Easy cut-out animation in OpenToonz (using the skeleton tool) - Puppet animation

have you wanted to get into cut out puppet animation but not sure where to start well it's easier than you think so that's what we'll be looking at today so the plan to create a working puppet is to decide what you want to draw and i like to sketch it out first on a sketch layer then draw each part of the puppet that moves independently on its own layer and each part is a part of the character that you'd literally cut out of cardboard if he was making a physical cardboard cutout of your character then connect each moving part together in the right order on the stage schematic and finally you'd animate it by using the animate tool the skeleton tool or by exposing different drawings for that level okay so let's get started first we'll sketch out our character and to make it easier to follow this week i'm going to use the simplest character i can one with only two moving parts so i chose bb8 the droid from star wars and having just two moving parts we still need to go through all the same steps but it'll be much easier to see them and the rig character can get quite complicated upwards of 20 different layers for a full character okay so here's our sketch now we'll draw the final character but with each movable part on its own layer so let's just do that so here you can see we're drawing the two movable character parts each on their own vector layer and notice how i'm reusing the sketches guide layer to mark the center for the circle and i'll also use it later to mark the center point for the rotations and how you break down your character on separate levels really just depends on the character itself and how you intend to animate it and in this case it's very simple there's only two moving parts so there's only two levels needed but for instance for a character with a face you might instinctively draw the eyes and mouth on the face level of your character but that means that unless you specifically animate it you can't have your character blink and move its mouth at the same time to do that you'd have to draw the eyes on their own layer then they can blink and look around whenever they like regardless of what the mouth was doing but i'll cover eyes another time and you also want to consider if the character can turn at all so if they can look directly forward and left or right then you need a different set of animations for all the connected parts and you can of course flip any animations to work to the right that were drawn to look to the left okay so that's the puppet drawn and you see i've got the body on one level they can move separately and then the head on another and if you animate the body using the animate tool to make it move across the screen then obviously you want the head to move with it but at the minute they're two separate pieces so we need to connect them together there's two ways of doing this the first way is with the skeleton tool so if you select that and change the mode to build skeleton you can then use this marker to set center point and to connect to the second piece but i find this tricky to use so i prefer the stage schematic to connect them together and i've added this on a separate room to help with setting up puppets but you might have the schematic view in another room or you can add it from the windows menu just here okay so the schematic shows the four columns which is the guide column and the sketch column that we're not using then the body and the head and at the minute they're all connected directly to the table from the blue circle to the table's red so we say the table parents these columns and what we want to do is the body to parent the head column so you simply click and drag from the red circle on the body through to the blue circle on the head and notice as you connect them together the line from the table to the head disappears so the head is only connected to the body and now if we select on the body and change the animate tool and move the position the head moves with it so the final thing we need to change is the center point for each column so that when you rotate the contents they rotate correctly because at the minute the center point is in the center of the page so if we change to rotation and try to rotate it rotates about that point so all you need to do is change to the center and then click and drag anywhere on the page until the circle is at the center point for the model so for the main body i want it to be the bottom center here and for the head it needs to be at the center of the body so it rotates around the outside the way i can do that is if i bring the guide back to the front of the body we can see the cross in the center that would set up at the beginning of the drawing so let's move the center point onto that cross and now if we rotate the head it moves around the body and if we rotate the body it moves around the base so that allows the robot to lean forward and backwards okay so for animating cut out puppet there's three main ways to animate so the first way is using the animate tool and that's the first tool at the top of the toolbar here if i select that and i want to animate the body first because there's only one frame i need to extend it to as long as i want the animation to show so i'll select that frame for the body and the head now click and drag to make it last 30 frames and on frame one for the body i can now change the second drop down here to position i can now adjust the start position for the body so i place it down here and if i want it to move to the right in 30 frames i go to frame 30 and then drag it to the right and then open tunes will interpolate between those two positions an interpolation mode it uses is set in the preferences so if you go to file preferences and then go to animation you see the default interpolation has ease in and ease out you can change that between linear speed and speed out and a percentage for easy knees out but easing these out is fine for what we're doing at the minute you'll notice it's created two keys on the timeline one at the start and one at the end on frame 30 and you can select these and use the standard copy and paste to create duplicates so now from frame one to frame seven there's no movement and then seven onwards there is movement and these values aren't just hidden you can see them and edit them yourself using the function editor so if we look in here you see the camera in the table are listed in the stage and so the four columns we've added so if we expand the body you'll notice that the east west and north and south which are the position attributes have both got a graph line on them and the rest of the attributes have just got dots so we can select those two and you'll see the change in them if you select any others you'll see there's no change so you can do quite a lot in the function editor and i won't go through that right now if i just bring that into view on the x sheets so i can select both values for the key here and drag them up and down and see the key moving on the x sheets or i can move just one value if i want to and it shows there's now two keys on those two frames and if i select between any two keys that has interpolation you'll notice at the top right it shows the interpolation mode you can change that to any other interpolation mode when you hit apply you'll notice the values change between the two keys one final thing to mention there's also an actual graph view if you select that button there you can see the graph view here and you can adjust the interpolation on the graph view but i won't look at that today because