How To Animate in Toon Boom Harmony (Full Class w/ Q&A)

let's see all right hopefully this is working um it's been a hot minute since I've streamed on YouTube so let me know if uh if my audio's working if the stream's working according to everything I'm looking at it looks like it's working but please let me know uh we are gonna hang out here for about five minutes uh give people time to shuffle in um so yeah uh just hang out get um get a snack get a cold beverage um grab your notebook if you're taking notes or open up toon boom Harmony if you're following along um let's see who's all here uh Hey Blinky animation Morocco ball djc animation blackbird see and hear me fine thank goodness I was really worried about it um you know you just don't stream on something for a long time and uh um sometimes it it just doesn't work you know so so I'm glad things are working I'm glad you can hear me um just chill out hang out for a bit like I said we're gonna give people a little bit of time to shuffle in hey glitch uh Joe shocking Tunes good to see y'all I'm really excited I'm super excited to put on um a free class it's something I've wanted to do for a long time um I love teaching it's like one of my favorite things and too often it's behind a paywall and uh I don't like that I want I want people to learn how to animate you know just on their own without having to Shell out a bunch of money so I'm really excited to put on another toon boom Harmony class also apparently I was checking out the video I uploaded on toon boom Harmony apparently that's seven years old so holy goodness it's time to put out some new content for it uh so I'm excited for it um hey chicken girls how's it going nothing we have to animate we need to keep rings but yeah I appreciate you guys all being here um we'll hang out for a couple of minutes like I said just give people time to shuffle in get ready um like I said grab a notebook if you want to take notes oh I'm glad they're helpful at just a person appreciate it yeah toon boom Harmony's my favorite animation program I've been using it for a long time it's been about 10 years I think since my first toon boom Harmony uh job that I worked on so I've definitely learned a lot since then exactly yeah where has the time gone where's the secret formula uh there is actually an animate button in toon boom Harmony I will show you that at the end of the Stream um any attainager the night sky good to see you again so hard to find good toon boom tutorials out there so glad you're doing this there's actually some really good channels out there uh I'd highly recommend stylist Rumble um it's a bird brain um here's a handful of people doing really good toon boom tutorials out there I'll try to think of more um and Shout them out if I can think of any but yeah stylus Rumble ends a bird brain are both very good also um Adam Phillips body of brackenwood has some really good stuff out there it's a bit old at this point but still relevant alrighty I think um I think we can get started here pretty soon it's been about five minutes or so hey Thursday how's it going uh Shihan smirky ship Matthew T good to see y'all uh chicken draws I'm currently in college and a lot of my classmates have referred to your videos for extra Health that's so cool that makes me very excited alrighty grabbing your laptop hurry hurry it's starting soon it says right there the stream is starting soon all right once once it reaches 805 we are starting the Stream um hey oh let's go alrighty let's get started hey everybody hey hello how's it going welcome to my class on learning toon boom harmony with me Jessie J Jones that's me hi um so what are we gonna learn today in class do you like my PowerPoint presentation I worked very hard on it um so what can you expect out of this class what can you expect to get out of this four hour class that we're doing well my goal uh for this class is to take anybody who's not familiar with Toon boom Harmony um maybe either you're coming from a different software like Adobe animate or Flash or TV paint and uh get you familiar with um toon boom Harmony which personally I've tried out lots of different softwares I've tried out clip Studio paint I've tried out tons of stuff um and toon boom Harmony still after all these years is still my favorite animation program um so I'm hoping to share that with you guys I I want people to learn how to use it um so that's what this class is for is to get you familiar with the tools and familiar with how to animate um in toon boom Harmony and how to export your video for YouTube um so tin boom is a huge program and it's so huge that even last week I learned something new about it so I'm not gonna be able to go over everything um in this class today unfortunately so what this class is going to focus on is mostly traditional 2D frame by frame animation we're not going to get into puppeted rigs or anything like that though we will use some of those tools to speed up your animation workflow um who am I hi I'm Jesse hello again um I've been in the animation industry for about 14 years um I've worked as a professional animator in that time uh I've worked for a bunch of different Studios um mostly remotely here in Portland Oregon I work from home for the most part but I've worked for Studios like um uh Netflix animation Leica uh tit Mouse um as well as doing freelance animation on the side so that's me um I also love teaching like I really like animation a lot and I like sharing it with people so those are my two passions our animation and teaching folks so um that's why I have this YouTube channel is to to share that stuff with you with y'all oh my gosh there's so many people in here sorry if I miss anybody or miss any questions or anything thank you I worked very hard on my PowerPoints thank you um will it be live later yes so some housekeeping stuff um I'm kind of blocking the screen here let me just Shuffle out of here um so the stream will be live um after this recording so if you miss it or if you need to go back watch it again don't worry the stream will stay on my YouTube channel so you can watch at any time going forward um if you have any questions I ask that you save them until the end of the Stream um if you need help with me clarifying something feel free to ask for me to go over something again if I went over it too fast or something like that um so yeah um that's basically it you know um the obvious stuff like be cool please don't be an annoying or awful I'm sure you guys are cool usually the animation folks are pretty cool so um with that being said uh let's get started alrighty so I've got toon boom Harmony open right now um the version I have is toon boom Harmony 20 premium so there's three different versions of uh toon boom Harmony there's Essentials Advanced and premium premium being the most expensive one it's the one that has all the character rig stuff um you can do things with the node View um so the version I have is premium it's gonna have some features that aren't available in the other two versions Essentials and advanced um if you're just wanting to do frame by frame stuff I would suggest just going with Essentials if you're looking to get into doing character Rigs and things like that then I would say to get premium um timboom Harmony Advanced is so specific I almost don't recommend people get the advanced middle version I'd say go with one or the other um what's really cool about toon boom and also a big goal of mine with my YouTube channel is to get people off of adobe I hate Adobe so much and I want people to stop supporting them so even if you don't use toon boom Harmony if you use anything else other than Adobe products that would make me very happy so uh the cool thing about toon boom Harmony unlike Adobe is they have permanent licenses so you can actually get a permanent license and own your software forever that's what I have here that's why I have version 20 which is a few versions back but it's still you know it does everything I need it to um so the reason I like toon boom Harmony is um opposed to clip Studio paint or TV paint is it's a vector program so a vector program as opposed to raster which uses pixels actually uses curves and it's very flexible in that way um you could just do a lot of stuff and it's very flexible with how you animate in it versus TV paint from what I've found which TV paints great I love TV paint but it's I found it a lot less flexible than toon boom Harmony um so with all that being said um if you'd like to check out toon boom Harmony uh you can get a free trial uh just go to toonboom.com and uh check out their free trials you can also get three different free trials so when one runs out on Essentials get the one for advanced and then get the free trial for premium so you actually get three different uh free trials this is not sponsored by the way I know it sounds like I'm Shilling Harmony I just like the software uh I'm not being paid for this at all I'm just giving my own opinions so um yeah um so yeah there's tons of alternatives to toon boom Harmony um basically if you go with anything that's not Adobe you're gonna be in good hands for the most part um so with all that being said now that we've got toon boom Harmony open um let's go over uh this welcome screen that you're gonna see here so the first um bar right here is your scene title this is what your animation is going to be called so you would call this uh I don't know something like my new animation something like that and then the location is where the animation is going to be saved so we're going to click browse and then go to our class here so I'm just going to select this folder that we're working out of and I'm going to select select folder so it's going to save our animation project in that folder so toon boom Harmony and I'll show this later doesn't save one file it actually creates a project folder and that project folder is what is going to contain all of your animation information so I'll show what that kind of looks like later um but important to know it makes a folder instead of one single project um camera size here you have a bunch of different camera sizes and you can actually make your own custom ones if you want the one I used 99 of the time is this uh 1080 24 frames per second one so that gives you a width of 1920 by 1080 at 24 frames per second that's a pretty standard size for most animation that you're going to be doing um so with all these settings um looking just fine we're going to click on create scene and that's going to create a new toon boom Harmony scene yeah thank you for any likes and everything guys also this is a live stream so I'm gonna stumble things are gonna go wrong so it's just the nature of it I don't have my handy editing to like make myself look good all right so um like I said if you guys have any questions um save them for the end of the stream and I'll get to them uh if you'd like me to clarify anything I can happily clarify uh stuff as we go along so now we have our toon boom Harmony scene open so I'm just gonna quickly show what the folder structure looks like for a tune boom Harmony file so this is our class folder this is the folder that we're working off of here so my new animation this is the um folder that we just created here I'm gonna just quit Dropbox really quick um so inside this folder you'll see this stage file so this stage file is your toon boom Harmony file um you can double click on this to open it up um but like I was saying if you wanted to transfer this to somebody if you wanted to transfer your animation project to somebody you wouldn't want to just give them this stage file what you would actually want to do is go up above this folder right click that folder and then zip it up using 7-Zip or WinZip whatever um zipping program you have and then that will make a zip file that you can transfer so that's the way you'd want to transfer um animation projects from one to the other it's more fun with the stubbles that's good to hear um so yeah uh let's see a couple things to note about working um and saving with Toon boom Harmony uh you don't want to work off of a USB drive or even um a network you always want to work locally when you're working with Toon boom Harmony because it has this uh project folder it's updating all the elements all the frames and stuff inside of this project folder every time you make a change so because of that uh things like external hard drives or online networks sometimes have a hard time keeping up with how much is being changed and you can actually lose some work it's happened to me where I've lost work um working off of a network rather than locally on my machine and then uploading it as soon as I was done so that's something to keep in mind don't work off of a hard drive um with your toon boom Harmony files another thing about saving uh really quickly let's just um let's just draw a classic smiley face just to show an example so file save I've got my project saved right uh there is this feature on here that confused the heck out of me when I was first learning toon boom Harmony and I want to show you kind of what the idea behind it is so it's the save as new version um option I would recommend if you're a beginner to never ever ever ever ever let me repeat never ever ever ever ever use this don't use this if you're a beginner um I'll just show you what it does because you might think oh save as new version I'm gonna go underscore version 02 right save that and uh I'm gonna make some changes um let's let's make him let's make him an angry face we'll delete his his mouth we'll make him big old angry face and you can see up here version 02 right I'm gonna click file and Save all right cool that's neat um and even in here in my project folder you can see uh my new animation and my new animation version 02 uh it looks like it saved as a whole new project well it didn't let me show you what happened um and this is another way that I lost a bunch of work was using save as new version if I go back into that project and open up the original not version two but the original stage file if I open that up give it a second to load so you can see this is not version two this is the original and he's got a big angry face so what saving as new version does is it's more useful for puppeted animation things that aren't you're not changing the uh the drawings it's it's confusing and that's why I say beginners shouldn't use it unless you're more experienced then you know what you're doing um basically what you would want to do is you'd want to make new drawings every time and if you're not familiar with Tim boom Harmony you're not gonna know what that means so the best the best method for saving as a new version instead of doing that is to just take this um project folder here just right click copy right click paste and that'll make a new project folder and then you can put underscore version 02 and then work off of that new project folder so just something to be aware of you can also do file save as from here and when you do that you can take this same name here paste that and do underscore version 03 for example if you do save as that does not save just an updated version that actually saves a whole new folder a whole new project so never use save as new version um if you're new to tune boom Harmony just something that can be confusing so uh it saves all the image stuff in the subfolders when saving yes so when you save as a new project um it'll transfer all of your frames your elements it'll transfer everything into this new project folder so it's basically creating a new project um that's why it's important to either copy the project folder or save as um use save as rather than save as new version um yeah I lost a lot of work using save as new version because I was working on a traditionally animated uh thing I was like I animated something and I was like okay save us new version I'm gonna try some stuff out animated it completely differently and I was like I don't really like that I'm gonna go back a version and that's how I found out um how to lose a bunch of work and be super upset for the day [Music] um that's how you learn right you like do something really horrible and then you're like I'm never doing that again and I haven't since then I've not had that same mistake so it was definitely um it was definitely a learning experience alrighty so with that saving stuff out of the way uh let's get on how to use actual toon boom Harmony so once you open up toon boom Harmony here's how to navigate around in it so to zoom in and out in toon boom Harmony it's the number one to zoom oops hold on it's one to zoom out and two to zoom in which uh I was explaining in my old tutorial that might seem weird if you're used to control Plus or control minus but I actually prefer this um because your hand is usually on the left side of your keyboard when you're working in programs so your hand doesn't have to go to the other side of the keyboard to zoom in and out it's super useful um that explains why my old toon boom homework disappeared it's so sad it's such a confusing term unfortunately uh as much as I love toon boom Harmony I definitely have stuff to complain about it it's my favorite program but it's definitely not perfect um as with any software every software is going to have its quirks uh to pan around your scene to pan around your canvas you hold down space and then click and drag to pan around to rotate your canvas you can hold Ctrl and ALT um I'm on a PC anytime you see the word control or you hear the word control just replace it with command so command and ALT on a Mac would rotate your canvas just like this so this is useful if you want to draw from a more natural um uh angle uh so you can rotate around zoom in and out with one and two space to pan around and that's kind of how you navigate around if you want to reset your view you can press shift m I actually because shift and M is on the other side of the keyboard I reset this hotkey to be shift X I found shift X to be a bit more useful and if you want to change any of your hotkeys you just go under edit keyboard shortcuts and here's where you can edit your keyboard shortcuts so the way you can edit a keyboard shortcut is you can either search for it by name or you can search for it by shortcut uh for example if we wanted to search for um let's search for uh shift and then you can use these arrow keys to navigate through all the commands that use uh shift or you can do shift Plus what did I say shift X so here you can see reset view used to be shift M and I've set mine to shift X so the way you set it is you highlight the option that you want to change and then you go onto this press shortcut key box you just click in this box and press the shortcut combination that you want so shift X and that'll set it to shift X and then you press ok just like that and that's how you change a hotkey um what's a scroll do I think scroll Zooms in and out I don't actually I have like the little knob on my um uh tablet so the scroll doesn't work great so I actually don't use the scroll too often but it seems like scroll works for zooming in and out as well I think the middle Mouse button also can be used for panning around if you hold the middle Mouse button um let's see another thing about toon boom Harmony is it's a window sensitive so these shortcut keys are going to affect whatever window you're in right now so you can see this red bar around this window here that means this window is active so if I zoom in and out it's doing it on my camera view if I go down here into my timeline and I press the same hotkey of 1 and 2 to zoom in and out I can zoom in and out on my timeline or I can use space to pan around my timeline just like this um obviously you can't rotate a timeline but but you can navigate using the same