How To Animate in Krita for Beginners — UPDATED 2023!

in this tutorial i'll show you how to animate frame by frame in krita as well as how to draw your character once and then move their body parts with motion tweens krita if you didn't know is a free photoshop like program that you can animate in you can download it for free from krita.org the version i'm using is 5.1.0 i am also using a wacom tablet to draw with which allows me to do light pen pressure and harder pen pressure if you'd like a tablet recommendation i have one in the video description below this tutorial assumes you already know the basics of krita if you don't know check out my first video on krita that goes over how to use this program with that being said let's get started animating [Music] so to start with after creating a new document we want our animation windows to show up like our timeline or onion skin window so the easiest way to do that is go under window workspace and then select animation and that'll set up everything that you need for animation if you just want the animation windows themselves it's going to be under settings dockers and then the ones we're going to need are animation curves animation timeline and onion skins you'll also want to make sure that you have your layers window visible as well and you may find other windows in here that could be useful also so first thing before we get started we want to make sure we're on a new layer which there should be a new layer by default with transparency you can see this little checker board showing transparency if we were to animate on this background layer because it's filled in with white it's going to get in the way of your onion skin and you won't be able to see your drawings before or after which is very important for animation so make sure you have a new layer if you don't you can click on this plus button down here and that'll make a new layer so to get started with animation we want to go down to our timeline down to our animation layer right click on the first frame and select create blank frame and now we can draw our first frame of animation once you have your first frame drawn out you can select frame number two right click and select create blank frame to draw your second frame and in order to animate we need to be able to see what our previous drawing was so we can do that by turning on this light bulb right here and you'll see your previous drawing appears in red behind it just like this your onion skin options are down here so you can select how many onion skins previous or forwards are visible and you can also change the color of your onion skins down here so that's how to turn on and edit your onion skin but let's say we didn't want to draw a whole new frame let's say we wanted to take the drawing we already had and edit it and move it around for our second frame well instead of creating a blank frame we can undo before we did that we can right click and say create duplicate frame and then what we could do is we can take our lasso tool and then just delete the sections that we're not going to use and then we can turn on our onion skin press ctrl t to transform our drawing and for this i'm going to flip it horizontal move it over here maybe rotate it a little bit just like that and i'm going to change his expression so he's looking surprised or shocked at something happening over on screen right once you've got your two frames finished you can turn off your onion skin and use the arrow keys to flip back and forth between them if you ever want to change your hotkey settings you can change those under settings configure creda and then keyboard shortcuts and then you just search for what you want to edit so here we have next frame which we can change to be period and then previous frame we can set to be comma and then press ok and now those are our frame forwards and frame backwards buttons if you want to move a frame you can just click select it and drag it where you want it to be and that'll change the timing of your frame if you want to copy a frame you can right click and select copy keyframes and then right click and paste keyframes or you can click and drag while holding ctrl and that will also copy a keyframe you can add a new blank keyframe with this button right here or you can add a new duplicate frame with this button right here or to delete a keyframe you can select this delete keyframe button right here and one organization thing that i like to do is i like to color my keyframes so these are our extremes you can think of these as the storytelling poses so usually i like to right click and color those red and then i can tell what my keyframes are so i want to do an in-between frame between these two so i'm going to click and drag keyframe number two over here and then i'm going to click in the middle between them and create a new blank frame for our in-between i'm going to turn on our onion skin by clicking this light bulb right here one thing to note when characters are turning their heads what a lot of beginning animators might do is just do a completely perfect 50 in between where their head just goes to the right just like this but if you ask a friend to look over to the other side of the room typically what you'll see them do is their head will go down a little bit and they'll close their eyes and you'll get this arcing motion whenever someone turns their head to look in a different direction so that's something that i'm going to keep in mind when i'm drawing this uh breakdown pose between these two all right so here i've got my breakdown drawing which is my halfway drawing in between my two extreme key poses so you can see his face goes down and then pops back up for his surprised expression so for breakdown drawings i usually like to color them as blue since they're not quite keyframes they're more like specific in-betweens between my two keyframes and if i were to indicate this on paper usually what i do is i circle keyframes and then for breakdowns i underline them so two more key poses that i usually do with every movement is an anticipation and an overshoot so an anticipation is sort of like moving the opposite direction of the direction you're going to move so you can think about like a baseball pitcher who leans back to throw the baseball and then swings forward when they throw the baseball same person who's hitting the baseball with a bat they twist backwards before swinging forwards with the bat right so that's what an anticipation is so