Aseprite Animation Timeline & tools (Pixelart beginner Tutorial)

hey everybody my name is Marty and in this video I want to talk all about the timeline and animation tools in a sprite let's roll the intro so just want to clarify that this video is about the timeline and tools of animation not animation itself this is gonna help you have a easier time going into animating and you might find some resources that will help your animation flow in the future so it's basically just to make sure that you know all the things that you can do in a sprite when you are animating and it will help you animate faster and better so it's more about showcasing what's in your tool belt when you're going to animate and these videos are always aimed to be very resourceful for people who are very new to this rather than helping people out who already got experience though there might be a few things in there for you too if you do have some experience with animation in a sprite anyway let's get the video started so the first thing I want to talk about is the timeline in a sprite and it's essentially where you're going to do everything when it comes to animation and you can find the timeline down here below so let's talk a little bit about the timeline so what is the timeline for those who don't know well if you've ever seen one of those flip books where you flip them through really quick and see a picture moving it's basically every number is the page of that flip book so when you press play it will play the first page and then it will go into the second page third page and so on and so on and so on until it reaches the end of all the frames that you have in your animation so that is basically what the timeline is if we call it really short we'll talk more about that so let's talk about all the buttons that's down here because there's a lot of buttons down there some of them are more useful than others but either way we're going to talk a little bit about what they are what they can do so the first button down here I want to talk about is the little eye icon it's pretty simple it doesn't do a whole lot if you click it it shows whatever is under layer so when the eyes close its not gonna see that layer and it's your eyes open it's gonna show that layer and that is basically what the eye does oh yeah by the way when the eye are closed you can actually not draw on the layer so it's also a way to kind of make sure that you're not drawings on something if you want to hide it away and work on it later like I said very basic stuff so let's move on to the next one so what is the lock icon well it's pretty simple as well when the lock down here is open you can move your lair around and when the lock is closed you can actually not track your lair around or you can draw or any other things on the lair I'm sure all of us have accidentally drawn on the wrong layer once in a while so lock your lair if you don't want to draw on it I can freeze super useful and it will probably save you some time once in a while but yeah that's basically the lock layer so let's just move on to the next one all right this one is a little more interesting this one is all about the cells it's the little icon down here with the two dots and if you click on it you can see it becomes this icon with one long oval so what is the different between the two dots and they're ovals depending on what icon your lair has activated every time you make a new frame it will either make an individual cell or a linked cell so what is an individual and linked cell well a individual cell is its own picture so you can see down here on my art timeline it's all individual cells so if I go back you can see all these are the individual pictures in my timeline but where you can see I have this linked cell down in my timeline is on my frame so you can see my tutorial I have this frame around my images and that image should be the same on all my frames so therefore I make that a linked cell so if I'm ever editing anything let's say I draw something on my frame here I want to erase this bit so every other frame will have that same edit I did to that particular cell but the cool thing about this cells is that you can actually mix and match them so you don't have to always have individual or linked cells on one layer this was something I wish I knew earlier on but I didn't realize it until a little later but now it's saving me a lot of time when I do animations in a sprite all right so let's move on to the next one so this next icon is really exciting as well it's called the onion skin and you can see here when I turn it on its going to look a little weird have you ever seen a traditional animator sitting at this table with some light in it and a bunch of pictures laying on top of each other and they can see through that's basically what it does to showcase probably how it works I'm gonna jump into a different document real quick so I can show you how it works so I'm going to try and turn it on down here and you can see these little boxes come depending on how far a drag this is how much it's going to show off my animation so I'm gonna make a ball that's gonna fall down and jump up and jump away so you can see here when I scroll through my frames I can see the next and previous frames of my animation that I just quickly draw and this is really helpful for finding a reference of what you were doing before because sometimes it can be quite difficult to animate just from remembering what the previous picture were and you'll have to play through all the time so this will really help you a lot eventually so the next icon down here is the timeline Settings icon and it split up to three segments the first one is the position and this is one thing I've been asked about a little bit as well if I can move my layers to the right or to the left because not everybody wants to have the timeline like an animation software like Adobe animate but they might want to have their timeline looking more like Photoshop but speaking of Photoshop so there's also something called thumbnails here and if I turn that on you can see I get some more option nothing changes over here just by clicking on it but you can then click on this one and you can see a little picture starts appearing if you are not animating you might actually want to have a little reference over here in a small thumbnail I personally don't use it but for some people it might be really really useful so you can turn the thumbnail option on here if you would like to get a small reference so the next one down here in the timeline settings is onion skin settings so the first option down here is match frames or red blue tint what it basically does like we showed here in our previous animation if I turn on red and blue you can see it show the previous frames as a red tint and the next frames as a blue tint and the match one of course just use it as a transparent picture the next setting down here is how much of opacity you want to shown of the next frame so I'll try and just drag it up to like let's just say about 100 something and then the next down here is for each next frame how much it's going to be less transparent so you can see if I go down to zero it's they are all going to have the same transparency but if I drag it up a little bit they are slowly getting more and more transport Aaron the more frames it shows if you have a lot of layers and they're overlapping each other but