So you want to dabble into animation and
you stumbled upon this software called OpenToonz which is ABSOLUTELY FREE
so you downloaded it, installed it, and when you opened it you stared at the screen
and you asked what the hell is all this?! Well, consider your questions answered because
I'm gonna show you a quick and easy guide on how to use the OpenToonz software so let me get
inside this laptop to show you how it works. So welcome to OpenToonz what you're looking at
right now is the start screen. First and foremost let's create a scene. By the way, if you are
planning to create an animated short with multiple scenes you can click new project and type whatever
file you fancy and OpenToonz will create a set of folders exclusively for that project. For now
let's select "sandbox" and over here is where you can name your scene so I'm gonna type "jump" for
mine. Let's set the camera size to 1920 by 1080p make sure to double check the resolution and make
sure it's 16x9 and 1920x1080 on the resolution. You can change this but this is the setting
I usually do. Uniit is inch and DPI is 120. I usually leave that on default and to keep things
simple we're just gonna use the industry standard 24 frames per second and once you've done all that
click "Create." This is the default interface of OpenToonz. You can keep it at this but I do have
my preferences so let me just arrange it for a second. One Second Later... And there you go! So
let me explain what these windows are. This big window is as you can see is the canvas where we
will draw all the stuffs. This little strip at the left-hand side is all our tools like the Brush
and the Eraser and further on the left is the Color Picker where we pick the colors we like.
The bottom window is the color palette more on that later, and this window on the right side is
the x-sheet which is a shorter term for exposure sheet. It's like a timeline but in vertical form.
I actually prefer this when I'm doing frame by frame animation because I can see the levels
and I can click around it better compared to the horizontal timeline. That's pretty much the
overview of the interfaces I use and I bet you'd like to start drawing right now don't you? Well,
we can simply just select the brush tool and start drawing but, I would suggest creating a level
first. In order to do that, you can right click on the x-sheet and select "New Level." A new window
will pop out and you can name the levels right here and we can just set everything to default.
For now let's just use the "Toonz Raster Layer" for the type to keep it simple since you're just
starting out. Why is this important? So here's the thing, when we draw on the canvas OpenToonz
automatically creates a level if we didn't create one and they usually just label it "A," "B" or
"C" or whichever alphabet they're in. Imagine if you're creating a project that has multiple
scenes, multiple characters, multiple animations, etc. and you didn't create the levels on your own.
It's gonna get confusing VERY FAST especially, if you need to reuse an animation from a different
scene so it's really for organizational purposes and it's gonna save you a lot of headaches.
I usually name the levels this way "scene name-character name-what kind of drawing is
it-and the number or letter if you prefer that," so in this project I'm gonna name this
level "jump-Jump Man (because that's the name of the character)-ruffs (because we are going to
do rough animation first)-and 1" (in case we need to do a number two) and here we go. If you notice
at the bottom the palette window added in some colors. So this color palette is exclusive to this
level only I want to draw in Red so I'm gonna add a new color by right clicking and selecting "New
Style" in order to change the color we can just go to the Color Picker window and select whatever
color we like. Now we can start drawing you can draw whatever you want but, if you're following
it step by step, I'm gonna draw a simple jumping animation. By the way I'm not gonna draw all
of it in real time so if you like to follow, I'm gonna show a frame by frame animation of it
later on. [Music] All right first post done! Now, I want to hold this pose for half a second so
in order to do that, we're going to drag this little rectangle right here and that will extend
the frame. I'm extending it to frame 12. Take note you have to precisely click and drag that
rectangle to extend the frames. You can't click it here or here or here it's not gonna work. Only in
that particular area, okay? So now to do the next frame you can select frame 13 and draw there and
OpenToonz will automatically create a new drawing on the same level. You can also use "Shift + ," to
go to the previous frame or "Shift + ." to go to the next frame. So let's do the next frame. I do
want to see the previous frame while I draw this. So let's hover to the side of the X-sheet and as
you can see, there's a circle appearing right over there that is the onion skin. Let's click this
and a dot will appear which means that this frame will show on the current frame we're working on.
If you want to remove the onion skin just simply click the dot and it will be gone! Alright, so
let me just do this second frame. By the way, if you want to change shortcuts you can just
click ""File" and "Configure Shortcuts." So the next frame, I want to add an in-between on frame
10. Let's delete these frames first. To select multiple frames, simply click on the frame and
hold "Shift" to which frame you'd like to select and hit the "Delete" button. You turn on onion
skin by clicking this side. Red for the previous frame and green for the next frame. Alright, so
we can start drawing again on the blank frame. Now we have three frames which show the character
getting ready to jump. What I did here is an animation principle called "Anticipation." Let's
continue this and draw the rest of the jump. While this speed drawing is going, I just want
to do a quick rundown of the tools. For now, we'll just be using Brush, Eraser, and Selection
Tools. We'll deal with the other tools in the future video. So be sure to smack the Subscribe
button and get notified. Let's discuss these toolbars up top. So for the brush tool, the first
option you'll see is the size slider. If you notice there are two sliders. It actually applies
to pen pressure so "Min" means the smallest brush size on light pressure and "Max" is the biggest
brush size on heavy pressure. On the right of that is a "Hardness" slider which adjusts the hardness
of the brush. Here's the difference between zero hardness and 100 hardness. Further on the right
is the "Smoothness" slider and it is helpful if you have shaky hands like me. It corrects the line
so it doesn't look jaggedy. The rest of the tools, don't worry about it for now and just keep it on
default. The Eraser only has Size and Hardness sliders. The other things again, don't worry about
it for now. The third tool is the Selection Tool and the thing you have to pay attention to in
the toolbar is the type. There are three types of selection tools. The first one is the rectangle
where it will create rectangular selection if you click and drag. Second, is the freehand where
you can select whatever shape you've drawn, and the third is the polyline where you click
points and it will create a line from one point to another until it forms a shape. I usually
just use the rectangle and freehand and, in case you're wondering why it's creating a
rectangle rather than a freehand selection, just check the toolbar. By the way,
you can also do copy-paste here and the shortcut is the same "Ctrl+C," "Ctrl+V"
and you can copy-paste selected drawings and frames on the X-sheet if say, you want
to reuse a drawing at a different frame. So I'm just gonna pause the speed drawing here a
bit because I want to show how to move drawings to a different frame. So I copied frame one here
by using the ye olde copy and paste shortcut. I want to move it like three frames away from
the previous frame so I can do an in-between. In order to move the frame, select the frames
you'd like to move and drag this darker colored bar on the side of the frame. As you can see, I
can move it back and forth. Please note that you can only move the frames by clicking and dragging
this bar on the side. You can't click it on the center because it will only select the X-sheet
so keep that in mind. Alright, let's continue. Alright here's the animation I've made. You
can pause the video to check each drawing up close. So frame one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, and then we
look back to frame one. It's just a simple jump animation. So to play this we're just gonna
click the play button or press "P." There we go, and we can click this little button right
here to loop the animation and it will just play over and over endlessly. The next
step is adding details and doing cleanup and color. So if you're ready to proceed,
just click this video right here!