even with a head movement like this one that's a lot smaller of an action there should still be a little bit of an anticipation there so i'm going to control select these two frames and then move them down by one frame giving us one blank in between so for this drawing because i want to reuse his head shape i'm going to select create duplicate drawing and that's going to create a new frame between this one and this one so now i can use my lasso tool to delete all the parts that i don't want to use so i'm going to turn on my onion skin and because he ends up moving this direction we want the anticipation to move a little bit in this direction first so that's where i'm going to move this head i'm going to select it transform it move it up a little bit maybe rotate it and for this anticipation i'm also going to have him start to notice a sound coming from off screen in this direction and for the hair i'm going to have it kind of drag behind and stay relatively in the same spot as it was on our first frame since it kind of gets dragged behind hair is something i'll often animate as a second pass because it's one of those floppy bits any bit that's like floppy things like boobs or fat on a belly is something i'd usually animate as a second pass after i get the main pass of the full body animated first but for this example we're keeping it pretty simple so his body's gonna be moving up just a little bit towards this direction same with his neck alright so this is our anticipation pose if we turn off our onion skin and kind of flip back and forth we can see that things are kind of moving the way they should be just moves subtly up in this direction just like we were aiming for and usually when i'm doing anticipations i'll indicate it underneath just like this just write the word antic underneath my keyframe and then same thing for this drawing we want to have an overshoot so i'm going to select this keyframe and move it one frame over and then do a blank keyframe right here turn on our onion skin and in the case of this drawing i only want to see the future drawing so i'm going to modify my onion skins to only show one drawing to the future and same thing but the opposite direction right so he ends up in this pose so we want him to go a little bit past his final resting pose for this overshoot and we can indicate what drawing this is by doing a circle k for keyframe and then usually i just write the letters overshoot like that so we'll just draw his head going a little bit past like that but his hair will have dragged behind like this just flip back and forth maybe exaggerate the expression a little bit on this frame and there we have our overshoot drawing so now we have keyframe one anticipation breakdown overshoot and then settle into final keyframe oh i also want to mark this as red i kind of consider overshoots as another keyframe so he notices something turns over and then changes expression one last thing that'll really help your animation feel alive is having stuff like hair kind of take a few extra frames to settle in after the body has stopped moving so we can do that by going one frame forward making a duplicate frame going one frame back and then erasing his hair turn on our onion skin for the previous drawing and the next drawing and just have it be in between your previous drawing and your next drawing just like this and we'll do this a couple of times just so there's a few frames of settle so there's one so let's do that again i'll drag this last keyframe just over one to give us one more in between click here create a duplicate frame erases hair right here do another in between between these two drawings turn off our onion skin and just see how this feels so he turns around and then his hair settles into place so if you want your animations to be better having these things can help a lot having anticipation overshoot and then having floppy bits settle afterwards if you have those elements your animation is going to look so much better so even just a simple head turn with a few extra drawings can really make things feel a lot more alive let's continue adding in betweens so where i like to add in betweens is mostly in the anticipation the longer you have in anticipation the faster your movement into your next pose can be so i'm going to hold down my mouse button and drag a selection across all of these keyframes and then move it down let's do by a couple frames like that then i'll add a blank frame here turn on my onion skin do a 50 in between here then i'll go one frame forward create blank frame do another 50 in between so the closer these drawings are to each other the more subtle and the smoother the animation is going to be so if you see things popping adding another in between can help a lot also for these since they are in betweens i want to make sure to remove color on them just so i don't confuse them as keyframes and then here i think i'm going to add an in-between from this key to this breakdown pose just to smooth that out a little bit all right so i think that'll look pretty good if we frame by frame through it it looks like this pretty nice if we want to play our animation right now it's gonna play once and then keep playing until frame 100 or so so there's a couple things you can do you can create a selection box around your animation like this and press play and it'll just play that section or you can select this hamburger menu right here and select when the animation starts and when the animation ends and also what frame rate it is at so we're going to have the animation end at frame 10 and you can see if i play it it's pretty fast also we have this option on called drop frames if that is turned on it's going to play your animation at speed but if it can't display all the drawings at the same time it's going to drop frames so if you want to see every single frame even if it's not the correct timing you can turn that off and it'll play every single drawing so you can see our animations playing pretty quick right now well here's what a lot of disney animators and old school animators did this is called animating on ones so we have one new drawing for every single frame what a lot of old school traditional animation is done is called on twos so every frame is actually exposed for two frames instead of one frame so what we can do is we can drag a selection around our entire animation move it down one and then keep repeating that but the easiest thing to do is select your entire animation