you only want to see the onion skin on the layer that you're currently editing you can turn on current layer only that way it will only show the onion skin for that particular layer that you are editing this next one is behind or in front sprite it will basically just show the onion skin either behind your main sprite or in front of it so that is a little bit about the onion skin settings so before we move on to other things than the icon down here I just quickly want to run over what we have gone through so far so the I was basically to show or hide layers the lock was basically to lock a layer in place and not being able to edit on it the cell was basically to connect frames as the same picture or make them individual and all the settings was where you would change how the onion skin timeline were positioned and show or not show thumbnails and last of onionskin was basically where you would have this kind of like see-through of your sprite from previous and next frames that is what we just gone through now let's move on to some other really useful things you can use in a sprite when you're animating so the first thing I want to talk about is the frame drop-down menu a lot of the things up here you can do with short keys as well which is shows here to the right the first one is basically the frame properties in here you can change how long the duration of the current frame is you can also change these cell properties so in that you can only change the transparency for that particular cell and of course you can make a new frame a new empty frame duplicate a cell duplicate and Link a cell and you can also remove a frame and remember all these have short keys as well if you're one of those people but there's also something called tack here which I really want to talk about so let's move on to text so first up what is text well down in your timeline you might have a lot of different animation like for example this Mario animation is frame 1 Frame 2 3 4 5 & 6 but it's only frame 1 that his idle animation 2 3 & 4 is his running animation and 5 is his shooting fireball and six is his jumping animation to show this a little more I'm gonna go into an animation I did a wild Bank in here you can see I've already checked my animation down here below the way you attack an animation is basically by selecting all the frames that you want to attack then right click and you can write a new tag and when you do that this window comes up then you can name the attack if you want to edit how many frames it is I know this is from frame 1 to 13 and you can also change the color of the tag and down here in the animation direction you can change if it's going forward or if it's something that you play reversed or if something that should go forward and then backwards and then forward and backwards basically ping pong the cool thing about this is when you are playing your animation it will only play that particular attack you are showing so you can have all your animations down in one long timeline instead of several files and you can just tagged him and that way it will make it a lot easier for you to have sort of everything in one file and of course you can also right-click on the tag itself and then you can remove it or you can change the properties of that particular attack if you want to change the color or something like that so next up I want to talk about the preview window which is one of my favorite things about a sprite so first of all I'm gonna hide my little face here and down here behind me you can see there's a little button down here in the corner that says one-to-one when you click that this window will appear and what this window does is making a preview of what you're currently working on so you can instead of scrolling in and out all the time and taking a look at your current work you can just have a little preview window of it here and it's super loveliest so let's talk a little bit about what you can do with this preview window first of all I'm going to jump into the animation here again so one of the things you can do with your main canvas is that you can scroll to zoom in and out that you can to do with the preview window if you want to have the preview a little bigger sometimes it's nice to just have it zoomed in a little bit next up sometimes I work super closely in my main canvas and I drag around if you click this button here when you drag around in your main canvas it will also drag around in your preview window I personally like to have the preview stuck and just placed where I like it especially if it's a small sprite like this maybe a bigger canvas but for a small one I'll make it stuff next up I can also play the animation but you can see when I play the animation in the preview window it only plays my current tech which is the running animation and it's not playing in my main canvas this way I can go in and edit small things whatever you edit will happen right away on the preview window and a lot of these things are really nice because sometimes you might have like onion skin and all sorts of things going on at the same time but you don't want to see that on your own previews you can also right-click here on the play button and then you can change the speed so if you want to make it faster in the preview window or if you want the animation to run slower to see the small details you can change the speed by that you can also change it you only play once or you can also play all the frames in your timeline and it will ignore the text so if I do that here you can see when I play the animation now it's going to ignore all the text and just run through all the animations but I rarely use that I always just have it to play tag only that way I see what I'm actually working on and the last button here will basically close down your preview window so that was all about the preview window and that is so actually where we come to an end in the tutorial these tools can be really useful if you learn to utilize them well in your workflow so I encourage you all to try and play a little more around with them give it a go and kind of understand it because the more you know the easier things get just before I want to go I want to show you a few things to check out one of the things I want to show you here is my new asset store that I've open you can go in here there's both free stuff and there's also some tiles and characters for people who might want to use them in their own projects besides that if you are a little bit of a peril gig like me you can also check out my pixel shirt store that I've opened theirs linked to everything down below personally I really like this kind of pixel apparel it really suits my interest so if you want to take some of these things out feel free to give it a go and I'll be adding more stuff over time of course anyways guys thank you so much for thing if you liked what you saw make sure to give this video a like if you want to see more content like this make sure to subscribe you can also help me help you by supporting me on patreon and yeah that's it I'll see you later guys take care [Music]

Channel: MortMort

Views: 385,831

Keywords: to, art, drawing, flash, dev, pixel, vid, tut, waffle, mnr, artwork, animation, painting, jazza, awesome, gif, tumblr, cool, development, game, deviantart, mnrart, pixelart, tutorial, how, zch, photoshop

Id: N4Z4MdZ1KWY

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2017