag it down and now i just have all of these on the same layer uh and we can see each one is separated into a frame so we've got three frames here another another way to make a video group on any of these layers right here we can click on this film icon and we can say new video group and then if i hit layer i'm going to come back here showing it down to one or two frames depending if i'm working on uh ones or twos and then what i like to do is i just like to copy and paste command c command v a lot of my layers and so when we come over here and we look um in our layers panel how things are appearing versus video groups versus layers so if i just have an uh blank layer it's going to appear like this uh we don't have we don't have it inside of the video group folder i have a video group we can expand it and collapse it and all of our layers are inside of here which i think is is the best option so that's called video groups there's also something else called video layers um which i use a little bit less but they're still good you can go up to layer video layer new blank video layer and the difference between um this and the video group is that all of my frames already exist here in video 11. we can see up here there's also a difference we have a film icon versus a video group folder so what that means is here in my first frame i'll draw a circle and then i'll move to my next [Music] frame so we're just drawing all in one layer it is divided into separate frames but we can't really see the separate frames uh so that's why i actually prefer the video groups because right here i can see where my frames are really easily versus up here i mean we know that they start like where all the frame markers are but it's just more clear to me down here and i can come down here let's say if i want to make something last for two frames instead real easy to do that versus up here it's a little bit more complicated you have to go up to layer video layers duplicate frame or insert blank frame however you want to do it so video groups and video layers that's what you're going to be working in in order to avoid the amount of stacking that usually happens in a photoshop okay i'm gonna come in and start tracing over my footage um i'm gonna you can see right here there's a few frames that like are sort of the same the hands more or less in the same place and then once we get here is when it really starts to move i'm gonna go maybe just four frames before where it starts to move and i'm gonna start from there so we're skipping three frames it's really not cutting out that much work but we're gonna have a place right here where we have a lot of time just here in the middle where it's the hand is pretty much just in the same position so we're gonna cut a little bit out of there too using using a method of just skipping frames and then we're going to repeat three frames that we create and use that to create the duration of time that we want for the for the length just have three frames on loop whenever the hand's closed so i'm going to grab my pen i mean i'm sorry my paintbrush my first pass is just going to be the hand shape afterwards i will go back and i'll make a second pass and it will be any details that i want to add and we're just going to fill this in it's great to know the shortcuts so if we want to get back to brush we can hit b and of course g is the paint bucket so that's that's helpful as well so next frame coming here make sure we have our correct frame selected and let's see how far we're gonna go with this so probably about right here is where i want to get to i'm gonna stop the recording and go through all of those uh frames and then then we'll start it back up so i have uh done my series of frames that i want to do and it looks pretty good um but now we have this big chunk of time where the hem doesn't really move and if we were to just continue to do frame after frame that would be a lot of unnecessary time until about right before five seconds so we want to create a loop that we can use of maybe like three or four frames and just repeat them over and over what i'm going to do is i'll come back to here adding a new layer and then i'm going to turn on onion skin over here and that's fine so right here we can see the general sort of outline of our red paint layer that we have i'm going to come in i'm going to use a different color just to have a clearer distinction i'll do blue and i'm just going to paint over top i want to paint over top of the red that i have which is generally i mean the exact same as where the hand is and uh what we can't do is we can't just extend this to uh about where we're gonna end because if we um if we hit play we can see it sort of has a shake with it and then all of a sudden it would just stop to completely still which would be uh it would be a little bit weird uh so we we want to create a small loop we'll go back i'll shorten that um let's do another one i'll do it again with blue all right uh so now i'm gonna turn off onion skins and i'm gonna shift select these four frames command c command v and they'll just get copied right behind i'm gonna keep doing that until about right there let's see how that looks okay so it did something that um i wasn't expecting it jumped it moved it over when we did the convincing command which is unfortunate um but we can fix that so i'm just going back to onion skins shift selected all of them and i guess it doesn't we can't see the understands when we move it but general same area that looks like it could be okay let's hit playback and we can come in here later and make a few adjustments if we want to but uh but that's that's pretty good for right now uh now i'm going to come back and add a new layer switch back to red and i'm going to uh just finish the the end section of it and i changed the color so that we can know what section is the loop looping section that we repeat the frames over and over and what frame is the non-looping section later on in after effects we are going to just add a fill so it's going to get rid of the individual colors and it's going to change the hand to one solid color so again i'm gonna stop the recording and i'm just gonna finish this until about uh right here i'll do my