controls um as moving around your canvas uh one thing about tint boom Harmony is by default you have to click on the window that you want to be active um this may be updated in newer versions but I know for a long time you had to change a setting and the setting I'd recommend changing is under edit and then preferences and I'd really recommend taking a browse through all these preferences um to set up Harmony in a way that feels comfortable to you um two things that I always change every time I'm on or uh let me go through all the things I would change so if I started on a new machine with a new install of toon boom Harmony let me go over all the preferences I would personally uh want changed let's see is there a comfortable way to drag frames around um yes we will go over um timeline and animation things there's there's a ton of really neat things I want to show with the timeline um let's see so the first thing uh I always turn on is this focus on Mouse enter that's a really important one make sure to turn that on and just really quickly to show what that does here I'll show I'll show it off at first so like I was saying you have to click into these windows to activate them to get the shortcuts to work if you turn on that preference of focus on Mouse enter now whatever my mouse is hovering over is what the shortcut is gonna um effect so one and two hold up I've got Christmas music playing hold up no Christmas music there we go thanks um all right so so now um I don't have to click in the windows to zoom in and out I could just highlight over them um super important uh it can't be a little confusing if you come from something else um you know if you forget that your mouse is down here and you're trying to zoom in and out on your canvas and you're like what the heck why isn't it working um so it took me a while to get used to um being conscious of where my mouse was at all times um so it is something you have to get used to if you're not used to it but uh by this point um you know it's second nature um I I don't know if that's on by default in new versions I agree did you see it should be on by default um which it might be in new versions I'm not really sure but um yeah I would almost say it's a necessity to have on uh let's see another thing I always change is this levels of undo I forget what level it's at by default but I always up this to like 250 something massive just because life you know um so I upped the levels undo uh the other thing I turn on is under the advanced tab um I turned on this support overlay and underlay Arts so we're gonna get to this later but you'll see these two layers here there's line art and color art there's only two of them again this should be on by default um but if you check this check mark and press ok you'll see we now have four art layers instead of just two so super handy that's another one I like to turn on by default is um under edit preferences and then Advanced support overlay and underlay art super important one to turn on so those are the two basic ones um I have set up another thing you can do uh which is really cool when you're setting up toon boom Harmony on a new machine is if you go under edit and preferences once you've got all your preferences saved just the way you like it you can actually click the save button and save it as an XML file so you can save that XML file and transfer it to a new computer and keep all of your settings um with you super useful I use that all the time same with um edit and keyboard shortcuts uh you can see up here you can click save and load so you can save these as XML files as well and that way you can keep all of your custom shortcuts that you've created and transfer it to another computer use toon boom Harmony 21 and it's still off by default yeah that that's a bummer I wonder if 22 picks that I know 22 is the new version um but anyway so that's how you navigate around that's how I set up team boom Harmony as well um when I first start out um adjusting layout so adjusting layout on toon boom Harmony is dead simple it's super easy um you can take these tabs see here where it says camera and drawing view you can take these tabs and pop them out and it'll make a floating window just like that and if you take this tab and move it on top of another tab like this it'll Nest it inside of this window so I can pull it down pop it out like that and if I take it and put it where it's making a big blue rectangle like this so not like this if you drag it on top of a tab it's going to Nest it in that window but if I take that Tab and I put it on the side of a window or like on top of a window so it makes these blue rectangles then that makes it into a separate window just like this so it's super easy to customize um your tune boom Harmony layout this way if you want to get rid of a window you can click this x button right here that'll get rid of this one we have highlighted which is camera view and if you want to add a window back in instead of dragging it onto the tab here you can click this plus button and bring back our camera so we can select our camera up here and uh let's say you really board things up like things are super messed up and you want to go back to the way things were um we just go under Windows workspace and then workspace again and then just select the default workspace and it might take a second um um um hold on did that really overwrite the default workspace no it's not supposed to do that so uh this is a part I would probably edit out and figure what was going wrong [Laughter] oh no okay restore default workspace that's what I was looking for again edit this out later um so restore restore default workspace if you mess everything up just click restore default workspace and uh give it a second hey first try that's what I was meaning to do so now it resets it back to the default workspace and like you saw up there you can also go to workspace and save workspace as so if you wanted to make a custom one you can save that workspace up there um so once you get things in a way that you like them I would really recommend doing that just so you don't lose your um your default or your customized uh layout um some things I like to do when I'm modifying my layout I'll show you how I kind of customized mine so first of all I just want the timeline here I don't want this node Library so I'm going to click X to get rid of that also this timeline um takes up a lot of horizontal space actually I do have my computer at a lower resolution usually I work at a higher resolution than 1920x1080 also speaking of um let me resize the window sorry about that I didn't notice um it was trunk small like that professional setup again edit this part out there we go that's a little bit better so what I usually do with my timeline when I'm on my higher resolution monitor is I take that timeline and I drag it underneath the camera right here so you can see it makes a smaller rectangle underneath the camera and if I do that what that does is it gives me less of a timeline but it gives me more vertical space for all of these tools over here which you know when you're on your brush and stuff can be really useful for seeing all of um your different brushes and stuff so it's an option it's what I do personally you don't have to but I like having the timeline just a little bit shorter and then making these tools a little bit taller um another thing is these art layers right here um I find it hard to know what art layer that I'm on if it's all the way over here so usually I like to drag this down here just so visually I can see what art layer I have selected um another thing is uh the difference between a window and a toolbar so these are windows all these um tabs with information inside of them these are windows whereas these things up here these horizontal and vertical layouts here these are toolbars so if you go under Windows you'll see all of these are windows these down here and then toolbars are checked on so if they're visible so things like Advanced animation is this toolbar right here Advanced animation is one you'll want to have on so if you don't see Advanced animation you can go up to Windows toolbars Advanced animation then you can take this and I usually like to drag it down underneath my tools right here just like that another thing you can do is you can right click on any empty space and that'll bring up your toolbars as well so you can select like Mark drawing for example and it adds it up here you can move these around to shuffle them into place just like that and that's basically it that's how you can um modify the layout for toon boom Harmony I'm gonna go into my um personal layout just because it's the way I like it I see I have two I'm not sure which one's the right one I think this one is the one I usually use um shorts world I actually do have a creda tutorial um you should check out my channel and search for creda I just uh uploaded one this year end of last year um thank you just the person yeah thanks for helping out um so yeah that's basic layout um so here's something that I like to have you can see I have a camera view here and then I have another smaller camera view here so I can have like a little thumbnail View um which I find kind of cool I like having a little thumbnail view just to get like at a glance so even though I have a camera here you can have as many cameras as you want and um duplicate Windows as much as you want um let's see next let's move on to Arrow tools so uh the first Arrow tool is your Black Arrow tool so this is your basic just select stuff and edit it uh I'm gonna do something here so here I have text um I'm gonna right click on it and go to uh convert and then break apart text layers so if you wanted to modify individual letters that's how you would do it so now I can take my Black Arrow tool I can move things around um really really important and potentially confusing thing about toon boom Harmony is this transform button right here so if uh if you saw this icon and you're familiar with what this icon looks like you might think oh I want to edit let's say this this o right here uh I'll select this transform tool to like resize it and stuff but you'll see it's actually modifying the the whole uh layer itself um and what it does is you can actually see it's created a keyframe here so that transform tool is not for editing drawings that's for um adding transformation information onto a layer so things like adding motion tweens or scaling a layer would be done with this if you want to edit the drawing itself that's done with the Black Arrow tool so with The Black Arrow tool you'll see when I select it you can see um this uh this transformation border around it so if I highlight a corner you'll see my mouse switches to the scale option so now I can scale just individual parts of the drawing using The Black Arrow tool rather than this transformation tool over here so something to keep in mind is if you're editing uh the drawing itself you want to use The Black Arrow tool or the white Arrow tool so The Black Arrow tool is just for moving objects around again you can scale it with the corner and if you go just outside the corner you can rotate just like this if you go in between you'll see it goes horizontal so you can skew your drawings if you go in between those little points a really really cool thing about toon boom Harmony that I find really amazing and I wish was in other animation software is let's say I have this R rotated and I wanted to do a squash and stretch on it um if I take this and I squash and stretch it you know it's it's not going to do it properly what's really cool about this transform Gizmo is it's related to how you have your canvas positioned so if I rotated my canvas this direction now the transform tool is this way and I can squash and stretch it properly you'll see this little circle in the middle here this is your pivot point this is where things are going to rotate around so you can also take this pivot point and set it let's say to the bottom here and if I hold down alt uh while I scale it down it'll scale around that Pivot Point um same with rotation it'll also rotate around that Pivot Point so that's what that little circle is for and again to reset view shift M by default but I have mine set to shift X so that's the Black Arrow tool um over here is your tool properties window so with every tool that you have selected this tool properties window is going to change and have different settings applied to it so it's worth going through and seeing what kind of tool properties there are with each of these different tools I won't go over every single setting uh just no time but I'll go for the ones that I use the most um so uh with this Black Arrow tool that we're on right now um there's this option easy drag which I find super useful um let's say you had a really teeny tiny piece of art that you wanted to edit um with easy drag not turned on uh what you would have to do is um you know you'd have to go zoom in and make sure you're on top of the artwork to drag it around um but with easy drag what you can do is um all you have to do is be inside of this box and you can drag it around so even if you're not on the artwork it'll just consider the whole box so this is really useful for really small hard to select kind of artwork um sometimes it gets in the way if you're like trying to select something underneath something else you know I can't click this o down here because it's just selecting the box so I turn it on and turn it off depending on what I'm doing usually I have it turned on um this select all by color is super useful let's just um really quickly change some colors here just so um just so I can show you what that does so we'll change these to Blue maybe change this one to Yellow so Under The Black Arrow tool there's this select all by color this is really useful for um so obviously when it's on you can select everything that's red there it goes uh you can select everything that's read and move it around just like that or you can select everything that's blue and move it around or you can even select everything that's red go down to your color palettes window and select blue to change everything that's red to blue what I usually use this for is for if I'm sketching so you don't need multiple layers if what you do is you just sketch in red you know and then you clean up using black this is all on the same layer and then just go up to your Black Arrow tool select all by color select the red and then just press delete to get rid of it the default for delete is backspace I think or no I think um let's check let's search for delete uh okay so it's set to delete by default I've changed mine to backspace just because it's easier for me to find the backspace button you know it's a lot bigger and it's on the top right um shortsworld tin boom Harmony is what I use uh the most for animation it's my favorite animation software um see let's move on to so I think that's everything for now for The Black Arrow tool um a couple more things you can flip things horizontal using this button or flip vertical with this button same with rotation um this button flattens objects so if I click that I don't think it'll work with text but that'll flatten uh things um so they're all uh the same Vector shape uh the white Arrow tool I think what we need to do let's right click go to convert uh break apart text layers there we go so now I think flatten will work so if you break apart text layers to White twice then it converts them from being text into um just Vector shapes so now if we flatten those you can see those turn into the same flattened shape um so that's the Black Arrow tool it's for moving things around it's for transforming um your different brush strokes and Vector shapes the white Arrow tool is for modifying Vector points so like I was saying earlier things like TV paint or creda or photoshop or clip Studio paint they all work with pixels right uh and boom Harmony is a vector program so except for bitmap layers layers are going to be made out of points and curves so because of that no matter how much I zoom in on here it's not going to lose quality another reason I like vector programs for animation is I can zoom in as far as I want on my characters and they don't lose quality um let's see so with the white Arrow tool you can select points and move them around um another thing you can do is if you have nothing selected and you just take the white Arrow tool and wiggle something back and forth you can kind of smooth things out and push and pull things around so you don't even have to select points you can just click and drag and like push and nudge stuff using the white Arrow tool I use this a lot um for example if I were to draw I'll try and draw kind of a squiggly line so if I select all of this with my white Arrow tool you can see how many Vector points are here and because there's multiple Vector points it makes it look squiggly and not very like clean right well if I take my white Arrow tool and I just give it a bit of a nudge just nudge it around give it a bit of a nudge you can see how much it's cleaned up these Vector points so there's way fewer now um so just nudging stuff can kind of smooth out your vector points as well I use that a lot um to really get things smooth um oftentimes I'll select Vector points with my white Arrow tool and delete them just like that and that Smooths things out as well so the white Arrow tool is really useful for cleaning things up in vector um will I be going over nodes a little bit I am going to go over nodes but it's going to be very very uh basic but yeah we'll we'll definitely go over the node view which I have tucked away right here um so that's the white Arrow tool um I think that's everything I wanted to discuss about the arrow tools um now that I've sufficiently messed up this slide let's move on uh brush and pencil so your two drawing option or your two drawing tools are brush and pencil so a brush is um let me just draw two shapes here just so we can compare the two here's a brush stroke and here's a pencil stroke actually let's do one with a pressure sensitivity just so they look uh pretty similar and here's a pencil stroke so they look basically the same right well if we take our white Arrow tool you'll see what the differences are so if I select both of these you'll see the um the brush tool is one filled in Vector shape it's got its points on the outside whereas the pencil tool is one line so they both have pressure sensitivity actually I think um with the pencil I could be wrong I'm not as familiar with uh Essentials and advanced toon boom Harmony uh but I believe Advanced and above has pressure sensitivity with the pencil I don't think Essentials does um let's see so I almost always use the pencil Tool uh I used to be a brush enjoyer I used to be a brush Fanboy but just the versatility of taking the pencil tool and being able to clean up your lines and also being able to select the line and adjust its size on the Fly you know I find the pencil tool to be a lot more um capable you can also go down here and select um different textures to apply to your pencil afterwards which you can't do any of that stuff with the brush the brush is just a filled in shape so brush um let's see I'm trying to think of when I would use the brush almost never um these days I don't use the brush hardly at all unless I'm wanting to fill in something super quickly um let's see oh yeah I would agree uh chicken toon boom uh file sizes are massive they're just like two of the biggest complaints I have about toon boom is how expensive it is and how big the file sizes are those are my two biggest complaints but it's still my favorite animation software I love it so much oh that's true I could see the brush tool being good for sketching yeah