How to Animate in Photoshop | #1

it's time to learn how to animate in photoshop let's get straight to it [Music] tiptut you can download the resources for this tutorial by going to www.tip.xyz and clicking on the resources page if you are new to photoshop i recommend watching my intro to photoshop series first before this one is very short doesn't take long and we'll cover things that we gloss over in this series such as selecting tools and basic photoshop controls all right let's get on with the tutorial hello everybody and welcome back to tiptop and welcome to this animation in photoshop series a few things to say before we get started um first of all we've just got a new dog it may bark i'm very sorry i'll try to repeat anything if it barks over what i'm saying we're doing this in photoshop with a copy of the anim destin ii plugin and which you can get from the link in the description just follow the instructions on github download it install it it's really simple to do once you've done that you'll be ready to go and follow along it's just a really useful tool to help you give some more traditional animation tools inside of photoshop um thirdly i've put a new bit of software on which should show my key presses in the bottom left-hand corner please let me know if that's all right for you guys it shouldn't be too distracting finally the animation that we're going to be creating is this little loop here a guy stamps down a couple of his feet his cape wafts in the wind as you can see here he raises a pencil in the air he does a cheeky grin and it reveals to be me and my big socks and my shorts uh not necessarily me someone um getting ready to do a drawing nice little simple animation we're gonna go through this scene by scene it might be a long series i might cut some bits out depending on what that is without any further ado though we're gonna jump right in and get started now you can download this file from our website tiptup.xyz on the resources page and we're going to use this as a framework to get started but what you should do first of all is um go to window in photoshop and go to your extensions panel and just make sure that animdesim2 is um installed and running correctly now once that is you'll be able to open up the window like this and i'll just take you quickly through what some of these options are this one opens the timeline panel and this one and creates a new project so with umps dot psd open we're just going to click this new project one here um just so that we can get used to adding and removing frames before we go back to one which already has something established so the frame rate we're going to choose is 24 frames per second which is kind of a standard for this type of animation i'm just going to hit ok and that's going to create a new document here as you can see that's called anim the button next to that will allow us to change our canvas settings for example it's currently 1920 by 1080. i'm just going to make it square 1080 by 1080 choose proceed the buttons next to that will add a either single or a um double frame now we're going to work mainly on twos which is a double frame it lasts two frames of animations clicking one of these will just add a new frame to whatever um video group or even think of it as a layer whatever layer you're currently working on you can extend and decrease the duration of an individual frame by just dragging like so and you can select frames by clipping and hitting the delete button if you'd like and you can duplicate frames by clicking the duplicate button here um the rest of these will go into as we start using them but suffice to say that yes you do have your layers palette over here on the right hand side but most of the work you'll be doing will be in your timeline panel so just make sure you've got that open so for example if we have our single frame here and i get out my brush tool i'm using a wacom tablet by the way i do recommend you use a tablet of some kind you can get them as cheap as 30 quid these days so it's not too expensive um let's just draw a circle to begin with like so you'll notice if i hit two here to get new frames we'll move on um to the next frame and it's blank you can then scrub through your timeline you can see the circle we've drawn drawn appearing and disappearing now there's a thing in animation called an onion skin which allows you to see the frames before and after the frame that you're currently on that's what this little button here does if we click that button it should turn it on the first thing you'll want to check is you go down to your burger menu on your timeline here and make sure that onion skin is enabled and you've opened your onion skin settings and you set the frames before and after to be too just gives you a little bit more freedom to look and you'll notice now that we can turn on and off our onion skin which shows or hides our onion skin preview therefore on this next frame we could draw the ball a little bit lower down add in a new frame again stretch the ball out a bit add in another new frame again the ball hits the ground and in another one the ball stretches out onto the ground again and so on and so forth obviously this isn't the animation that i'm going to be showing you here this is just oops what did there was accidentally hit the save button instead of the new frame button so we'll just do that um hopefully we can get this going back to a roughly similar place as the stop and you can see there once you hit play we've now got a nice little balancing ball animation you can turn off um you can start and stop the animation just by pressing the