Adobe Animate Basics II: Frame by frame animation on the Timeline - Adobe Animate CC Tutorial

welcome back to part two of adobe animate basics a series of short videos where you learn the basic skills you need to start animating in adobe animate in my last video i showed you how to move around your workspace and we looked at basic drawing tools like the classic brush tool today we're going to build upon that and learn how to create a simple frame by frame animation on the timeline using layers keyframes frames and onion skinning we'll go step by step through the process of animating a simple blink like this one so let's get started by creating a new document i'm going to file new and i'll have a document size of 960 by 540 24 frames per second and action script i'll click create and you can see that we now have the blank stage in the middle the tools panel on the left and the properties panel on the right which we covered in part one if your workspace looks different remember that you can go to the workspaces icon in the top right corner and select essentials now let's go down and take a look at the timeline which you can find underneath stage layers are located on the left side of the timeline and you can see that we already have one layer created by default if you want to add more layers clicking the plus icon over here will create new layers whereas the trash can deletes layers we can rename layers by double clicking on the layer name and i'm going to name this layer head and hit enter to confirm the other layer i'll name eyes and i've decided to put the eyes on a separate layer because that's what we're going to animate for the blink whereas the head doesn't need to be animated separating layers and giving them descriptive names will help you stay organized when you're working on larger projects or with other people so it's a good habit to have moving slightly to the right this little icon on the timeline shows that we have one blank keyframe on each layer i'm going to select the classic brush tool and draw a head on the stage i'll give him a nose and a mouth as well and going back down to the timeline you can see that the icon has now changed to show that that keyframe is no longer blank you also notice that the drawing is stored in the keyframe of the layer that is currently selected which at the moment is the head layer if i want to draw on the eyes layer i have to first select that specific layer before drawing on the stage let's go ahead and add some eyes i'm gonna fill it in with the paint bucket and let's use the eraser to give him a little highlight so now that we have something on both layers let's talk about these icons next to the layer name the first icon which looks like a crossed out eye hides or shows the contents of a layer the lock icon locks the contents of the layer and prevents you from making any changes locking the eyes layer you can see that i can't select or move the eyes and maybe you think that it's because i've got the head layer selected down here but if i go ahead and unlock the eyes layer i can now make changes to both layers at the same time since we're only planning on animating the eyes i'll lock the hit layer now so we don't accidentally do something to it the last thing i want to mention about layers before moving on is this icon which toggles outlines when outliers is turned on your drawing will look something like this and it can be a bit confusing if you don't know what's going on so just remember that you can go back to normal by turning outlines off okay now that you understand how layers work we can start thinking about animation this large area over here is where you'll find your frames and keyframes these numbers tell you what your frame number is for example this is frame 10 this is frame 20 and so on you also see a timestamp which tells you how long your animation is in seconds because we're working in 24 frames per second which you can check in the properties panel one second of animation will consist of 24 frames right now our animation contains only a single frame but we can extend it to one second by clicking on the 24 frame going to this square i can right clicking and selecting frame you can see that our animation now spans 24 frames which is one second but pressing play which is over here nothing happens and this is because we haven't added any keyframes so let's go somewhere near the end of the eyes layer frame 20 and this time we'll right click and select keyframe it looks like nothing has changed here on the stage but we now have a second black dot on the timeline and each black dot represents one key frame if i select and move the eyes then go back to the start of the timeline and press play again you can see that something is happening when the animation plays but we don't actually want the eyes to move out of the head so i'm going to hit command z to undo and we'll select another frame a little bit before that second keyframe and this time we'll right click on this icon and select blank keyframe if you look at the stage you notice that the eyes have completely disappeared that's because we have created an empty or blank keyframe on the eyes layer if i move along the timeline you can see that the eyes are still there when we get to the other keyframes moving to the beginning of the timeline and clicking play again will show us that there's a brief moment when the eyes disappear to finish our blink animation we want to go back to the blank keyframe on the timeline and draw a pair of closed eyes to help us draw the closed eyes in the right spot i'm going to click on this icon over here to turn on onion skinning onion skinning lets us see drawings on the frames before and after the current frame which is extremely useful when you're animating by default it shows just two frames before and two frames after but you can drag these handles to change what you see if i drag this handle on the left all the way in i can no longer see this frame in the same way if i drag this handle on the right until it reaches this keyframe over here we can now see what's on that frame keep in mind that onion's skin only works on layers that are unlocked so locking the eyes layer will hide the onion skin with onion skinning on and the eyes layer unlocked let's use the classic brush tool to draw a pair of closed eyes right where the eyes are supposed to be going back to the start of the timeline and pressing play we now have a character that is blinking and while there is always more you can do to make an animation better for example i could go to right before the blink starts and add a blank keyframe and then draw the eyes just beginning to close and do another one here with the eyes just starting to open which will make the animation look much smoother when we press play again but using what we've learned about the timeline layers keyframes and frames onion skinning you already have all you need to animate basically anything you can think of which is pretty exciting i hope you found this video helpful if you have any questions or feedback leave them in the comments thank you for watching and goodbye

Channel: Devon Kong

Views: 9,550

Keywords: devon kong, animation, animator, entrepeneur, small business, minimalist, minimalism, malaysian, malaysia, freelancer, melbourne, australia, new final animation, adobe, adobe animate, adobe flash, adobe creative cloud, adobe animate cc, adobe animate basics, adobe animate beginner tutorial, adobe animate tutorial, beginner, beginners, timeline, layers, frames, keyframes, frame, keyframe, blank keyframe, onion skin, onion skins, onion skinning, frame by frame, frame animation, animation tutorial

Id: jHEsiv7i__Y

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021