right click go to hold frames and select insert multiple hold frames and then just set this as one press ok and now your animation is on twos well except for this one we can right click and go insert hold frame after that one it'll add a hold frame just like that and now if we set our animation to stop playing at frame 21 our animation now looks like this pretty cool so animation on twos kind of has that traditional sort of old-school look to it so i'd really recommend animating in this way if something's happening super quick like a somersault or like some quick fighting action that's when things would happen on once but for stuff like this animating it on twos is a really good idea next let's move on to how to motion tween with krita so first i'm gonna do a rough sketch of the character and then i'm gonna turn the opacity down on that layer and then we'll draw the body parts on top of it and i'll make sure to separate the body parts by different layers for example in this one we're going to do the head as one layer and then the body as a second layer so now we've got our character all cleaned up i'll show you how i cleaned it up over here so this is my rough sketch which i had underneath here and then each body part that i wanted to be animated i have separated by their ink layers and then they're filled in color layers and then i have both of those layers in a group so you can do that by selecting both of these layers with shift select and then pressing ctrl g to group them into a folder just like this and then i have a background that i added and a little circle that we're going to animate so first off we're going to animate this to a song so to import a song into your animation we want to go down to this speaker icon right here and we click on open audio so you're going to need audio beforehand if you want to record audio you can always use your microphone and a free program like audacity to record audio i have a song already picked out that i'm going to import and i find that dot wave files usually work a bit better than mp3 files so if you're having trouble with audio try converting it to a wav file or making sure that you have a wav file and then we're going to click open and then if we play it [Music] we can hear our audio plays and if we scrub through it so this has added audio to our animation but um apparently the scrubbing doesn't work very good i remember like an old version of krita the scrubbing worked fantastically but here it's not functional um apparently this is getting fixed on it might work in version 5.2 but as of now the audio scrubbing seems to not work so uh just something to be aware of i think somebody i did some research and someone was saying version 3.3 or something the audio scrubbing works but then you're going back a bunch of versions so it's a bummer but what can you do um one solution might be to play and just see where the beats are since we're animating the music so let's make a new layer called beats and we'll do a new blank frame and we'll just do a little circle here on the top right corner whenever we hear a b and one thing to note about this frame is it's gonna stay on the animation for the whole animation so if you want a frame to disappear you're gonna have to create a blank frame when you want it to disappear so now we have one frame where it shows up and then it disappears just like that and i'm gonna control drag to copy those two frames over so let's put the next one right about here see how that feels repeat that [Music] all right so it took a little bit of work but we finally got our animation all beated out so anytime this blue dot appears that's when we want to hit our beats also i've got my timeline zoomed out if you want to zoom in and out of your timeline you just put your mouse right here and then drag in and out just like this to zoom in and out your timeline so now that we've got our music all timed out and we've got our character split up into different body parts let's motion tween something so the first thing i'm going to start with is the head so motion tween happens in this animation curves window right here and to animate something with the motion tween we first have to add what's called a transformation mask onto a layer so here i've got my head group if i select the group and then click this drop down next to the plus button right here and then select add transform mask what this means is i can add a transformation to this head object here and it applies it to this transformation mask object right here so you can actually see i can toggle the visibility of that transformation mask on and off so you can think of it as a layer that applies a transformation to your layer and that's what you're going to need anytime you want to motion tween something in krita so make sure you have your transformation mask selected go down to your animation curves window right here and then click this add keyframe button right here and you'll see a whole bunch of options pop up over here on the left however if we were to select a layer just on its own without selecting a transformation mask and click this add keyframe button you'll see the only thing we're able to animate is the opacity of a layer so that's something to keep in mind is if you want to animate opacity that's done on a layer itself but if you want to animate position rotation scale that has to be done on a transformation mask so if we go back to our animation timeline and just drag our playhead to the next beat which is on frame number nine right here go back to our animation curve add a keyframe click once on the head and you'll see transformation controls pop up so now we can move this head and rotate it and then press enter now when we drag our playhead back and forth you can see we have a motion tween so the computer does all the in-betweens between these two keyframes for you if we go back to our animation timeline you can see these keyframes are showing right here on our transformation mask so if we wanted to copy one of these keyframes we can do the same thing by clicking the keyframe we want to copy holding down control and dragging that keyframe to where we want it to be copied now we have a head that goes down and then back up pretty cool so that's all you have to do for a motion tween really if we play this animation however it just goes back and forth in a linear movement so there's no like favoring one keyframe or the other it just equally moves back and forth from one to the other it's