same looping animation again probably a little bit from like right here to maybe an extra second or so so that we can have some footage at the end before it goes back if we want we can also try and create create a full loop so whenever we get to here in this section i'm going to grab this frame way back here right here and i'm going to bring it over here and i'm gonna make it transition from wherever i'm at to that frame that i have there so that we can have a loop that will just repeat over and over with the hand opening and closing we're gonna try and make the end a bit smoother so if we come here and we loop it let's see how it looks it doesn't look that bad at all we can see a little bit of a jump but it's not bad um and when you loop it's a little bit counter-intuitive but um where this end marker is it needs to be at the like right here at the start of that frame it that way it includes this frame if i moved it here it would also include this frame we don't want that so we're just going to have it there and so what i want to do how i want to help it make it loop is i'm going to grab my very first frame i'm going to do command c command v we think we think that we would be able to do that but whenever we do that it actually uh we if you remember the issue we had when we did the the blue hands it slightly pushed it over a little bit so we can see my first frame my second frame which i just copied and pasted it should be the exact same but it shifted it a little bit it shifted it to the center or just some other place that's not what we want we can't have that because if we were to take this frame to the very end back here we would be using this frame's position and not that springs position so um i'm gonna delete that frame and what we do instead we have to duplicate it so uh duplicate layer and now it's the exact same i'm gonna drag this out and move it all the way to the end and of course we also have that one extra frame i'm just going to go ahead and delete that and move that to in front of my final frame so we can see both so we're trying to move from here to there and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to do some in between some in between frames tweening mabel onion skins and we can kind of see where i have started which is this this thumb right here and i'm moving to this thumb and uh i want to do one more i want to do two more i want to do one more before this in between and one more after so come here and uh so i also want to put one here all right not bad let's turn off onion skin and let's uh this is in the position that we want it to be because this is the last thing we want to see we don't want to see that frame when we loop it let's see how it looks and it looks great perfect loop um seamless seamless enough okay so another section that is giving us a little bit of trouble is this blue section because we just repeated those frames over and over we can start to see the repetition all we really need to do when we come in here is uh zoom in a little so we'll look we'll start at the first blue one one two three four then what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna um so this would be one i'm just gonna take what would be two i'm gonna move it before one that's one on two three and four i'm gonna take four move it before three and you really don't have to do this in any la like systematic order it can it can be a little random uh just as long as you don't end up putting a one by one but this will help break up your sequence a little bit so it doesn't look like quite as repetitive let's see what does that look like oh looks okay we can mix it up a little bit more maybe we have uh done the base layer of the hand and now we're gonna go back and we're gonna add the details um basically the shadowing so that whenever the hand closes we have distinction of where the fingers are i'm going to close that down i'm going to make a new video group and unfortunately we are going to have to do pretty much uh just the same number of frames again around what was it 74. uh but it should go a little bit faster i'm going to copy and paste copy and paste a bunch of those come to my hand turn my video layer back on and i'm going to take the opacity down on my video group let's rename this base and sorry the lights the the sun is really bright where i am and it's hard to type um and let's call this so in shadowhand we'll go down to this layer i'm going to grab a different color i'll use purple and right here um let's go to a smaller size let's do 10. um i'll take you to the middle first actually what we're gonna do is just come in here and draw the separation between the fingers um the phone and it uh the shading how however you want to have the detail that's really up to you this is more of an artistic decision here if you decided that you wanted to outline the entire hand you're welcome to do that i just do where the shading uh or the or the the creases would be that overlaps and i make a distinction between here and uh the variation it can you can go back over some areas if you want you can see back here there's really no overlap so depends on what you want to add details to do you want to add details to wrinkles uh to the lines on the hand that's your decision you could add one here if you wanted to um i don't know kind of your choice but the more you add of course the more time it will take the more details i finish the shadows and we'll go ahead and play the whole thing and see what it looks like and for this blue section i just did the same thing that i did with the blue base layer i kind of just went in and i looped i i made a couple frames i i looped them and then i switched a few of the frames back and forth i did have to go through some of these and and make uh some adjustments just in here uh sometimes this this uh thumb wasn't lining up quite how i wanted it to for the most part it does that one the one spot is a little funky um so i might come down here and actually i might erase a little bit of the blue but uh it looks pretty good

Channel: Nathan King

Views: 6,107

Keywords: animation, tutorial, photoshop, rotoscoping

Id: U1pOnx4rgTk

Length: 31min 26sec (1886 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020