that's a good point chicken um so let's do a deep dive into these so with the brush tool um over here we've got our tool properties I'm just going to expand this so we can get a better look at it so you've got your default brushes here these one two three four brushes I've got a couple Uh custom ones that I've added here see feels like sorry there we go feels like my window keeps changing um so I've got all my brushes down here and it's got these cool um texturized brushes here so you've got things like airbrush marker which is kind of fun to draw with I like that one a lot um pastel can be pretty fun uh and you can also customize these so you can take a brush and customize it by clicking this Arrow tool right here or this um arrow on your brush so let's customize a default one let's let's just select uh brush number four and customize it by clicking on this Arrow right here so when we do that that brings up our brush um tool options so there's a ton of options here to play around with I would suggest um playing it around with these on your own but you uh let's just go down them really quickly so first of all you can set um your brush type from being a solid Vector to a textured vector so whether you want it to have a texture or you want it to be just a solid Vector brush um that's this option right here with the vector you know you can change the the shape of the brush and that's about it textures got a lot more options to it um let's do brush number six we'll make my favorite brush I'll show you my favorite brush setting so we'll do brush number six uh under textured Vector maximum size that's how big your brush can go and minimum size that's how small your brush can go so if you set minimum size to 100 percent that basically means no pressure sensitivity so you'll have no pressure sensitivity if it's at a hundred percent which honestly I've been really enjoying not having pressure sensitivity and drawing that way lately um has been a lot of fun uh roundness and angle you can just kind of visually see what that does here changes the angle changes how flat the brush is a pen tilt sensitivity you can um adjust pen tilt with this um hardness spacing that's how close um each pattern is to each other so if I have my spacing set very far apart you can see it spaces out the pattern pretty far apart from each other so typically the smaller your spacing is the more smooth your brush is but also sometimes the more CPU it uses um so that's what spacing does random size the random stuff is really good for creating texture so if I up the random size you can see it already feels a lot more natural for a brush shape and then random angle if you increase these it just makes it feel a bit more like um a naturalistic kind of a brush it feels almost more like traditional media I feel um you've also got smoothing options here so this is for um the vector points so if I so this is what it looks like right now with smoothing and if I up my smoothing to a bunch which usually I don't do usually I keep my smoothing um pretty low just because I don't like this thing where after I draw it it goes back and then like computerizes it I really don't like this so usually I have a smoothing set pretty low just personally usually usually I have it set like three or lower um Center Line smoothing that's uh Morpher pencils um anyways they're both smoothing options but there is actually a stabilizer which we'll go over um so this isn't a stabilizer it Smooths your brush after you draw it so a little bit it works a little bit different than a stabilizer so we'll go over the stabilizer later transparency so you can adjust the flow which the difference between flow and opacity I'm not quite sure it seems like if flow is more like pressure sensitivity based whereas opacity is just overall like make everything less opaque you know more transparent then these you know you can randomize them as well um dual tip I'll be honest I don't really use it that often uh but I know it's like a Photoshop option and some people might be really excited about that I don't use this I don't I don't actually know what I would use dual tip for I guess for like super customizing them your brush texture so that it looks a lot more natural uh paper texture is very cool so let me just bring back the transparency make it more solid so we can see the texture so the texture I like to use is um if we check this on you can select different textures for your brush so you can see like it adds sort of a papery texture to it makes it look a little bit rougher super cool I really like a messing with the textures on the brushes in tune boom Harmony so the textures I like to use are texture six along with uh the brush tip number six it's just kind of how I remember it makes my favorite kind of brush um and then yeah that's all the uh the brush tip settings uh you can scale your your texture down here you can set additive um a line just means that um no matter where you draw with your brush the texture is always going to be in the same place um so so yeah uh who boy that's all the uh brush options again I would really recommend going through and playing around with them um again to edit your brush you just go under this Arrow tool right here um a really important thing to know is a everything I did here it has not saved this has not saved anything um so if I go select a different brush and then go back is my my capture is not working so this is the fun of live streaming um let me disconnect and reconnect really quick waiting two connects hold on a minute please wait there we go we're back they're working there we go Okay so you remember we did all those settings and modified our brush well if I selected off of it and selected back on it it went back to what it was before so if you actually want to save these changes if you want to save any of this texture stuff um so let's set it back to brush number six texture six and you'll see this little asterisk on top here that means your changes have not been saved so if you want to save your brush you want to click this refresh button right here it's a little green refresh button so you can either click that or you can select this new brush preset to create a new brush so again this updates the one that you have selected or if you want to make a new brush you click new brush so we'll call this a very good name press ok and now we have a new brush which it'll put at the bottom here so so now it's got our brush saved a little hard to see the texture but it is a textured brush here um you saw me earlier change the size on the fly so you can change the size with this slider right here or the way I like to change size is hold down the hotkey of O So o you can sort of think of as like the shape that your brush tool makes see how I'm making an O bigger and smaller so oh and then click and drag will manually change your brush size so o is very useful to know and that works with a brush tool and pencil tool so my pencil tool is this size if I use o i can shrink it down make it smaller again um let's see uh some things about editing uh stuff in toon boom Harmony so let's uh let's just draw something really quick and I'm being sketchy on purpose just to make make it a bunch of different brush Strokes so let's say I'm drawing doodling away just like this so let's say you've got a drawing that looks just like this you've drawn it with your um your brush tool here so if I take my Black Arrow tool you can see each one of these brush Strokes is actually its own individual stroke so just the way toon boom Harmony works and I actually really like this a lot um that it separates every individual stroke if for whatever reason you didn't want it to do that there is this Auto flatten option right here so if I were to do the same thing looks like it still looks the same I was thinking it might flatten the texture but it seems like it's looking the same but if I select it it's all the same Vector uh shape so so one thing that might be confusing if you're coming from a different program is let's say I wanted to cut out like a little circle from this piece of art well when I do that it just selects all the different brush Strokes within that Circle so if you want to select a specific section of art that's actually done with the cutter tool so you may see these little arrows underneath the tools here these little white arrows anytime you see that with a tool that means there's sub tools underneath it so to access those you click and hold on that tool and you'll see all your different subtools so cutter is underneath the Black Arrow tool and then underneath the white Arrow tool is some pretty useful ones so Center Line editor pencil editor uh perspective envelope and edit texture texture and gradient those are the ones I use the most um under the white Arrow tool under the brush tool we've got brush and repaint brush uh repaint brush just really quickly if you have that selected uh instead of um being an actual brush it just repaints things in whatever color so that's what the repaint brush is used for you can also instead of selecting the repaint brush you also have this repaint button down here under your brush tool which I find easier I find it easier to select that to repaint things I'm on a bit of a tangent but um we'll get back to the cutter tool in a second the hotkey also for repaint instead of clicking that button or selecting the tool is hold down X if you're on the brush tool and you hold down X that is the hotkey for repainting so that's pretty useful for making light colored lines and things like that um so back to the cutter tool which is Under The Black Arrow tool here let's set white Arrow tool back hold down Mouse button on Black Arrow tool select the cutter tool so if I wanted to select a certain section of my art and move it that's how I would do it so the cutter tool um is used a lot for things like um moving things around and cutting things out or deleting stuff another really useful thing for it is uh let's go back to let's use our pencil tool this time actually another really useful thing about the cutter tool is if you draw say for example um let's just draw an idea for a head here um what the cutter tool can be really useful for is for getting rid of these overlapping lines so all you have to do is just select a line through any overlapping lines and it gets rid of it just like that and it makes a nice um clean cut actually let me undo that let me show you something um one reason I didn't like the pencil tool at first and it's just because I didn't know about a setting um so by default with the cutter tool this option is changed to bevel I think so just to show you what that does if I use the cutter tool on it you'll see these really ugly Corners happen um whereas with the brush tool if I were to do the same thing with the brush tool and the cutter tool let me just draw the same shape over here so if I make the same shape and use the cutter tool and if I were to cut these out sometimes this happens where like the gesture doesn't work and it just selects it all you have to do is press backspace or delete to get rid of it which is kind of annoying it just happens sometimes so you can see a nice clean corner here well um if I were to undo again again this should be on by default it's not but um what you want to do under your cutter tool to prevent that weird corner from happening with your pencil tool is change this end point here from bevel change that to round if you change that then anytime you use the cutter tool it won't have those ugly Corners in the corner there um switching between tools uh so if I want to switch to my brush tool I can hold down let's see if I'm on brush tool and I wanted to erase for example I can hold down e and as long as I'm holding down e I'll be on my Eraser so I'm still holding down e as soon as I let go of e it goes back to the tool I was on so that's kind of a useful thing that you can temporarily switch to different tools so for example if I'm on the brush tool and I really want to quickly switch to the cutter tool the hotkey for the cutter tool is T for time to get rid of those lines so I don't know why this happens this whole weird thing and the annoying thing about that is if I let go of T to delete it then I lose my selection um so that's annoying uh one thing I'll usually do is uh I'll add a delete button up here so all these buttons up here you can customize uh you can right click go to customize and you can add a ton of different tools onto this toolbar right here I like customizing this toolbar a lot so let's just search for we'll search for delete so you just select delete then click this Arrow to add it to your toolbar and then click apply press ok and now I can hold down t and if it's doing that weird thing it shouldn't do this but if it is doing that weird thing now all I have to do is go up here and press that delete button to get rid of it um kind of an annoying workaround but it is what it is like I said that's not the default Behavior it shouldn't be doing that it should be getting rid of it um so holding down the tool switches to it temporarily right so if I hold down e and let go of e now I'm back on the brush if you want to permanently switch to a tool you need to use the um the alt button to switch to it so if I use alt and E um then I'll be on the Eraser tool or if I use alt and T then it'll switch me alt T all all t it's not working I swear I swear anytime I do a class it's like this thing that behaves the same every single day yeah it's not gonna work today it's not gonna do what it's supposed to Alton T is supposed to switch to the cutter tool I don't know why it's not um see what else um oh let's go over the center line and pencil editors because these are super duper useful um let's start with the uh the brush tool so remember how I was saying with the brush you can't really like take your white Arrow tool and like move it or nudge it or anything well they actually added a tool uh called the center line editor so you can tell it's four brushes because it's got a little brush icon here so if you select that you can actually treat your brush Strokes as pencil lines so you can actually move these points around and you can even nudge them and smooth them out with the center line editor super duper cool really neat feature um if you're working on a project that uses uh the brush tool that's really neat uh that it treats it like a a pencil line and still it's still a brush um Vector objects so pretty cool um with the pencil tool if we take our pencil tool here um what the pencil editor does uh which is under the white Arrow tool pencil editor the pencil editor can change the line width of something so you'll see all these little red dots so if you click and drag them it changes the width of your pencil line and if you hold shift it'll edit both of them you can also select these and press backspace or delete to get rid of them just to simplify things so if I wanted to get rid of this one for example I can press backspace to delete it if I want to add one I just hold down control you'll see a little plus icon right here so I can press Ctrl click and that'll add in points where I can change the width of my pencil here if I hold down shift and bring these two points at the end just close together like that instantly get a taper which is very cool um so yeah that's mostly what I use the pencil editor for is for adjusting line weight on the fly or for adding a taper to your brush stroke uh to your pencil stroke so I'm I'm a big pencil fan now I used to be a brush boy but now I'm a pencil boy uh for just the flexibility of it being able to change the size of it and stuff if you want to change the size globally on your um on your uh pencil line you can select it and under your tool properties you'll see all your options for uh what kind of pencil stroke this um can be so you can change the maximum size up here and you'll see a little outline of how big it's going to go um you can change the minimum size so if you didn't want those tapers there you can up that up to 100 even or bring it back down which I guess once you uh made it 100 it loses all that information so let's just undo before we did that um will Centerline work after editing the brush vectors it should do yeah it should work anytime whether it works well or not um that's Up For Debate so if I were to make something really funky something like that and uh use the Center Line editor it's probably not gonna work as well you can work uh fine with these spots where it's aligned but here it kind of doesn't know what to do so you're gonna get some weird results with things like this so it just depends with the brush tool like sometimes you'll get weird results and sometimes you won't um but if you're wanting to fix like a really small thing in a pinch the center line editor can be really useful um let's see with this pencil tool so I'm just going to select it with my Black Arrow tool to bring up my pencil properties again so you can select what kind of pencil line it is here as well so you can choose where the tapering is going to be which is really cool you can have it have fat ends just like that um for these ends here you can see how the ends are flat just like this you can also change the ends of your brush um of your pencil stroke right here as well so we can set these to round just to make it look a bit nicer and join um I usually just keep round I usually don't change this unless I'm going for a specific look you can have it be squared off or beveled uh usually I just keep it round um but yeah you can change the ends this way um you can change the texture by going down here and selecting different textures there's even ways to import your own textures you can export a uh a black and white PNG I believe and uh import it as your own texture to modify your uh pencil texture and there's even ways to make this texture like wiggle around and stuff to make it look like it's alive um and a living drawing it's pretty cool so boy I think that's just about it um the Eraser Tool uh works just like the brush tool so it's got pressure sensitivity you've got an option for a bitmap oh I haven't even gone over bitmaps oh man um let's go over bitmaps before we move on I'm gonna take a drink of water really quick uh does anyone have any questions before I move on um about the brush and pencil tool or any of the tools that we've gone on uh gone over so far what is the main difference between them so I went over that earlier uh persona but basically um the pencil tool is a very editable line that you're drawing with and then the brush tool is a filled in Vector shape that's a little uh less flexible to work with uh but they may be more intuitive for like sketching or people who are new to drawing into boom they do look the same which is actually what's kind of cool um typically with a the pencil tool I don't know if Adobe animate has changed this but in Adobe animate the pencil tool never had pencil thickness kind of the really one of the cool things one of the many cool things of toon boom Harmony over anime is you can have uh pressure sensitivity on your pencil super duper neat um wonder if there's an option to maintain the thickness of the pencil line when you make it smaller or bigger so do you mean like uh let me know if this is what you mean so if I've gone through and I've like done some edits to this pencil thickness so it's like thick here and thin here and I wanted to do just like a global change to it let me know if this is what you mean so you can't take your Black Arrow tool select your pencil line and then go under tool properties and just change the maximum and minimum size so that changes the whole stroke but keeps all of the same ratios the same so it's still thin here thick here still keeps our taper so you can adjust