space bar as well which is quite useful uh turn off the onion skin to watch the animation you can see we've got our first little animation so that's all that we need to know to get started we're going to learn everything that we're going to need to know to animate using the example file just know for example at the moment that these are the two buttons you use to add frames duplicate and delete frames and this is your onion skin tool here okay the rest of them will get through to that in the real file so i'm just going to close this file down and take you back to see what we've got working here in our initial file you can see that i have a number of frames and i've just drawn different pictures on each one there's a foot that slams down and twists to face the camera and then we just duplicated and flipped that to um do the other foot coming down there is then a line which is going to represent our character's cloth it's going to ripple and then whip away and there is a hand that raises into frame lifting up a pencil his uh sunglasses or his normal glasses are going to shine then he's going to smile and then it's going to zoom out to reveal he's just standing there like a muppet wearing his high-waisted shorts and his big tall socks ready to draw a picture okay you'll notice that all of these layers are red and that's just because i've selected a layer and i've applied one of our guide colors here you can see i can change that to green if i want to as well or blue and what that will do is change everything you've drawn on that current frame to a certain color now all you need to do is open up this and we're going to use this as a framework to start our animation so the way i like to work is i do a storyboard for our animation first of all and i'll just call this one storyboard down here in our layers palette and you can see that renames it up here as well in the bottom left of our frame now if you zoom in using the zoom section here you'll notice that each of our first frames in each shot last eight frames and then it lasts 12 frames uh on the subsequent layer so we've got layer three here eight frames layer four here is um 12 frames and then this does another eight frames and then another 12 then another 8 and then another 12. and that creates a nice rhythm and times out our animation for us and to do that all i did was just stretch some of these frames here for example i selected them and just adjusted their duration just by clicking and dragging we're going to use this as a storyboard on top of that we're going to draw our things called roughs and we're going to use our roughs our rough drawings with the red green and blue overlays to sort of break down our animation into bits and then make it easier for us to draw for example i'm going to add a new layer above this current storyboard layer that we're going to call roughs to do that i'm going to click this little folder icon which will create a new folder on top and automatically give us a single frame drawing within it we're going to double click this over in our layers palette here we can double click the name and we can just rename this roughs like so okay let's stretch out this first frame to be two frames here and what i'm going to do is go down to my storyboard folder down here and i'm just going to reduce the opacity of that down so it's less distracting so you can see through it a bit more let's grab our brush tool and i'm just using a simple pencil brush tool here and i've got from just photoshop and on our layer selected here we're just going to start draw oops i accidentally opened layer style on another window there my mistake let's just close that uh we're just going to start to draw so using this as our guide layer here we know that for the first eight frames or so we wanted to take eight frames to for the foot to reach this final position so i'm just going to draw in using my pencil the foot in our roughly finished position basically tracing just to get warmed up a little bit okay and we're going to use this as a reference to draw the rest of our frames so you can see i've got obviously a touch screen here that i can use to rotate my artwork which you might find uh useful when it comes to drawing correct angles and things like that okay now we've got a foot that we're happy with but we don't want it particularly there so what i'm going to do is go to start my timeline press 2 again that's going to add in a new frame you can see this added in after it but you can just click a layer and drag it to position it before after or wherever you like in your timeline so now we have an empty frame at the start if i turn on onion skin i can see my next frame already just for the sake of convenience i'm gonna make both of these uh previews with a green overlay now as this foot slams down into the frame i'm thinking i want it to be sort of coming down like excuse me can i use the brush tool because the target channel is hidden um so what happened there was for some reason under my channels this this quick mask was um selected when i was drawing i want to be on the rgb channels when i'm drawing and this will then allow us to draw something like so and erase something like so as well so we're just going to click this new two frames icon here and we're just going to drag that before our drawn on frame which has our foot on it and as you can see with our onion skin selected we can see our foot on this frame and obviously no drawing on this one if i click the green button that will overlay it with the green here and i can just get to drawing on this one as well so i think what i want is like the foot