FREE 2D Animation Software / How to Animate in Krita!

hey everyone I thought I'd kick off the new year with a tutorial on how to animate in critter and give you some hopefully helpful tips to get you started so critter is a free program and can be downloaded on their website it also has a look and feel similar to photoshop with a range of really amazing brushes changes and improvements are funded through donations so this means that bugs might not be fixed as quickly as other programs but they do seem to update the software pretty regularly and if you can't afford other programs or just starting out in animation I think this is a pretty good choice now I'm just going to open critter and set up a new file if it's a short film or something for YouTube I'll go the usual 1920 by 1080 pixels if it's a loop for Instagram I'll go for a square canvas usually around 800 by 800 so if you click content here you can change the name of your file how many layers you want the canvas to open with as well as change the background color a nice option Krita offers is animation template and this gives the canvas a frame that makes it look like you've been animating traditionally if you do select this option you'll see layers to the right which have been pre-made and labeled to help you organize your animation you can do it this way but I like to add things as and when I need them so I'm just going to create a new custom document 800 by 800 now if you've downloaded the software it doesn't look too much like an animation program so far because we're currently in the default workspace for critter however if you like this out but one of the animation tools all you need to do is go to settings Dockers and then hit animation and timeline there is an option in Dockers for onion skin but there is a button on the timeline panel to bring up and hide this feature here too another way to bring up the animation features is to go to window workspace animation which is quicker though I have to bring up the brush presets in Dockers just in case I want to change my brush while I'm working now in the animation toolbar you can see what frame you're currently on where your animation will start and end and your playback buttons to change your framerate enter a new value here for me it's usually 25 frames a second to the left of that you have several options like add a new frame add duplicate frame and remove keyframe without leaving anything around on the next row we have options called drop frame and this means if I'm playing my animation through and my computer is lagging it will drop a couple of frames to make sure it keeps time with my animation this next one is auto frame mode which is on if I keep it like that it will create a new keyframe every time I move across the timeline and draw something if I turn it off I'll only be making changes to the last keyframe I made now it's pretty obvious from the icon but this is the onion skin and tapping it will bring up this window the onion skin shows your frames before and after the frame you're working on in different colors which you can change here and increase or decrease the opacity of each is great for doing in betweens and keeping things consistent if you need to trace over your previous frame you can have up to 10 frames showing before or after your current frame but usually I'll just stick with one either side next up is the audio feature it has options to open mute remove and change the volume of the track as you can see I've got a little message up here which says audio is not supported in this build I think I had an earlier version where it did work for me by updated to make this tutorial and now it doesn't work I'm not that bothered by this because you can animate and then add audio in another program afterwards and export the two from there but this will definitely make lip-sync a lot more difficult if you want to make it in Krita they seem to update pretty regularly so I don't expect that this feature will stay broken for long now if I animate something here just very quickly and I want to clean it up I can add in another layer by going into your timeline here or the layers panel but suddenly my ruffs are gone luckily I haven't lost all my animation they're just hidden and that's because if you want to keep your layers on the timeline you need to right-click on the layers you want to see and click show in timeline now this is good if I've got loads of layers and just want to focus on one but it also means that I can see what they look like altogether as you get used to critter and start animating more quickly you're going to want to set up your shortcuts and hotkeys to open it up go to critter preferences and then keyboard shortcuts a lot of my shortcuts for the animation tools have no assigned keys so what you need to do is write down a list of all the features you want to use when animating that will help you work faster and figure out which case you want to assign them to the shortcuts I find the most important to setup and help me work faster were create blank frame next keyframe previous keyframe remove keyframe and toggle onionskin you can check what keys have already been assigned in the menu and work around that or override the ones they exist already by clicking none and then entering a key if the shortcut is already being used this window will pop up telling you why it's assigned to and then you can either cancel or continue by hitting reassign clicking this blank Square will erase the shortcut once I'm happy with my animation I can export it but it's not quite as simple as is in other programs I'd watched a few tutorials on exporting both in Windows and Mac that made me go no there's too many steps I'll do something else but there's obviously been an update because I did it very quickly and it wasn't as complicated as I first thought so to export I can go to file render animation I can export as an image sequence and enter the first and last frames of my animation I usually set my file type to PNG if I want to bring it into another program I need to layer it up with camera moves and different backgrounds exporting the animation like this will create a new image for every frame in my animation so if there's a lot of them you'll want to make a new folder to keep them all together to export as a video which you want to do if you've got sound or you want to play it through without having to do anything else you'll need to get something called ffmpeg and save it in your computer where it won't be deleted because you'll need this file every time you want to export a video so if you head to this website there's a few different options I kept the first option selected and chose Mac because that's what I'm working on if you're on a Windows be sure to select what version you have I then kept the top option selected on the third menu and hit download once that was finished I unzipped the file and moved the folder to my desktop in this folder there is another called bin and if you open that you'll see ffmpeg I move this file onto my desktop and delete the rest and it still works for me so it doesn't seem like I actually need to keep anything else going back to critter and my export I can select the ffmpeg I've just downloaded if you've got sound be sure to include the audio and then select ok after that just check the net place if it does great if it doesn't like my first try didn't go back into critter and re-export it except click these three little dots beside render as and make sure the drop-down menu beside profile has baselines selected hit OK to re export it and it should work if it still doesn't work I used a program called handbrake which again is free and I use these settings if you want to copy them down just hit pause at any point in the video this program will react sport your animation as a new file allowing you to play it I also use these settings on big animations to bring down file size a bit without absolutely destroying the quality finally I just wanted to mention two channels I follow that used critter I apologize now if I pronounced either of this wrong so the first is Sara toughies and she does some really beautiful digital paintings in the software she has tutorials up on a channel with digital and traditional painting as well the second channel is ed today and he has a lot of speed paints and animations using critter which are amazing I'll leave links to both of their channels in the description and you should definitely go and check them out so I think I've covered everything in this tutorial I really hope you found it useful and can making some animations fo free if you want to see more stuff like this for me give this video a like and subscribe and I'll be back with another one real soon bye [Music]

Channel: kdsketch

Views: 1,439,420

Keywords: 2d animation software, free, krita, how to, animate, tutorial, help, digital, painting, frame by frame, ffmpeg, export, handbrake, onion skin, animation company, animation studio, 2d animation studio, 2d 3d mix, whiteboard animation, explainer animation, product animation, krita animation

Id: k8XImKvRAls

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 04 2019