that after the fact just like that um let's go over bitmap uh stuff really quick when you go bigger or smaller with the selection tool Oh you mean like when you scale it down oops when you scale it down like this yeah so you get stuck like this so technically this is the same size but um it it appears thicker just because it's smaller right or if you scale it up um it looks like it's Getting Thinner so this is a little bit more advanced but what you can do is you can edit the uh properties of a layer um let me just take this move it down onto my examples layer here so you can edit a layers property by either double clicking on it or pressing the hotkey of shift e to bring up the layer properties so again this is a bit Advanced but you can go under line thickness and um let's see so I'll admit this is something I would have to experiment with before I got the result I was looking for but I believe we can edit um whether it changes with the camera or not in this option here um maybe preserve line thickness um [Music] scale to do yeah so um so there's two different ways to scale this is um this is a little bit outside what we're talking about but what we can do is we can add a peg to here and if we add a keyframe and then scale it up using our transform tool so if we go into render View this is what it looks like rendered but if we scale it up using our transform tool let's see so that's one way you can keep it consistent is um or one way how to word this so let's say you had a character rig made up of pencil Strokes um and you wanted him to get if you wanted that character to get closer to the camera if you added a Peg and you scaled that character up closer to camera you can see in this example it's not appearing to get smaller same if I shrunk it down now it's looking just like the same pencil uh thickness so that's something you can adjust that's the thing I was talking about how it adjust the uh pencil thickness so with the line thickness option if you go to zoom independent thickness and you turn that back on then you know if your character gets closer to the camera the line thins out and if he gets further away from the camera the line gets thicker it doesn't get thicker or thin out it just visually appears that way because it's a smaller piece of art so if you did not want it to do that you would uncheck this Zoom independent thickness option and then it would just stay consistent so a bit of a tangent but that's um that's basically how line thickness works with a toon boom Harmony and scaling and a character artwork with the camera um so let me get rid of that Peg here so let's make a new layer um so to make a new layer I'm going to click this new layer button right here which has all the different shapes um if I click that it gets you uh this window so you have the option of making Vector art or bitmap art and it allows you to pick one or the other for each art layer that the layer is going to have so let's do a bitmap a line art layer and we'll call this bitmap so this is really cool this is um this is one of the most exciting things about toon boom Harmony um to me is the ability to use a bitmap brushes um since there are textured Vector brushes uh I actually don't use the bitmap layers as much as I used to I used to really like them a lot but honestly they get kind of bulky compared to the vector ones so usually when I want a textured brush I'll just use the vectored um texture brushes but you do have the option to make a bitmap layer go in here and let's see what's a good bitmap brush we could select pastel draw with that we could use our airbrush here select a different color so we'll go over color later but here you can see rather than a different um color pots it's actually a slider that we can move around so we can up the saturation select the green and we get a little green airbrush again same thing you can hold down o bring up the size do that you can adjust its brush settings using this Arrow tool here again you'll see many of the similar kind of options as the vector brush um but one thing about uh bitmap layers is they're not quite as flexible of course um you know if I were to so you can zoom in and see that they are bitmaps see they're made of pixels instead of vector points um so one thing is you cannot uh move individual brush Strokes around um there's also this weird um I don't like this and I don't know how to work with it if it's giving you problems uh which it has for me with like really large files you have this um dotted line right here this is kind of like your maximum drawing size for bitmap layers uh so if I were to draw like over here you could see it's it's not letting me draw past that point so there's been cases where like this dotted line is on such a huge file that's like scaled down that it'll like cut into the scene um and I don't know how to change it if anyone knows how to fix or make this bigger please let me know um but yeah that's one limitation with it um if you want to move things around again you can use your cutter tool which is under your Black Arrow tool so same philosophy you can use your cutter tool and just move things around but as soon as you let go they're gonna merge so I can no longer um select this blue for example it's going to be merged with all that stuff um but you can't do things like uh repaint so if I take my brush tool and make like a red color and uh select this repaint option down here so same thing you can still repaint stuff if you wanted to keep transparency and things like that um oh that sounds promising afro yeah I've looked everywhere in like settings and stuff and I could not figure out how to um how to adjust that dotted line tray annoying stupid um so that's bitmap brushes uh and that's all I have to say about that let's move on to build bucket um oh also um there's all these uh little buttons down here in the camera view uh these can be pretty useful um it'll be kind of hard to tell on this scene just because there's no like extra layers or anything but basically um the light box uh this light bulb is really useful for turning on and it'll Fade Out All the Other layers just so when you're drawing on top um you know everything else is like faded out so you can more easily see what you're drawing uh so I use light box sometimes stay on top if something's like behind a bunch of layers you can use stay on top to bring it to the front just visually so you can work on it uh camera mask very useful to turn on and then kind of zoom out and take a look at your composition make sure that it's looking good [Music] um safe area do people use safe area still um and then reset view uh the reset view if you don't want to use the shortcut you can always click this button right here to reset your view to fit the screen oh for sure yeah that makes sense chicken yeah I think um my plan was to go over all the tools and then um in the next section we'll go over how to animate stuff um oh thank you terzi I'll I will check that out uh let's see hmm I'm curious to try this let's uh let's make a new bitmap layer add and close blank this out all right so scene resolution oh wait this is if you're making a new bitmap layer though I don't think this is how you can adjust one that's already created yeah no this doesn't change something this is a I think this just changes um when you're making a new one scene settings sorry just a little bit of a tangent drawing resolution so if you set that to like 500 press ok it doesn't seem like it changes it but if we made a new bitmap layer see yeah for the new bitmap layer it's been adjusted but it doesn't change one that already exists okay um moving on uh build bucket ingredients um let's see so filling in stuff is pretty easy in tune boom so basic enough we'll also go over color in this section and how Color Works in toon boom so if I were to go into my paint bucket here um you can select your colors down here under your color window so if you want to make a new color you just click this plus button right here to create a new color and if you want to edit that color you just double click on the um well if you double click on the inside of it it goes into renaming mode so you can name it whatever but if you want to edit the color you can double click on the corner right here and then you can edit the color in this Color Picker window right here so by default it's on this weird um color editor where it's like blue up here and cyan over here I don't know why it does this by default but to get a normal Color Picker just select this H right here um so if you select the H it'll go back to um the default Color Picker it does that every time I start toon boom I don't know why it doesn't remember this setting but anyways um so you can select the Hue up here and you can adjust the saturation lightness and darkness up here and then you can change the opacity of your layer down here just like this we'll go for gradients in a bit but once we're happy with our color we just click X and it's been saved right here so all you do is fill in with the paint bucket tool just like that you can select different colors and repaint them in just like that um [Music] some really useful paint buckets so you can see the white Arrow tool or the white arrow on your paint bucket right here if we were to click and hold you can see paint unpainted repaint unpaint these are super duper useful also stroke and close Gap paint unpainted is really useful for painting um a whole bunch of shapes that haven't been filled in so things like this if I wanted to fill in all these bubbles I can use paint unpainted select my blue right here and just drag Alesso around all my shapes just like that and it fills it in whereas if I were to use just the regular paint bucket tool and do that same thing it fills in the outlines as well so it just fills in everything just not really thinking about it um when's this life gonna end so we're gonna take a break in about 30 minutes a 15 minute break and then um we'll come back and the live stream will be going until about 12 o'clock so after I go through all the tools um we'll uh no more tangents no more tangents for now uh so after um after we go over all the tools then we'll go over all the animation stuff I'm almost done with tools the very next topic is uh how to animate so um we'll get on to like the timeline and stuff but it's important to know how to use all these tools because they do come in handy um for once you've started animating um and also just to experiment with and to know that they're there uh repaint so repaint is useful for uh like it says for repainting things so instead of filling everything in if I wanted to just repaint all these lines to be a different color for example if I wanted them to be uh this purple that we made I can do the same thing select it all and it repaints it says purple without um filling anything in it just changes the color um unpaint is a little bit more nuanced um what unpaint does is it gets rid of the filled in paint information but it keeps all of The Strokes so right now um we can't see the pencil lines but um actually never mind so unpaint um it's useful for like uh if you wanted to um let's say for example here let's do this let's draw in some some holes in these Donuts here so if I were to use um paint unpainted and fill in all these circles just like that uh what unpaint is useful for is just getting rid of some of that paint just like that um the reason that we have things like unpaint instead of um just you know selecting it and deleting it is a with unpaint or any of these other paint tool options is you can actually go through and do the same operation on every single frame using this button we'll go over that later but um just be aware that um there is the option to fill in all of your animation in one go uh super duper easily um so if I go into [Music] um let's see let's uh let's create a gradient let's talk about gradients really quick um so I'm just gonna draw a few squares here let's see let's set that to like this size just draw some squares just like this and let's take our paint bucket tool make a new color and we'll call this gradient so to create a gradient we just want to go down here to where it says gradient and just click this check mark right here so with the gradient you've got this bar here where it changes from one color to another so if you made it go from red to blue isn't that ugly um you can do a linear gradient which is just straight um from one color to the other or you can do radial which is more like a circle gradient um let's do a radial gradient for now or a linear gradient for now uh what you can also do is you can um for example if you wanted to do something like a shadow you can change both of these to your Shadow color and then select one of these houses and just drag the alpha down to zero and that's a really easy way to create a shadow um another thing you can do after editing these colors you can add more Colors by clicking down here to add another house just like this and you can add more colors that way just by clicking in this blank area down here if you want to get rid of any of these you just click the house and drag down to get rid of it so it's kind of like you're selecting it and moving it away from the gradient just like that so let's make let's make a nice like a blue gradient just like this so once we're happy with it we'll click X to close it down so um when we fill things in with the gradient it just fills it in according to the shape of the object just like this if we want to edit the gradient that is under our white Arrow tool which is up here so if we hold down and go under edit gradient and texture select that now we can take we can select any of these gradients here we can rotate them we can shrink them down we can position them around just like this and if you want to say take the same gradient and apply it to all these other boxes here what you can do is select the gradient with your um edit gradient and texture thing press Ctrl C to copy it and then paste it using Ctrl V and all these other boxes right here just like that so now you can see it's all the same gradient so unfortunately it doesn't link them or anything so if you did edit the um the gradient you know it's not going to update with everything else so if I were to take this gradient move it shrink it down rotate it you know I would have to redo my control C by selecting this one and then Ctrl V to paste it on all these other ones just like that so just something to be aware of that's how you copy and paste um gradients onto other objects um all right finally let's move on to animation let's move on to animation stuff again I'm gonna take a drink of water does anyone have any uh questions so far all right so animation timeline so for this I am going to get rid of all this other stuff we are only going to focus on animation for now so this is the point where let's say you've started a new scene and you want to um start animating so first of all this is something I should have gone over in my first tutorial but if you want to change the size of your scene like the scene length um by default it's at 60. so you can see my scene ends at 60 frames if you want to change that you can go up to scene and then scene settings um not scene settings I'm sorry if you want to go up to scene and then um scene length right here so you change scene length and you can set that to as little or as much as you want so if you wanted it longer you could type in 120 just like that and it makes our animation longer so now it's 120 frames you can also take this bracket right here this Red Bracket and just slide it around manually and that'll also change um how short or how long your scene is you may see these scenes up here these start and stop uh numbers that may be confusing as you might think that might adjust the um the scene length but it does not these numbers are just for playback and preview purposes only same for this Frame frames per second drop down this does not change your scene this is only for temporary preview purposes changing any of these numbers if you want to change your frames per second or how big your um aspect ratio is that you go under scene and then scene settings so here you can change it from 1920 by 1080 you could do like a square for example I really like for like Twitter and stuff I like making a 750 by 750 square you can also change the frames per second here by typing something else we can change that to 12. uh there's also this drop down of these default um frames per second um if you don't see it in the drop down you can just type it manually here under frames per second um and that's it for now we'll press ok all right so here I have an example um just something I sketched out really quickly um actually we could even go simpler than this let's let's keep it simple um let's just draw a bloke like this so we'll give them a circle head with an ear we'll give him eyes just like this and a smiley face uh you can draw shoulders on him too I guess if you wanted to so there's our little dude um it's kind of looking like Shrek I don't know if I like that here maybe we just move that in a little bit um so there's our dude um there that looks cute all right let's say you wanted to animate this guy first of all um when you make a new layer in toon boom uh by default it's only going to be one frame long so down here is your timeline this is where all of your layers are going to go your layers being on the left side and then how long your animation is will be this length right here um so if I were to drag my playhead which is this red um uh tick mark right here this is kind of like scrubbing through your timeline this is to navigate through uh your animation so if I were to scrub through you can see that he disappears um he doesn't last for the whole frame um and you can see that visually here actually you wouldn't even see it like that it would look more like this um so if I wanted this Frame to last longer I would need to extend the exposure of it so right now it's being exposed for one frame it's only exposed and Lasting for one frame long so to extend the exposure I can go down in my timeline right click on it and go to extend exposure the hotkey for it being F5 so if I click on that now he lasts for 30 frames so if I scrub through I can see that my character stays on for 30 frames and then disappears we can do the same for our title up here we can press F5 to extend that exposure and I think our scene's not going to be longer than 30 frames so I'm going to go up to scene scene length and just set that to 30. just like that and again if you want to make a new layer uh it's this button right here or you can click the plus button right here oops I guess you gotta click and hold um and here you can see all the different kinds of layers that you can add um really the only ones you really are probably going to add are either drawing or camera and we'll go over camera uh later but uh if you hold down the plus and select drawing that'll bring up the add drawing layer you can name it whatever add and close and if you want to get rid of a layer you can click this minus button to get rid of it just like that um if you ever do something you didn't mean to do you can press Ctrl Z to undo and control shift Z is to redo in tune boom Harmony um so now we have our guy he's lasting our entire animation so let's do something simple let's make him blink yeah so we could do a thing where we just redraw this whole character right but let's make it easy on ourselves let's make a new layer using an anime only his eyes and will keep his body just as a still frame so I'm going to double click on this title here and just rename it to body just like that make a new layer we'll call it eyes add and close so here's one aspect of copying and pasting