pretty boring and doesn't feel very natural so what we need to do is we need to add easing to this motion so the way we want to edit the easing on this animation is we want most of the hang time to happen while his head is up and be a really hard impact when his head goes down so one thing with these animation curves is it set a keyframe for all of these values but we're not really animating every single one of these values we're only animating like a couple or three of them so we're going to hide every other control except for the ones that we're using so the easiest curve to see is this position y which is up and down movement so i can select a keyframe by just clicking on it and then i go up to here here's your three different interpolations so there's bezier curve interpolation there's linear interpolation which is what we have right now and then there's hold constant value or no interpolation so i'll just show you that one right now and i'll do the same thing for his position keyframe right here as well as his rotation keyframe right here so what that means um okay it's being very weird um if i scrub forward there's still interpolation going on but if i let go then it snaps back to where it's supposed to be so i guess as long as you're not scrubbing it it's it shows what it's supposed to be doing i don't know what was supposed to happen is i scrub and it doesn't move at all right now a lot of these features are kind of janky on the motion tweens panel in recording this tutorial i found a lot of really janky issues with this animation curve window and it was a little bit finicky to use hopefully it's going to be better in future versions so just something to be aware of that this window's not as good as it could be so anyways with that out of the way let's continue on with how to do easing on your animation so to edit the easing of my animation first i'm going to isolate what property i want to edit the easing on for this example i'm going to do his rotation z property so right now this curve looks very flat right but there's actually motion going on to view the curve as a whole you can click this button up here and then you can click to select the first keyframe and then press this bezier handle button up here and that'll create a hollow handle that you can then pull out and modify your easing this way so you kind of have to eyeball it which is not the best hopefully this will be easier in the future you could just push a button but this is how you favor one keyframe or the other so the way we're bending this is it's going to favor the outside keyframes and then in the middle keyframe it's going to be really quick and bounce back to the end keyframes so let's apply this same easing to all of our other body parts and we'll also make sure to copy these keyframes by ctrl dragging them on the timeline and then once we're all done let's see how it looks by exporting our animation as a movie so the first thing we're going to want to get before we can export animation in krita is ffmpeg so if you search for ffmpeg the first result should be the correct one so it's ffmpeg.org and you're gonna want to have it for exporting animation from krita so this is the way the website looks for me there's a big download button right here we're just going to click on that and then you'll want to download the version for whatever operating system you're using i'm using windows so either one of these links should work it should be the same thing i'm just going to click the first link and then just follow the instructions to get the correct download so here is ffmpeg essentials i'm just going to get essentials and you'll need an unzipping program like 7zip in this case to open it so if i open up the zip file go inside the folder this is all the stuff that makes up ffmpeg so here's what i recommend you do so i have a folder on my c drive called ffmpeg so i actually right click made a new folder and i named it ffmpeg then inside of that folder i extracted all of this stuff into that folder and then if we go into this bin folder that is where we're going to see ffmpeg.exe so this is the file that you're going to want to direct krita to when you're exporting your animation so after we have ffmpeg on our computer we're going to go up to file render animation and instead of image sequence we're going to select video and if this is your first time doing it this ffmpeg will probably be blank so what you want to do is click this folder icon to navigate towards ffmpeg and on my computer it's under c ffmpeg bin and then select ffmpeg.exe and press open and that should be the only time you have to do that you can just kind of set it and then forget it and then here's our options of what kind of video we can render so we can render mpeg videos webm videos all sorts of different formats we can do gifs for this example we're going to do an mpeg video which will save it as an mp4 and we're going to make sure to check include audio since we do have audio with this animation and we'll click ok and now we sit back and wait for it to render and if we open our animation up [Music] so that's it that's how you animate in krita there's some things that'll be updated in the future i'm sure like hopefully scrubbing and also the animation curve window will be fixed and a little bit more usable in the future but it's still freaking awesome i really like using krita a lot and i want more people out there to use it it's free if you want to animate it's a great way to learn how to do animation on if you'd like to check out more of my stuff check out the links in the description below make sure to subscribe like the video if you thought this was helpful and until next time guys take it easy take care and uh bye-bye be sure to click here to subscribe to my channel to stay updated on future videos and tutorials if you'd like to help support my work you can click here to visit my patreon page you also get access to rewards like early access to tutorials source animation files and access to a secret patreon only chat room keep on animating and until next time bye

Channel: Jesse J. Jones

Views: 464,376

Keywords: how to make cartoons, how to make a cartoon, how to create cartoon, how to make cartoon, how to make cartoon animation, cartoon livestream, flash tutorial for beginners, toon boom tutorial for beginners, animation tutorial for beginners, animation livestream

Id: -B3LDBlkFWU

Length: 25min 38sec (1538 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022