it's quite complicated and with enough to get through so go back to the animation view but what you might want is you might want some rotation so he leans as he moves so if i go back a couple of frames if i change the rotation i can then set the rotation by just adjusting it slightly and then i can put the rotation on frame 10 perhaps to where it's leaning forward so between frame 5 and 10 the rotation changes as the robot leans forward and starts to move so the last few frames i'll set the rotation there by again touching the screen bring frame 30 back here and i put the rotation back to approximately the center and if you look at the top of the screen it shows actual rotation which you can type into this box so i'll press enter after typing zero and now with the animation you see he leans he moves then he goes back to upright the final part of the animation i want to do is to rotate the head so as he leans forward i'd like the head to rotate too so then to add animation to the head you simply click into the head column move to the right frame and again set the animation by clicking on the screen when you invite animation mode moving the frame to interplay to change the value again and again reset it at the end if we take a look at this small animation the robot leans forward his head goes over as well he moves a little bit and then his head and body return back to being upright now we can perform the same animation but slightly easier using the skeleton tool and that's a button just here so if you select it you can change the mode to animate or inverse kinematics and for today we'll just use the animate tool and by using the skeleton tool you can set up the animation without changing between the columns that you want to edit so if you start off with the body column selected on frame one you'll notice it tells you the name of the level here and when you hover you get two arrows above and below it we'll look at that in a second you've got this green button here where you can click and drag to move that level around and you've got two yellow buttons for rotation if you click and drag you can rotate the level okay so up the same animation so we'll set the start position here frame seven we want it to stay in the same place so we can add a key by pressing the key button and you'll see a key appear on frame seven for the body and then by frame 30 we click and drag because we want the character to be to the right we'd also like them to lean so again back on to frame five we'll set a full key here by clicking the key button it says the current rotation position shear and scale so that from frame 5 to frame 9 we can now rotate the robot over and then 28 we can set a key again to storage position and frame 30 we can rotate him back to the center and you'll notice there's nowhere on the screen to type the value for the rotation or the position that's only for the animate tool so again back at the beginning we want to rotate the head so how do you do that you simply click on the head and you see it's now selected by the box around it you just simply click and drag to set the rotation and i'll undo that because i'm set a key first on frame five so nothing changes from frame one to five and then up to frame nine it's rotating with the body but i'd like it to rotate further just the head on its own so if you look at that you can see the head rotates and the body independently and again at the end i set the end rotation and the rotation to the center at the top so if we go back to the beginning hit play make see scuttles across the screen okay so that's how you can use the skeleton tool to change the position and rotation and the third way to animate is frame by frame so i'll just remove all the keys again first okay so if i bring the level strip into view and you'll see i've created 12 frames for the robot's body and as i skip down them you'll see it's to allow it to rotate now this is simulating any kind of movement you might have in your character whether it be a walk cycle eyes blinking mouth moving hands opening and closing or whatever and i've created the cycle to show as bb-8 moves across the screen so there's a few ways to get this cycle into the timeline and if i select and highlight over some of the frames and then press the delete key to delete them so the first way because we're showing drawing number one first we want to show you from drawings 2 through to 12. scroll down hold shift and select drawing 12 and then click and drag into the timeline and you see the block of drawings appear we'll just place them there if you want two cycles we can hold shift and select 12 and put all 12 in so they follow on from each other and as you watch the animation you'll see them turning the other way if i just highlight those and delete them is i can extend drawing number one over to frame seven and then the shortcut to change the drawing in the current cell either forward by drawing or back by drawing you can see this in the cells menu and the keyboard shortcuts are w and q to move them backwards and forwards so fire select on frame number seven and press w cycles forward and q cycles backwards so i want drawing number two on frame seven if that drawing selected and you click and drag the drag handle you extend just drawing number two onwards but to extend the full sequence of drawings if you select drawing number one and two and then click and drag it'll show the sequence through to 12 and beyond that it shows the numbers in red which means you haven't got drawings for those numbers so you can simply come back to 12. but to keep showing a cycle there's a small trick where if you have the final drawing in the sequence i'll extend that over then i press w on frame number 18 to go back to drawing number one so we've got the final drawing here and the first drawing here if you highlight those two and then click and drag it'll then go around the sequence repetitively as many times as you need to we've played animation from frames one through to six it shows drone number one that it plays rotation of bb8 through to frame 30. so now if we add some animation you should see the character moving across the screen a bit more realistically so that just needs a little bit of fine-tuning so the final thing to mention for this character is if we're using the skeleton tool i did say you can see the layer name and there's some arrows at the top and bottom of the layer name slot allows you to select the drawing of the current frame directly on the page so you just simply click and drag up or down and it tells you the frame number and you then select the one you want which isn't handy for a sequence of numbers like this but if you want to select a specific drawing for animation it could be useful okay so i'll just set up a small animation now with this character just to demonstrate how you can use him [Music] and that's the basics of setting up a puppet character to animate with and how you can animate with him why not give it a go yourself and next week i'll be looking at animating with a more complex character and show them some new techniques to make the puppet work better for you so if you like this video please like and share to help the channel and comment below if you've got any questions or requests for other tutorials and don't forget to subscribe to be reminded of future tutorials and animations and now back next friday with more puppet animation and that's a guarantee [Music] you

Channel: Darren T

Views: 28,323

Keywords: animation, opentoonz, cut-out animation, puppet animation, animating bb-8

Id: wIc3Ocag8s4

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018