um so copying and pasting Works different in your camera view versus your timeline view um so I'll show you what I mean if I were to copy down here and paste right here um see did that actually okay hmm see I'm trying to think of how to explain this so let's say we just wanted to copy the eyes right we just wanted to copy the the eyes from the character so I can take my Black Arrow tool let me set this back to White Arrow tool I can take my Black Arrow tool select the eyes right here and then if I'm down in my timeline and I press Ctrl C and go up to the eyes and press Ctrl V um what it's done is it's not copied the drawing uh the eyes from the camera view it's not copied my selection from here right it's called it's copied the frames from the timeline because I did the shortcut copy and paste in the timeline view um so if we were to go into uh so if we were to go into the drawing view just to kind of isolate the layer uh you can see under this eyes here it didn't copy and paste just the eyes it copied and pasted the uh the whole character which is not what we wanted so let's delete that layer or let's delete that frame um if we wanted to copy just a body part from this drawing what we would do is we would select the body go up to our canvas here select the eyes just like this and instead of copy with Ctrl C what I'm going to do is press Ctrl X to cut so what cut does is it deletes it but it also adds it to your clipboard it adds it to your paste information so I can cut his eyes which is a morbid image go up to my eyes layer and go back into my canvas view so you can see my red outline around my canvas View and press Ctrl V and that'll paste the eyes right here so now if we go into drawing view which kind of isolates the layer we can see we've only copied and pasted the eyes and you can also see that if I turn on the light box here so if I turn on light box it fades out everything except the layer that I have selected so you can see we only have his eyes here which is exactly what we wanted again we need to extend the exposure because his eyes disappear so we'll go down to frame 30. press F5 to extend it just like that there we go all right so let's make him blink so let's have him blink around frame uh 12. so here's how the here's how to um animate traditionally in tune boom Harmony so every time you're gonna want to make a new frame You're Gonna Want to create it down here in the timeline using either of these two buttons so there's create empty drawing or there's create duplicate drawing so what duplicate drawing does is if I click that and if I navigate away from my timeline you can see this little line right here so this is our first drawing happens all the way up to here and then our duplicate drawing that we created starts from here and then stays on the scene so if I'm right here editing this duplicate drawing that we just created and let's say I take his eyes and scale them up just like this like he gets super surprised you can see if I scrub from left to right as I scale up so that's a way that you can make a new frame without recreating the same drawing is using the duplicate art drawing or a duplicate frame button so let me undo that so what you might think um without knowing about these two buttons is oh I can go onto frame 12 and then just take his eyes and scale them up right and that happens on frame 12. well it doesn't because you haven't created a new frame right here all you're doing is editing frame number one even if you're later on in the timeline because frame one has been exposed throughout this whole timeline so really you're not editing anything on frame 12. you're just editing the same frame so that's why it's important to know that if you want to make a new frame you're going to either have to click create a blank drawing or create a duplicate drawing and you'll know that you have a new frame because you'll see a little tick mark right here so I'm going to go on to frame 12 and I'm going to select create a blank drawing to start his blink and an important thing about animation is we need to be able to see the frames that came before it right so what that is is an onion skin so to turn on the onion skin we just we want to click this button down here turn on onion skin and you'll see um a little red uh onion skin appears it's a little hard to see just because I have it set to be kind of faded so I'm going to go up to here click on this light bulb lamp looking thing this is how you can adjust your um light table and onion skin opacity so I'm going to turn up the onion skin opacity just so we can see it a bit better press ok so for my personal preferences I have it set up to be um red as the previous frame and green will be the future frame so because it's red I know that's my previous frame so for his blink let's animate his eyes being half closed so I'll just draw his eyes being half closed just like this we'll also bring his eyebrows down just like that okay and then let's go forward um two frames and then on the eyes we'll click create blank drawing again and you'll see now my onion skin is showing my half closed eyes so now I'll just draw his eyes being fully closed just like this and bring his eyebrows down even more all right and then we want to have his eyes come back up for the blink so what we can do is we can copy this halfway up frame right here uh by selecting it in our timeline press Ctrl C to copy it go down [Music] um two frames and then press Ctrl V to paste it and then we want his eyes to be open after the blink so we'll go back to frame one which uh you can copy it from any point in this timeline uh I could copy it from frame 10 if I wanted to even um so I'll press Ctrl C to copy his open eye frame and then I'll paste it two frames forward just like that paste it and now if we play our animation by clicking the play button you'll see he blinks yay if you want to have your animation Loop when you're playing it you can turn on this Loop icon right here just to have it Loop and there we go we have a little blinking animation super easy if you want to export this animation that you just made and you're super proud of you just go up to file export and then click movie so again that's file export movie so we'll save this under our toon boom Harmony class file we'll call This Blink save that so here's um here's the settings I usually use when I'm exporting a video from toon boom Harmony I like to change this from QuickTime movie to h.264 h.264 is just going to take up a bit less space than a QuickTime movie so that's why I like to select h.264 up here you can specify how many frames typically you're going to want to export all of your frames a resolution you can change here I don't want it to be any smaller or bigger so I'm just going to keep it on the same resolution and then color space I always always leave alone so and then movie options is grayed out just because uh with h.264 it's already setting your movie options for you which is great because it just makes it easier for us we don't need to worry about it so we'll just press ok and that took no time at all you didn't even see the loading bar because uh it's such a short animation but now if we open our blink animation you can see the little blink animation that we created super cool so now what you can do is you can take this blink.mov movie and you can upload it to YouTube um or anywhere else you want to upload it to um if you wanted to upload it on your phone you could email this file to yourself and then download it on your phone and that way you can upload it from your phone onto Tick Tock or whatever platform you want to use so that's how to export your animation uh let's talk a little bit more about the timeline when we get back from break yeah um it's about 10 o'clock so we're going to take a 15 minute break and get back to class uh talk more about animation we'll get really into depth with um how to create a whole scene from scratch we'll talk about how to lip sync audio how to import a background image and um go over some tools that I like to use when I'm animating traditionally uh with frame by frame animation so so yeah uh blink us goodbye dude um so yeah uh 15 minute break we'll be back um I'll set a timer here grab a snack get up and stretch and uh I'll see you guys in 15 minutes [Music] [Music] no no no no [Music] no [Music] no [Music] hi [Music] [Music] laughs [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] everyone's happy Spirits are light I am sitting here thinking along with my drink as I do this time of the year do you remember When Love Was around when we were gone Talk of the Town when I am sitting here drinking can't help but think about you about us as I do this [Music] I think I remember me being with you was that just a dream that never came true I am sitting in sinking drink after drink as I do this [Music] I thought I was trying to forget you I must have forgotten I am lost in my memory pouring in the eyes away [Music] say do you remember we used to be near and you don't recall you for God [Music] I am thinking of you every every day of the [Music] SE all right [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] let's get back to it hey welcome back everyone all right this is the part I'm really excited for we're gonna make a whole new animation straight from scratch we're gonna start right from the beginning so I'm gonna go up to file new I'm gonna make a new project we'll call it dialogue scene so if you're making a cartoon with acting in it or dialogue or some kind of audio uh this is the part you're going to want to watch so I'm gonna make a new scene let's see I'll bring back my um camera view up here just because I like it there we go all right um so first off I have a background that I want to import so to import an image in toon boom Harmony we want to go up to file import and select images then we'll browse to where our background is select background.jpg and open that up so um the settings I like to use first of all we want to create a single layer you can rename it here if you wanted to we'll just leave it as background for now instead of toon boom bitmap drawing I like usually selecting keep as original bitmap or no no no I'm sorry import as Tim boom bitmap drawing um is the setting I like to use um and for the alignment I like to keep it as the actual size typically but since this is a background so this is how to Boom is going to size it to your scene so I wanted to take up the entire scene um and be fit into the um the background here um or Alpha always set this to straight you'd you almost never unless you have a reason to want to select these pre-multiplied options uh your transparency you always want to leave this as straight so with these settings the way they are I'm gonna click ok and there we have our background so you can see our background layer right here under our timeline um and since I don't want to edit it or do any animation to it I can lock it off by clicking this lock icon right here and that'll prevent me from like clicking on it or accidentally animating on it um and you can see this no symbol I see people comments about this sometimes that they can't draw or do anything if you see this no symbol and you can't draw make sure you have a layer selected where um you have the ability to draw so just something to be in mind of maybe you don't have a layer selected if you're seeing that um so now that we have our background let's import some audio so to import audio into our scene you might have guessed it we go up to file import and then sound so we'll go to our class and we'll select sound clip click open and you'll see it gets added to our scene right here you can see the waveform for it so uh with audio it's important to be able to scrub through it to hear different um mouth shapes where mouth shapes need to go also this um this audio scene or the scene is probably not long enough we're on 60 frames so we're probably going to want to extend that let's go let's go huge and then we'll shrink it down so I'm going to set this to 300. and let's see how far we need to go so it looks like it ends about 210 so I'll set my scene length to 210 press ok and my background probably doesn't extend that far so I'm gonna unlock my background layer go to the end of the timeline for my background layer press F5 to extend that and then lock it off again okay and also for um for this animation I created a little character sheet that I want to reference a little model sheet um so I'm going to import that as well so I'm going to go up to file import images again I'm going to browse and I'm going to select character design and press open so this is a character design that um it's he's literally a napkin doodle like I didn't spend too much thought on him um but I thought it could be useful to have a little character reference to go off of when we're animating so you can see it added it at the bottom here underneath my background so I want it to be above my background so I can see it so if you want to rearrange these layers you can just click and hold and drag and you'll see wherever this this blue line happens that's where your layer is going to be so I want to have it just above the uh background here so I'll let go right there and there you can see our um character design so here's a fancy lad um just drew a couple of faces of him squashing and stretching as he's emoting um also an aspect ratio for how much head versus how much mouth uh and then some hands just because I gave him big hands just so we can act with his hands as we're drawing him so we don't want this to be visible as we're animating so I'm just gonna select this character design and move it off to the side here just like that there we go all right so let's hear our and let's hear our animation let's hear our little audio clip that we're going to be animating to so under our play options over here um you'll see these two speaker icons so there's a regular speaker and a speaker with an s on it so regular speaker just enables sound it enables us to hear sound when we play our animation um and then scrubbing so right now when I drag my timeline nothing happens but if I turn on scrubbing that might be a little bit loud let me turn that down is that okay hopefully that's not too loud uh but you can hear um you can hear the word two because you scrub through it so you can uh lip sync by scrubbing through and knowing exactly where mouth shapes need to happen and that's what scrubbing is useful for that's what this button is useful for so let's play through our audio just to hear what it sounds like we'll play through it a couple of times there are only two things I can't stand in this world people who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch okay one more time there are only two things I can't stand in this world people who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch no fun fun little um bit of audio to animate some acting too and this is a fun exercise I recommend getting um audio from a movie you really like with some good acting and uh animating a little character to it so I'm gonna start drawing uh I already have a drawing layer that's blank by default it comes with it when I create a new scene in toon boom Harmony um also be sure to save often don't always have your hand on control s and like save almost after every action you do just a good habit to get into uh with anything really so let's thumbnail out some stuff so let's play it just one more time just to get an idea of what the lines are so how's it go there's two things let's hear it again there are only two things I can't stand in this world people who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch all right so here there's two things I can't stand in this world people who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch so there's like three different parts so um so thumbnailing what I like to do for thumbnails let's turn off the background just to keep things simple and we'll also turn on our uh camera mask with this button right here and just zoom out really far um we'll grab our brush here and uh I have a little sketchy brush that I like to use let's see this guy right here um let's also make a new color so I'm going to click plus to add a new color and I'm gonna call this sketch this will be my Sketch color it's just gonna be a dark semi-transparent gray close that what does that feel and that feels alright um so let's figure out the composition so I figure he's gonna be uh just from like the waist up right [Music] um he's saying something to somebody off screen so we'll have him he's also a bit perturbed he's a bit like upset about something so literally here's all the detail you need with a thumbnail just just that that's enough let's also um let's extend this so right now it's only lasting for one frame I'm gonna turn off scrubbing just so I don't annoy your ears I'm gonna extend that exposure just so he lasts the full frame so there are we'll have him back up here so I'm gonna use um create blank frame just to blank that out and see there's a new blank animation frame here um to go frame forward and frame backwards uh you use um period and comma so that's how you can go forwards and backwards I have mine set up to G and H just because um you know it's easier for me again it's that left side of the keyboard thing it's easier to reach G and H rather than period and um comma so here we'll have him kind of cross his arms giving you the business um here's something with acting I would try to avoid with animation so he says the word there's two things right there's two things I can't stand um one thing I would avoid with um animation and acting in general is obvious gestures right and you see this with a lot of beginning animators it's like oh he's saying there's two things I can't stand so you know I'll draw him going like there's only two things I can't stand right you see this a lot in like beginning animation where they just do the obvious gesture or let's say they're giving someone the business and they're like you aren't pulling your weight you were not helping something like that right it's like pointing at you and it's just like I would try to avoid those like obvious gestures um or if he's like if maybe he's being inquisitive and he's like I'm thinking of a number and he points to his head you know um just avoid stuff like that if you can like your acting will be a lot better if you don't go the Mr Bean route you know so that's why I have him just crossing his arms um just being upset um you know there's only two things I can't stand um you just get rid of that exposure there are only two things I can't stand in this world people who are in people so let's have him change pose a little bit here we'll have him kind of bring his arms down and these are so quick like the point of thumbnails is they're so fast that you can delete them and get rid of them if you need to um and just experiment like this should only take like a couple of minutes based on the poses more on emotions rather than the words yeah and just like um I was gonna say act it out but if you're if you acted out in the mirror and you end up doing those poses then yeah I don't know it's just um it's just something to keep in mind you know if it's if it fits it fits you know it's like those poses are like Comic Sans it's like they're overused but you know they have their time in their place so it's not a rule it's just like something to think about that's all but yeah basing it on the emotions rather than the words is a really good way to put it people who are intolerant of I really like how he says intolerant so maybe we'll have a little a little head shake a little head shake with his eyes closed like foreign [Music] s go like back like that yeah thank you Jersey appreciate you being here everyone's been