coming down kind of like this and like getting ready to slam into position and down onto the page so i like to do to make sure that my sizes are going to be similar is i will draw myself in the same position for a little bit then i can grab my sorry excuse me i hit the microphone there grab my movement tool and just move that around to wherever i want it basically uh let's have it moving up just a little bit there and i'm just gonna get the heel and have it start to slam down just a little bit like so maybe it's more like that so as you can see here i'm being pretty rough with it i can just grab my eraser and just undo some stuff we are going to go through and neaten these up obviously later on i may not do that on camera because it's just a case of you know are you happy with the drawing which is quite a personal thing so let's grab our move tool and just shimmy that into position like so that looks pretty good let's add another frame after that two frames long let's make him green as well and let's draw one as if the heel has hit the floor but our foot is still currently just about to hit and we can facilitate that by drawing in some baggy socks nice and then we'll do one which is basically the foot has landed but it's just off on the toes and what that will do is basically allow our foot to kind of settle in a little bit of course you can just click where you need to go you can hear the dog jangling there good girl popped off having a niche uh turn off your onion skin to have a little quick preview bam and then you can click play of course to um preview that but as you can see because we didn't set any kind of loop it's going to play our entire animation which can be quite distracting so if we zoom out a little bit you'll notice you've got these little handles here at either end of the animation and they should match the visuals somewhat of the handles here on this side of the end of this side of the timeline too if you scrub to the position where you want the end of your looping segment to be and click the right hand one that'll clip it there and obviously the left hand one will clip it wherever the left hand one goes if you then hit play it will loop that little segment and now you can see our foot is kind of settling into position there now i think i've been a bit uh presumptuous with the four with the eight frames settling here i think what we want to do is maybe extend this just a little bit so we'll do the same for both of our layers just by dragging those out and we've got bam he settles in maybe we'll do 12 frames for this as well and that's the thing with the storyboard it can change and flex as you need it to let's give ourselves a bit more breathing room and let's add another two frames here let me see so there i did it wrong i had the wrong layer selected so i'll just hit ctrl z to undo that and go back to my green layer and hit two on that one instead and i'll add it on the correct layer let's make it green and we're just going to retrace as we did the first one here our first little sock and we've got our first frame here so this will basically be the finishing frame um so we want all of our other stuff to go in between that so if we just add in a few more frames now i like to do a couple frames at a time like so i know pretty much that that's going to be where i want it to be you can drag your last one towards the end and because we've got the storyboard on um and we can use our onion skin we can start to morph these shapes between each other as well so let's select this layer here and let's get to drawing if you don't find the colors helpful then obviously you can just color the pen um to be whatever color you want if you don't like using the previews i find them quite helpful but it is absolutely up to you so we're just going to start moving this foot around frame by frame i think we'll just have one easing frame either side and just start to position these guys in like so we've got the heel starting to turn here like that boom we need one more settling in frame so this will probably be quite quick we can actually just delete these and then extend this last bit and that's quite nice because then we've got one second of footage per um per shot in the animation so you can see i'm just using my style frames here and the onion skin to kind of tweak a little bit and make sure that my drawings fit in between the desired frames i can shift select these layers and turn them all green at once uh oh no apparently you can't don't know what that error was let's just do them one at a time then there we go uh let's drag our looping section to here and see what we got boom boom boom boom okay pretty happy with that let's uh let's stop it turn off the onion skin and watch it again looks okay you can notice i've missed a few bits here uh at the top of the animation um if i just stop that and scrub through a frame at a time i'm sure we'll see them that one doesn't need them this one does though it's just these uh these sock segments make sure to get the curve in because obviously this character's leg is supposed to be round even though it's flat um let's get these in here and then on the last frame here i i missed this section of his sock bam so there we go have a look looks nice very good yes lovely i think what it needs is um well first of all that foot looks awful so we're going to fix that and i think that needs to kind of go up a bit more kind of like this as it's slamming down boom yeah that looks nicer so we'll stick with that just rub out the sections we don't want straightening things up a bit round things off a bit again these are just the