super cool I don't think anyone's got the band Hammer today everyone's been super cool and helpful uh let's see so in tolerant so keep his eyes closed intolerant Heaven lean forward a little bit and flipping back and forth I can kind of feel where these energies are going intolerant and then here he'll stand back up other people's cultures here he's still leaning forward another thing for acting and animation is thinking about the line of action so you may have heard this term before where um the line of action it often follows the spine but it doesn't always um so here here's a decent line of action one um it's just the uh the through line through the pose um and a really strong pose is going to have a strong line of action even someone who's just standing still uh probably wouldn't have a line of action like this you know they might be leaning from one side or the other um so something I like to think about when I'm acting for my animations is um he goes from this one intolerant of other people's cultures and then when he gets to and the Dutch reverse that curve like go from one curve to the other at the Dutch he's so disgusted he gets even farther away from the person you know he gets as far away from that that Dutch person as possible so and then he crosses his arms maybe again just to really close off that body language let's get rid of these lines of action and just there as an example so that's scrub through see how this is feeling from the two things I want him to do that on cans so I'm gonna take that frame and just select it and then drag it to where can't happens right there can't stand in this world people who are in it and then in for intolerant we'll have him go back to shake his head and then there's a really strong like e sound right there so we'll have him go forward right about there tolerant all right of other people's cultures then he he's pretty strong in that word culture so heaven go forward a little bit more on cultures again these are so quick to just add in ideas and take them away if you change your mind later [Music] I'll just cultures and then maybe here people's cultures here's a good spot for like a blink or something so instead of create blank frame this is a good case where I could do create duplicate frame you can see that's created a new frame here so I can just erase his eyes here add in a blink and then here is where we can add a a breakdown so a breakdown is a way of traveling from one key pose to the next so a breakdown can convey a lot of um how the emotion is um coming out of the person I guess is one way of saying it so um so we'll have him keep his eyes closed like he's still pretty upset here and just really exaggerate that C line before he goes up here and then here so I created a duplicate frame right here because I want his pose to land right here but for this pose I think I want to create a blank pose and then just have it extend farther back so he goes past the point and then settles into there and here we can not have his arms crossed just yet but almost just like that and then Dodge that's a hard that's a hard d right there let's that feels pretty good so if we play our little thumbnail animation this is what it looks like so far there are only two things I can't stand in this world people who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch that feels all right I could go um I could keep messing with it but I think we'll call that good for now so I'm gonna double click on this layer name and I'm going to call it thumbs for my thumbnails let's turn our background back on turn off our camera view and now we can take these thumbs and just turn that transparency color down a lot just like that and then we can make a new layer using the new layer button and uh we'll call this uh roughs we're not moving into cleanup yet we're just still on the rough stage so these aren't roughs these are thumbnails like it's not even close to looking like the character uh pretty much on purpose so for my rough animations I really like to use like a um transparent Reds and Blues um those are usually my favorite kinds of colors to sketch with so I'll just modify my red my blue to be more transparent um let's go on to this this first pose here so for a stage like this here let's get a thinner pencil like that for this kind of stage um usually I like to keep it down to Construction so just making it simple like cylinders uh cylinders and spheres uh cones shapes like that um because those are way easier to move around and change uh than drawing a fully uh rendered out character so can start with that I'm gonna put his hips is like a square just like that that's why it's important to practice drawing 3D shapes is even though you're animating 2D characters um they're still existing in a 3D space in a 3D environment so it's important to um be able to draw those shapes in 3D so he's pretty pissed off here Turtle has big nose like that this mustache and then stuff like hair things that are going to bounce around I'll usually leave for last so we'll extend the exposure for that rough layer just so that's like that and then two spheres for his shoulders and cylinders for his arms and I'm keeping that um frame oh what's it called line of action in mind so even though they're all different body parts they should all still be following that same general line of action so turn his arms in like that so that's one keyframe so here's something that I find useful is uh marking what my keyframes are so um the mark drawing button or the mark drawing toolbar is down here so you can get that by right clicking on any blank area um like say up here is a good spot to do it right clicking and going to Mark drawing which is where is it I guess it's down here Mark drawing um and here's a weird thing about toon boom um toolbars is I can't take this toolbar from up here and drag it down here for example so the places you right click and add toolbars um are kind of context sensitive so if I do want it to be down here I would have to right click down here and then select uh Mark drawing down here and it'll add it you can see it right here it's a little hard to see just on this lower resolution so I'm gonna move my timeline so it's taking up the whole bottom of the space just like that there we go uh and it got rid of my marked drawing so I'll add that again Mark drawing there we go so you can see keyframe uh this red K breakdown in between and then these are for retakes so keyframe you can kind of think of as your storytelling poses so all these poses pretty much all these poses we drew for our thumbnails are all going to be key animation poses so when you mark it as a key you'll see it gets marked with a red tick mark right here so I'm gonna go here um click blank frame to add [Music] um a new frame and then you can turn on onion skin to a trace this image again so what I like to do is use the onion skin and trace on top and he's going to be facing down a little bit more for this one [Music] so I'm just gonna bring his features down a little bit and we won't see up his nose as much so it's gonna be a bit more like that and then his mustache so I like to draw over the onion skin just to get it on model and I always reference the uh the first frame um that way the character doesn't shrink or you know get bigger as the animation goes on very important keep those volumes consistent um and then because his head is pointing down that means his ear is going to go up so I'll use the cutter tool to drag his ear up just like that move his head into place just like this turn off my onion skin and just lip it to see how that's feeling I don't know why he's telling us this out in the middle of a nice park it seems like an inappropriate place to be doing this but that's fine so this rib cage is going back just like that so you can see how we can see underneath the rib cage now like you can see the bottom of the rib cage because it's facing back another reason it's um just emphasizing it's really important to know how to take these 3D objects and be able to rotate them around and move them around in space because uh when you keep your character rig or you keep your um character drawings as simple geometric shapes it's way easier to draw and move them around just like this foreign the whole animation obviously it'll take a lot longer to get that done than we have time for but what I want to do is at least get a pretty good start on um on one movement so we're gonna animate this first movement that happens here so have him Crossing his arms I would also recommend uh if you're getting into animation learn how to get in and out of crossed arms um you're gonna be doing it a lot and it's kind of a difficult pose you know if you're not used to it um I'd still have trouble with it it's it could be tough sometimes uh but you know people do it a lot especially when they're like upset or you know trying to make a point out of something or if they're acting serious [Music] um can be really useful to know how to animate crossed arms and what that looks like um yeah Isaiah this uh this whole stream will be um available after it is over don't you worry um again if anyone has any questions or anything we'll do a q a section at the end oh I still have Auto flatten on I'm like why is it why is it flattening everything I had this auto Latin thing turned on um I really wish that cutter hotkey was working sometimes when things are being goofy and toon boom you just have to restart the program and I assume if I did that it would be fine but um I kind of don't wanna interrupt the live stream so I'll just deal with it it's fine all right so we've got our two poses here I'll mark this as a keyframe as well just like that so if we play it uh [Music] oh my play buttons up here I don't want that I want it down here so I'm gonna right click down here go to playback adds it right there but I want it to be over here there we go I also want and Mark Duran can stay there actually so this is so if you wanted to preview just a small section of your animation like if you didn't want to preview this whole thing what you can do is you can click the start and stop button so just the words see how the words highlight if I click Start on frame one it'll start the preview at frame one and then if I go to frame 70 and click the word stop it'll set the stop point to 70. so like I was saying before this doesn't edit how long your animation is only how much it's going to preview when you press play there are only two things I can't stand in this world that feels pretty good so when I'm animating from one pose to another uh usually the other two poses that I like to do are an anticipation and an overshoot so let's start with an anticipation an anticipation is sort of like uh moving in the opposite direction of where you're going to end up so he's ending up back this way right let me just grab my colors um weird oh there it's not showing all my colors for some reason uh where is it Swatch mode turn that back on that's weird I thought that was supposed to like scale when you squash the scene down or squash the frame down but I guess it doesn't anyway I wanted to grab my blue um so he's ending up back this direction right so for the anticipation from this pose we want to have him Lean Forward not very much just a little bit so I'm going to create a blank frame here turn on my onion skin just to reference that previous frame and here you can see green is my future frame red is my previous frame so here again it's gonna Trace over and reference our previous frame here [Music] keep them about the same just like that after his big nose and his mustache and then we're having him go forward just a little bit I'm going to turn off my onion skin and just split back and forth see how that feels and feels a little off I think that's too far we want to keep it kind of subtle that feels good that feels pretty natural I'm not trying to go like super over the top within one of the hardest things with animation is a subtlety like it's easy enough to make things squash and stretch and exaggerate all around but keeping things constrained it's a one of the hardest things you can do what sounds counter-intuitive right you'd think like less movement would be easier but it's really not like it's a lot easier and um also more fun in a way to really exaggerate things and go over the top but uh keeping things all right so here is where I'm gonna have him start to cross his arms so his arms are gonna go They're gonna start going out they're gonna start making like a triangle shape just anticipating getting ready to cross them and keep his forearms facing down I think like this just like that yes we will go over um coloring animation so that's kind of why I just wanted to do two poses is kind of go through the whole production but just with um two simple poses all right so I'm gonna Mark these just so you can visually see what uh drawings were on so this is a keyframe this is also a keyframe but it's an anticipation so usually we call that antic and this is also a keyframe so for dragging around um frames uh first let's zoom in just so we can get a better look so I drew this Frame Just One backwards uh one frame back just to make it easier to flip back and forth between them just like this but that's not the timing I want I want it to be further back so tin boom gives you these um you can see red bars and yellow bars um so what these are useful for is for pushing and pulling your animation around and uh with it being kind of small it's kind of hard to like select them so what I like to do when I'm animating is I like to turn on this thumbnail view so you can see a little uh person icon right here you click that you'll see bigger frames for your animation this is really useful for doing frame by frame animation is being able to see nice big thumbnails so there's yellow and red so what red does is it actually overwrites things so red you could think of like blood Bloodshed like it's gonna eat up whatever it's passing through right um yellow uh the color of uh piss which stands for push so yellow means to push that's how I remember it uh so piss push um yellow you can push things around with so if you're on red and you push it forward it's going to eat things up um if you're on yellow it's gonna push things so it doesn't eat anything up it just pushes it farther down or you can just select the frame adjust itself and then click and drag and move the frame just manually just like that super easy um if you want to increase or decrease exposure like let's say you're not working with just one layer but there's like a whole stack of layers um and you wanted to increase exposure from one to the other you can shift select multiple layers uh here just like select the first frame hold down shift go down here and that selects a stack of layers and then the hotkey if you have a numpad is plus and minus to increase and decrease exposure so if I press Plus that adds exposure and if I press minus that minus is exposure and you can see it's doing that for all the layers that I have selected so I can bring the timing closer that way or make it further apart just like that um so plus and minus is how you increase and decrease exposure so anyways that's our anticipation let's turn on scrubbing again I think on the two so again I'm going to use red just to shift that around because I don't want to push anything I only want to change this drawings timing and then I think around here is where we'll have the overshoot but just to make it easier to flip back and forth I'm gonna do it one frame behind select here create blank frame turn on onion skin again and this time we'll reference the future drawing which is the green one Trace that one [Music] just like this add in the middle lines just like that keeping it rough so the overshoot is kind of like the anticipation except what the point of it is is um you want to go past the pose that you're going to settle into so he's gonna be back around like this area right he'll go a little bit past and then he'll slowly settle into this pose so that's what the point of the overshoot uh key is for so we'll move his head back like this maybe rotate it uh is that too far we'll rotate it a bit like that foreign that feels pretty good okay and then it's going farther back so I have his shoulders up here bring your shoulders up like that diaphragm is right about there so when I'm animating I like using the onion skin just to keep things on model but when I'm actually animating I prefer to LIT back and forth I find it easier to kind of get a sense of how things are moving you know if volumes are feeling right and if uh the character is moving properly I find it seems to be a bit easier to keep track of with flipping rather than um using the onion skin okay so here is where here is where we'll have his arms start to get into the um the cross position so we'll have this one going up like this I love this uh sitcom music okay and then that goes like that and then this arm will be going in front just to make that clearer I'll hold down e for the eraser just so I can visually see that that's going in front and that's tucked in behind the arm just like that and then this arm is back here like that cool and then again I'll use red just to um drag it around because I don't want to push anything I just want this post to be about right there and if we play that how's that feel oh let's uh let's also Mark this as also a keyframe but is an overshoot then if we play it around the two things I can't stand in this world that feels pretty good cool so that's our keyframes um see so keyframes are the most important you want to get through your keyframes just because those are your storytelling poses and get those really nailed down and figured out um that's your first order of business as an animator when you get a new scene um once your keys are all figured out um and we'll keep this rough right now um you know it's easier to again same reason as the thumbnail it's easier to delete one of these drawings you know I could delete this drawing right now and I would not feel that sad about it because uh you know it was pretty easy to draw um so we're gonna stay in this really rough um kind of uh mechanical doll sort of phase uh while we're doing our breakdowns on our in-betweens and stuff okay [Music] so a breakdown is sort of like the halfway point oh also I wanna Mark these as keyframe just like that so a breakdown is sort of like a halfway point so it's how he gets from this pose into this pose um so we'll put it about halfway for now just to see how that feels oh actually let's let's do one one behind just so it's easier to flip back and forth between them just to see how it's feeling so with animation what a lot of beginners will do for doing a breakdown or any kind of in between is they'll think okay um I just need to move you know draw everything halfway in between right like everything just moves halfway in between just like this so and this might work it might like not look like the worst thing in the world but it's not gonna be very interesting um so for example is rib cage is here shoulders literally right there and then arm like that this arm halfway is like that not putting any effort in because I'm just making a point of what it would look like if we just did halfway in between for everything this arm like here and hip going down like that all right so so that's just a regular halfway in between um that's serviceable uh but it doesn't look very good um and it's not very interesting story wise um so where breakdowns um and usually breakdowns are marked with um an underline like this rather than a circle so with breaks uh breakdowns you can have a lot of fun with them um you know is the butt leading the animation is the head leading this animation I think in this example I think it should be the butt should be leading it um and you know his head should be going down towards the camera kind of like this you know really going down something like something like that and also his eyes should be closed as well scene since he's facing towards the camera you wouldn't see under his nose turn off our onion skin so yeah something like that and then we can have him leading with his back maybe not his butt necessarily but we can have his back be leading the animation sort of like that and it just feels a lot more interesting having it be like that we'll have his hips favor towards the future pose just kind of push his hips out so he goes kind of from this line of action to this sort of line of action to this line of action so you get kind of that um or actually I guess it's more like that so you get kind of that whippy wavy kind of movement to it does that make sense that's way more interesting than um just having a a regular old um 50 in between you know you want to decide like what's the attitude what body part is leading the motion makes for a really good breakdown pose and then for and then for his arms we'll have them whoops let's use our red here hey jjr welcome to the Stream I love his arms going backwards getting ready for his arm to go into the cross position uh please don't spam in my stream thank you let's see and then we'll have the spine go like this here we'll have his arm start to head towards his chest but have the hand leading down like that see how that feels well maybe it could go up even more probably yeah maybe we'll have it right around here like that and have the arm trail behind and then he settles into his fully crossed arms just like that and then same thing as marking with the keyframe we can use the mark breakdown just to mark that as a breakdown and we'll position that right about there let's see how this feels now if we play it there are only two things I can't stand in this world let's play it one more time it kind of skipped frames there are only two things I can't stand in this world feel like that could happen a little bit earlier maybe like that there are only two things I can't stand in this world that feels pretty good there are only two things I can't stand in this world alright so let's do some in-betweens so for figuring out the in-betweens on a frame actually you know uh before getting onto in-betweens we should work on um doing cleanup uh so let's just say we did all of our in-betweens for this uh section of Animation here and we're ready to do cleanup so I'm gonna make a new layer we'll call this cleanup foreign close and what we can do is instead of you know making a blank frame um extending it and then you know making sure we have blank frames on all the right spots what you can actually do with your cleanup layer is you can right click on it and you can do sync layer width and what that does is it syncs this cleanup layer with the same timing as your rough animation so if you ever do any changes to your rough animation like you change your mind later on and you want to change timing and stuff it'll change it on the cleanup as well it just makes it super easy to make changes and update things later and keep things organized so instead of background where we want to time it to the rough animation so we select rough animation and press ok and now we can see this little chain icon and we can see that um all of our keys have been uh synced with the layer down below with the rough animation layer don't know why my marked Keys went away um let's bring those back just like that there you go then we'll also enable thumbnail view just to make it easier so now you can see when I move my rough animation like let's say I move this Frame here it does the same on my cleanup cleanup art as well my cleanup layer which is super duper cool um so let's see um let's let's clean up this layer the first one so first of all I like to turn on the light box so that's this light bulb option right here turns that on and um we can uh get a better idea of where our drawing is versus where the um the rough animation is so for cleanup I like to use the pencil tool the pencil tool is my favorite tool to clean up with um we'll use the black color and we'll use this pencil tool I like um cleaning up with no pressure sensitivity it just makes it easier because there's less things to think about and I think it's it looks good I think it looks good um so to clean this up what we can do is we can take our model sheet here our character design sheet um we can take this grab our transform tool and just move it and scale it so that it's about in the right size and position as our rough animation so right about there looks pretty good and then when we go into our cleanup we grab our pencil tool and we make sure that our light table is turned on and it'll just sort of fade everything away make it easier to um to reference so we just go through and just clean up our animation cupping the rough but keeping the model sheet in mind for uh proportions and everything so here you just want to get him looking on model see his mustache just like that and then once we clean up this Frame I'll show you how to um how to do coloring and stuff as well so here's his eyes like that fill these in with black that looks a little off-center just like that it's cheekbone and uh if I have like Wiggly lines like this I can go in with my white Arrow tool and just delete some of these Vector points just to clean it up a little bit foreign normally I would be a lot more careful with my cleanup animation but I also kind of want to just go through so we can cover everything I wanted to cover today so again I can use my white Arrow tool and just wiggle these around smooth this out just like that foreign do a sideburns here and his forehead like I said we'll do this pretty quickly just so we can get to the um coloring and everything then he's got these funny Square ears foreign just a couple of Curves like that and then here where I've overlapped his mustache I can just hold down t for my cutter tool and just cut that away just like that and here we have his neck then his lapel um matches the same perspective as rib cage here just like that is lapels like so and having the model sheet just on your animation just like this is a really convenient way to keep things on model which uh was always tough for me it's always been hard for me to keep things on model it uh it takes a lot of practice and drawing the same character over and over again but if it's a character you're not familiar with it could be really tough sometimes so grab these smooth these out add in his neck shadow underneath and then his arm goes like down here just like that a little bit of a shoulder bump a little bit of a wrinkle for his armpit here and I can see the back of his rib cage goes into his butt just like that and same thing he's got pointy shoulders up here and that goes down into his arm just like that oh that's true I forgot I am I never named this guy does chat have any recommendations for what to name him I have no clues all right so now that we have him pretty much all traced up we can take this model sheet using our transform tool and just uh move it off to the side since we're done with it there we go we have our cleaned up animation um so let's talk about coloring let's talk about coloring and shading uh animation so you remember I talked about um these art layers down here right so if you don't see your art layers um usually they're over here on this side of um toon boom Harmony so what the art layers are useful for is for um separating different aspects of your animation so um line art obviously is meant for line art uh color art is meant for your colors underneath the line art underlay art typically used for sketching things like that and then overlay art is for things that go over your animation so effects or you know maybe like a shine or a highlight something like that so the typical process with coloring in toon boom so you can take your paint bucket tool and uh let's expand here I'll hide the camera view so we can see our colors a bit better so you can take your um color here and let's just make some colors for him really quick uh I imagine he has like white hair so we'll make a white color call it hair um and I imagine he doesn't get a lot of sunlight so maybe like very palish kind of green skin tone and we can modify these afterwards if they're if they're not fitting um skin and then I was like a good purple suit nice purple suit I think would suit him just fine and he has this um this little poof so we'll make a new we'll do suit number two and just grab like a lighter pink like that Charles Charles is a good one I could see Charles for him I was thinking Mr rich I was thinking either Mr rich or Mr fancy so like I was saying you can take uh these colors here and just plop it onto um the line art layer nothing wrong with that um it certainly is easier this way suit number two then suit number one oh we need a color for his his button here so I'll make a yellow orangish button like that so here um we're running into we can't fill this in because there's these big open gaps right obviously Jacques I like Jacques he is Jacques um so we need to close these gaps off somehow and one way we can do that is we can use this option on our brush Tool uh draw behind so if we select that and select our suit color and we just paint from one side to another just like this and just block that off like that and then we fill in it allows us to fill it in oh he's kind of like Dan backslide colors should we make him like straight up Dan backs like colors this is Dan backslide he's kind of like that color right there there's our our bootleg Dan backs life I hate the Dutch con found them um so you can do that this is all on the line art layer right um but I'm gonna teach you a typical way to um color in toon boom Harmony where we actually use these art layers so on your line art layer with your cleanup art all finished we want to click this button up here create color art from line art it's also if you have your Black Arrow tool selected you can also see it down here right here it sort of looks like a Grace uh C pointing to a blue c if we click that it looks like nothing happens but if we go into our color art layer now you'll see all these blue lines and Yellow Boxes um and what that has done is it has taken um our line art and made invisible Strokes that we can now fill in so here's something super duper important um there's so many important things I can't hammer on everything but a lot of people get a lot of people get confused on the difference between the camera view and the drawing View um 99 of your time you're gonna be in the camera view and oftentimes if you're having trouble and something's not working this is going to be one of the first things I'm gonna ask you is are you in camera view or are you in drawing view because you should be in camera view most of the time for example like if your animation's not playing there are only two things I can't stand it might be because you're in your drawing view so your animation would play if there are only two things I can't you're in camera view uh what drawing for you is useful for is for isolating a layer um working with onion skin or viewing these art layers just on their own so here you can only see the blue Strokes uh you can't see any of the line art if we click on the line art layer here uh we can only see the line art layer we can't see the blue Strokes so it's a way to isolate your line art layers just to make it more clear of what you're working on so with this option we can have our color on a separate layer and the reason for doing that is lots of reasons um one reason is it can make compositing easier it can make um it can make it easier to make massive changes to your colors later it's just a good habit to get into coloring your animations this way um so same thing we could take our brush tool and uh just draw behind and close these off but actually there's an easier tool to work with these Strokes for closing gaps like this and it's under your paint bucket tool and it's called closed Gap stroke does a similar thing I'll show stroke first I suppose um so what stroke is useful for is for drawing with these invisible Strokes so a place I might do that here is on his hair highlights which I don't want to have an outline I just want them to be on their own just like this right so I might draw some hair highlights in his hair just like that um maybe one down here just like that so you can take that stroke tool and also close these gaps off using the stroke tool but the closed Gap tool Works automatically so all you don't even have to like connect them you can just get close enough to these two points and it'll automatically close it for you so anytime you see a yellow box like that that means there is a gap um and when you see a blue box like that that means there's a closed Gap so whenever there's uh gaps like this like you could see on a sleeve here it's important to close that Gap just so the color can get filled in there's no um gaps for it to leak out of now when you look at this there's these open gaps um well I guess that's not one that that one's deceptive there is a closed gap on that one but you can see um just in different spots there's all these tiny little gaps uh and you could go through manually close all these but there's there's a better way um if you go under drawing clean up close gaps so again that's under drawing clean up and then close gaps or shift F10 I suppose is the hotkey um you can increase the size until so I'll do it slowly so now it might be a little bit hard to see but there is a tiny red line connecting these two gaps now um and if I lower it you'll see that red line goes away so that's visually how you can see um your gaps being closed so here if I increase it even more you can see this bigger Gap getting closed you don't want to do it too much because then it gets a little bit crazy and it's going to make painting in your character even harder um so you want to do it just enough to close all those small gaps so we'll go we'll go about there and if you had a whole animation you can click this to apply it to all drawings that's um very useful if you have color art on multiple different frames so we just have the one so we'll leave that unchecked and we'll press ok and all these bigger ones I'll just fill in manually so the hotkey for closed Gap is C you can think of C as close Gap so just hold down C and draw a line just like that and we'll just glance around see if there's any gaps we missed and I think oh here's a big one so hold down C close Gap just like that and I think that should be good so now we can take our Paint Bucket and just to make sure that everything's filled in properly I'll usually fill it all in with one color and that looks filled in just fine so here's an example where unpaint can be handy remember unpaint so if you filled in thousands of frames of animation and let's say his arm was crossed over and that got filled in as well if you have thousands of frames of Animation it's just more um clicks and buttons to press if you have to select each one of these and press delete so it's easier just to go through take your unpaint tool and just click anywhere you need to like unpaint on your character it's just a little bit faster that way um so let's undo that and let's fill him in proper so we'll start with his hair let's give them some white highlights for his hair just like that things like his eyes I know are filled in with black sometimes you can tell what's filled in with black because you'll see this weird squiggle on the inside if I go to my line art you can see that's just filled in with black so I don't need to worry about that so fill in his suit just like this another thing about having it on the color art layer is you can take your paint bucket tool and just draw a huge lasso around stuff and you don't have to worry about filling in your um your line work accidentally which is super useful uh mustache whoops so you can see there's obviously a gap in his mustache so uh looks like it's right there close that off there we go and there we go so we're in our drawing view so we can't see it all together until we go back to our camera view and now we can see our character all colored in so how can we shade this character well um one way we could do it is we can do a new layer on top call it shade and enclose and again we want to sync this layer with either the rough or the cleanup it doesn't really matter since they're both synced up together I'll just sync it to the cleanup press ok so for the shading um this might be a good spot where you can use the brush tool just because what you're gonna want to do is fill in these big blobs of of color so I'm gonna make a new color call it shade and I highly recommend against shading with just pure black at like 50 opacity um put a color in there I usually like to do like a dark desaturated purple for my Shadows so I also leave it pretty close to about there for the alpha um it depends because he's in like um he's outside right so he's gonna be pretty lit up from everywhere so he's probably not going to be to to shaded in so just go through fill in this is also a case where um autoflatten might come in handy you can see since I'm using a brush that um has transparency on it anytime I overlap it's creating these overlapping uh brush strokes and if I go into render View you can see it's even going into um the rendered version of the animation so uh so render view is this little colored flower I don't think I mentioned that so opengl view is your working View um and then render view is how the final animation is going to look like so if I zoom in you can see it's pixelized because it's 1920x1080 you know it's this is a 1920x1080 image that it has rendered but if you're working if you're drawing you want to go back into this gray flower here The opengl View so this might be a good point where you can have Auto flatten or you could select it all and um press this flatten button up here just to flatten it after the fact that works also but let's just go through and paint our homeboy oops I have on paint behind we don't want that it's a little hard to see on his mustache here but there you can see filling that in let's do under his nose and then uh underneath his eye here like that so this could be one way to shade in your animation is just make a new layer above and color it in just like this you'll want to make sure not to go outside the lines though um you will have to erase that um this is a good spot where we can talk about the node View and one thing that could be handy um when doing compositing stuff like this so any like final animation edits um so like I was saying um normally you want to pay attention to not go outside the lines let's also um tied Our rough in our thumbnail drawings for now um so we're doing our shadows here I feel like this one's a bit intense so I'm gonna tone that one down a little bit so we've got our shadows here and uh I guess I could increase it just so it's a bit darker easier to see so we're doing our shadows and uh we're like coloring Outside the Lines we're just being super sloppy with it well one thing we could do is we could use a cutter node to um to cut out the Shadows using our um animation layer so if we go to Windows and node View this is our node view here um usually what I like to do is uh I have it nested over here on the right side just so I can both animate and work in the node view at the same time so when you open up your node view if you've not messed with it in a scene it's going to look like this it's going to be just everything stacked on top of each other and not very organized so if we're in our node View