roughs you can take your time and clean this up as much as you want okay so [Music] all right cool so i'm going to treat that as done now and that little section here and we're going to move on the next section here is exact same thing but just flipped around to the other side but i think this could benefit from some secondary animation so we're going to add on top of this another layer called rust2 and again these are just my naming convention you can call it whatever you want alpha2 let me go and you can see that this has created another folder on top with another collection of frames we're going to make these ones blue and what we're going to do here on these ones if i just add a whole bunch of frames because i know that i'm going to need animation on every frame for this segment um what we're going to do here is add like a puff of dust as his foot hits the floor and turns i think that might look nice and once you finish this we'll have two shots done because it's just mirrored so obviously on this frame there'll be nothing now to move back and forth you can just choose left and right on the keyboard but you may have to activate the anim decim2 shortcuts and you do that just by clicking this button here which basically means it translates your key presses to um shortcuts that animdesim understands rather than photoshop understands sometimes this will help sometimes it won't which is why you should turn it on and off using this toggle switch here for example i can now push myself back and forth through my frames without having to worry go of course forward two frames and we've got our little puffs of dust here as it hits the floor so what we'll do is we'll just have a little cartoony puff of air come out from each bit turn on onion skin for this segment and we can just have our our sort of cartoonish puffs of air come out and we'll have them kind of just start to dissipate so this isn't really a how to animate tutorial it's more of a how to animate in photoshop tutorial because a i don't think i'm quite qualified to teach that sort of thing uh very well i do my best obviously um there's so much to animation that i don't understand and b it's probably it's what people have asked for more than anything else um they want to just know specifically how to animate in photoshop and this is how i do how to make in photoshop so we've got a first puff of air now coming up boom as it hits the floor boom you'll notice here that because we've got the onion skin on it's not quite playing in real time but it will warn you of this by uh this little icon down here in the bottom left where it says sort of 19 frames per second currently not to worry too much you've already got a feel for the movement and it's going to move you know solidly at whatever that frame rate is so it's not going to be too much trouble hopefully um okay great let's carry on let's go back and use our blue blue layer blue layer again and as the boot starts to turn just on this frame we will have as well some little puffs of dust so i'll follow the path to reinforce four three and fourth i can't speak reinforce the uh motion of the boot as it slides along the dirt so i'll have these kind of just from out here like that and then of course they can disappear off into nothingness so bam bam looks nice let's turn off onion skin we should probably let it play at real time nice we will come back and tidy this up and maybe add extra frames and that sort of thing but it'll be using the same techniques so don't worry too much if it changes slightly between this episode next episode it means i just took some time off camera to fix that okay great so we're happy with this then um what i will do is leave this next section blank um what we could do is just select all of these layers if we just hold down control you can multi-select things like so and we'll see if duplicating this will work i'm not sure it will because they're in separate groups but let's give it a go no see it duplicated them they're all on the same layer but what you could do is quite simply select all these green bits with shift and drag them down and that'll fix that for you obviously at the moment they are not flipped but that is quite easy to do you can just select your layer you can hit ctrl t which will select obviously the things you've drawn and just go to flip horizontal which will do that for you and reposition it but as far as i'm concerned there's no point doing that until the very end because you're going to draw it all anyway and as far as we're concerned it's the same thing so there is our two feet slamming down um i think that'll do for lesson one so that we don't get too far into this uh next time we're going to take a look at animating this little bit of cloth here and having it whip out a frame it's going to be some of the same techniques but we'll explore things in a little bit more detail as well hopefully that was enough for now though i hope you've enjoyed this video if you have let me know like comment subscribe leave a thumbs up it really does help and i hate asking for it um and hopefully i'll see you next time for another episode of tip remember to subscribe for more tips tricks and tutorials thanks for watching

Channel: TipTut

Views: 16,357

Keywords: tiptut, tip, tut, adobe, creative, cloud, graphic, design, designers, tutorials, lessons, helpful, basic, easy, simple, beginners, designer, graphical, digital, create, theory, animation, photoshop, anim, ps, frame, by, wave, principle, beginner, animate, key, keyframe

Id: vqg9D2QW5H0

Length: 24min 4sec (1444 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020