and we press Ctrl a to select all and we select one of these pyramid shapes here um it's like three uh White train a white rectangles uh making a pyramid we just click one of those it doesn't matter which and just press ok it'll organize it into this pyramid shape here so it's a bit easier to see what's going on um so the way the node view works is a whatever's on the left is on the top of your animation and whatever's on the right is on the bottom so you can see here our background is at the bottom of our animation and then our cleanup and our shading is on the top so if I were to take my shade node view or my shade node and take this blue spaghetti from the shade and put it to the right of cleanup right here you can see it's now behind our cleanup animation um so the note view looks scary but it's really the same thing as what's going on down here it's the same thing as your timeline where things on the top are on the top of your animation things are on the bottom are in the back same thing with the node view things that are on on the left are on the top and things that are on the right are on the bottom um so one thing we can do with this shade node where we're coloring Shadows is we want to use the cleanup to cut out our shaded animation so we can't go over the lines so we do that with a cutter node a cutter node is kind of like a mask so if I press enter inside of the node view I get this search dialog and I can search for the word cutter so if I take a cutter I now have this cutter node so um so to apply a cutter node the thing we want to cut out is our shadows right the Shadows need all this excess stuff cut out from it so so I'm going to take this cutter node hold down alt and I'm going to connect it up to the middle of the Shadow layer just like this so the shadow connects into the top of the cutter and then it comes out of the cutter it connects onto our animation which is this final composite node right here um I can even click this Arrow right here just to show that this is a preview of the final animation just like that so anytime you want to see what a layer is you can click these arrows here to get little thumbnail views of them and you can click this cutter here to see what is happening right now nothing it's not doing anything so you want to make sure that the shadow is connected into this blue section of the cutter it's connected into the middle the section here on the left is what's going to be used for the mask so we want to use our cleanup animation as the mask on the cutter right well if we take our blue spaghetti and we cut it and we plug it into the cutter like so um that worked but now our cleanup animation is no longer visible it's uh only being plugged into this cutter node well one thing you can do with these nodes is you can have multiple strands of spaghetti come out of them so I can have one strand of spaghetti plugging in to be displayed on the final composite and I can drag by clicking from this tiny blue box I can drag another strand of spaghetti onto the cutter node right here on the left side and that cuts out um using the build-in animation to cut out from the Shadows here so it's doing the opposite of what we want so what we can do is we can double click on this mask here to invert our mask so now our mask has been inverted oops and now anything where uh the color art um anything where the animation is colored in will now be the only part that gets Shadow so that way with the cutter node we no longer need to worry about going outside the lines so we're free to fill in art shadows as we please um let's just go ahead and quickly fill in Shadows I'm not going to worry too much about it we'll just fill in roughly um where I think Shadows would be again I can hold down o to shrink or grow my brush as needed so we'll just add in some Shadows just like that I can use the Eraser to get rid of some Shadows if I want um fill in his little Lacy poofy thing just like that shade in his button and then the side of his arm just like that and then again if I render it it's going to show all these like overlapping sections so I can select it all and press Ctrl shift F to flatten it another thing we can do with this node view is we can do some really neat things with the Shadows um I mean the more wires that you have the more it looks like spaghetti do you see ah blue spaghetti delicious um so what we can do with our shadows is um with our node View compositing and effects we don't even have to use this um transparent uh dark purple we can even make it a neon green if we wanted to set it to pull uh color just like that and with our nodes we've got lots of different options for what we can do with it um we can go under let's do blending let's add a blending node to it so if we select a blending node and hold down alt and plug it in underneath our shadow here if we click this yellow box we can edit the properties of any of these nodes so we can click the yellow box on blending and here's where your blending modes are so if you're familiar with things like Photoshop or clip Studio paint here is where you can add things like multiply or overlay or um add glows things like that so since it's a shadow I'm going to set it to multiply and it's now become a shadow even though it's this bright neon green it's now behaving like a shadow after the fact you can um adjust the color so it it feels more like a natural Shadow so maybe like a uh let's see since it's on multiply the lighter it is the more transparent it's going to get so maybe like a light purple color like this would work pretty well something like that feels pretty good so that's how you can add a cutter node and blending node to your shadows and then that way you can go through and uh color in and shade your animation and you don't have to worry about um going outside the lines and you can also um do highlights like for example if I wanted to do a new highlight node for example I can press Ctrl R is the hotkey to add a new layer um it can do HL for highlight add and close again we need to attach it to our composite or else it's not going to get displayed so we'll drag a line from highlight onto the top of our composite again on the left because we want it to be in front of everything and uh move that down did I move that on the left okay it is on the left cool so we'll make a new color for highlight for highlight usually I like to do like um really bright yellow somewhere like around there looks pretty good so again this is just default fully opaque Lake nothing special happening to it it's also going outside the lines kind of a layer but if we start with that just like this well let's add some to his poof we'll make him super shiny and then if I do the same thing if I press enter add a cutter node hold down Alt so it's connected in between um the Highlight spaghetti then I can drag another line from my cleanup art oh I forgot I also want to sync this layer right and that's another thing I want this highlight layer to be synced with my cleanup layer that way they maintain the same timing and everything so now I drag another line for my cleanup onto my cutter again it's doing the opposite so I need to double click on this mask icon right here that'll set it so it's inside of our character and then again we'll add another blending node here hold down alt to have it wedge in between to have that blending effect be applied to our highlight click the yellow box and let's set it to add uh let's see where was add overlay I think linear light's a pretty good one too I know linear light and the hard light are usually pretty good for highlights let's try hard light see what that looks like that looks insane um overlay is usually okay I like overlay overlay works pretty well we can also um we could change the opacity of this highlight color uh in the color itself or we can add a transparency node that way we don't have to worry about um flattening our artwork all the time we can just add this transparency node again holding alt and plugging it in after this blending node and that'll make our highlight layer a 50 transparent so transparency node Works kind of funky in toon boom um you might think like transparency okay I want it to be like at 20 opacity but it actually goes up in opacity you kind of have to think about it as the opposite of Photoshop you think about it as the amount of transparency you want so if it's a hundred percent transparent it's not going to show at all um so if you only wanted it to be twenty percent uh visible that means you need to set it to 80 transparency it's goofy it's quirky but that's how it works we'll leave it at 50 for now um but yeah there's our final cleaned up animation all colored in um I'll give you a better look at the node view so you can see what's going on here so just the overview again we have the cleanup going into the composite just on its own um we had the same with the shade just going into the composite and the Highlight going into the composite shade and highlight going on the left because they are on top of our cleanup art and then we alt drug um two cutter nodes onto our shading and highlight and then we use the cleanup art as a second strand of spaghetti to plug into those masks to cut them out um if the masks aren't doing what you want you can double click on the mask to invert it and then we added some effects to those shadows and highlights using our blending nodes and our transparency nodes so that's our basic setup for coloring in and shading animation all right um we are nearing the end of the class I am going to just uh work on some in-betweens and kind of show what my process for that would be so we're back on our rough animation here we've got our um our keys here oh I'm on the render view that's why I was like why isn't it scrubbing so besides checking if you're in the camera versus drawing view another thing to check if things aren't working is make sure you're in the um the working view the gray flower rather than the color flower let's turn off our camera mask as well um so for moving from one key to another uh I like to use timing charts um timing charts are super unnecessary actually and I think people um in this day and age don't need to use them as much as they did for um the traditional day age of Animation you know you can add keyframes and be willy-nilly and edit things around and the only reason you'd really use timing sheets nowadays is if somebody else is going to work on your scene um that's really the only reason you'd ever use timing charts and I don't even like to call them timing charts uh I like to call them spacing charts because it determines how spaced apart the drawings are are going to be from one in between to another so let's just do from uh this one might be too subtle to do an example of let's do from it's due from yeah let's do from this key to this key with a breakdown in between so we'll do it off to the side just so we can see so we've got our keyframe here this is on frame 11. and then we've got another key down here that's on frame 21. and then our breakdown I might want to adjust but we have a breakdown in here somewhere I'm not sure on what frame I'd want it on so with 24 frames per second animation typically animation is done what's called on twos where every frame is exposed for two frames um so that's kind of how I'll calculate out my um timing for this first of all um and I probably won't have time to show this off using motion tweens or anything but um we're going to talk about easing so easing you can think of as like cushioning it's like where is this movement going to be cushioned is it going to be cushioned at the start and then be really fast when it gets to this keyframe is it going to be really fast out of this keyframe and then cushion and slow down into this keyframe or is it going to be cushioned on both sides um so just to kind of give a visual example of that uh what timing charts might look like for different kinds of easing so I'm just dividing in half in half in half in half so something like this um gosh it's different in every animation software but I would call this um an ease in um because I kind of think of like if this is the start this is like in going to out so easing in is like easing into this motion it's doing so it starts out the drawing is really close together so the closer drawings are together the slower the motion is and the further apart the drawings are the faster the motion is so I would think of this as like starting out slow slow speeding up speeding up and then super fast on the out right and then ease out obviously is going to be the opposite so again I'll divide it in half in half in half half half so this is easing out so it starts out quick and then slows down at the end whereas this it's slow at the beginning and then it's quick at the end okay let me organize this illustration just so it's a little bit easier to read so this is an ease in is timed out this way this is an ease out and mastering easing is really important for making things feel really natural um so again here I'm going to do half half half half half half half and then same on this side half half half half half and that's an ease in and out so it'll have cushions on both sides so it'll start out slow fast in the middle and then slow at the end just like that um hopefully without any um motion tween examples that's clear enough to understand so that's how we're going to be animating this motion right here where he goes from this key to this key we'll do um a cushion on the beginning and the end so see how many frames do we want to do this in so that's our middle so to identify the middle usually I'll draw McDonald's arches kind of like that whenever I see that I know that that means that this drawing is halfway in between this key and this key so that's a halfway point same thing with right here if I had two more in-betweens on these sides and I did another McDonald's Arch I know that those in-betweens are halfway between the breakdown and this key uh same with this in between it's halfway between this breakdown and this key so the McDonald's arches are super useful for knowing where your halfway points are so for an ease in ease out I might do something like that so if we time this out by um by twos that would make this drawing 13 [Music] . 19 21 and then this would be moved down to 23. this is why I don't like to call them timing charts because this timing could be whatever like these numbers could be whatever but the spacing is what's important about these these graphs these charts it tells you how far apart the spacing is on these drawings and also what um order to work on you want to work from the biggest McDonald's Arch and work your way down to the smallest archways um just because you use them as reference for example I couldn't do this drawing 21 this small McDonald's Arch until I had drawing 19 which is halfway between the breakdown and drawing 23 done so that's why you'd want to work from Big to small we already have our breakdown done so our next frames that we can work on are drawing 15 right and drawing 19. so let's move these drawings down to 23 so that's right and then B was on or the breakdown was on 17. so again the cool thing about those sync layers is when I move uh one drawing it affects my highlight my Shadows my cleanup everything sync layers are super useful um so yeah let's do uh drawing number 15 so we'll go to frame 15 add a blank frame using my blank frame button hey Flavio welcome to the Stream you're catching the tail end of it but this whole stream is going to be recorded so you can check out the whole stream uh by the end all right so this is halfway between these two so we'll just quickly rough in that's halfway mark so he's facing down like that so a rough in really quick with the um onion skin on and then I'll turn onion skin off and just kind of lip it to make sure that it's feeling okay are you feeling okay uh uh so the hips go like that and then the arms starting to come up right here the hand trailing down like that and then uh his shoulder this is going halfway and uh halves are the easiest thing to work with animation wise it's way easier to divide and in between in half rather than in thirds or anything like that so that's why if you're just starting out I recommend um working with halves at first it's just the easiest to think about um so I'm going to call that good uh since we're nearing the end so that's drawing 15 uh let's go back to our timing chart see our next thing to work on so we did 15. we're doing drawing 19 now so go to frame 19 add a blank frame onion skin so here's an important thing to note when doing in-betweens um what a lot of beginning animators will do is for this ear for example they'll put it right smack there that seems right right no because uh things go on arcs and what this in between is doing is moving linearly um if you want to do a proper in between it should move on an arc so I want to actually view the the last two frames just to illustrate this a bit better so I'm going to open up my windows um onion skin View so onion skin View is the way you can edit your onion skin so here you can adjust the opacity of your onion skin with this slider you can turn it on and off with this button and you can choose how many frames forwards and backwards uh with this onion skin view on um to get this onion view uh onion skin view to work you do need to use the advanced onion skin option which you see this white Arrow tool you can click and hold and you see show Regular onion skin or show Advanced onion skin I only ever use Advanced onion skin nowadays I don't really use the old one anymore so anyways I want to turn it on and just to illustrate this point um we're gonna view the past two frames sorry threw me for a loop I forgot what I did with the breakdown so the direction is going like this right so it's a little bit more complicated than what I was going to illustrate I was going to say like oh you follow this Arc but we actually have as a head going down like this and then coming back up so it's still going to be on an arc it's just it goes forward first and then goes along this Arc up here so just something to keep in mind when you're doing in-betweens um put things on arcs don't just a linear linearly in between stuff so for this halfway drawing between these two I'm gonna keep the arc down this way same with um this head um spacing up this way down this way and I want to kind of keep that drag so I'm going to keep him sort of facing that angle just like that show the top of his head a little bit erase his chin we'll just keep it on simple simple halfway in between so this arm would be going down like this I'm trying to rush since it's almost the end of the stream actually actually it technically is the end of the stream but I want to finish this animation um but I was going to stay a little bit later just to um do some question and answering uh it's the Q a segment uh uh ask your questions um but yeah technically the stream is over I want to finish this animation uh just because I like animating wouldn't you know it I actually like doing this for fun um but yeah I wanted to set aside some time so if you have any really big questions or if you want me to go over something again um Now's the Time to ask um is there anything I can clarify do you have any questions not related to Boom um maybe you have some questions about uh working as an animator or um questions about taxes that's always fun um but yeah I'm gonna keep working on this in between and kind of talking through my process so I'll keep myself occupied if there are no questions so don't you worry about that uh Beatrice would you consider making another stream or tutorial for the whole nodes and puppet thing I definitely would um I might do it on patreon um if you guys don't know about my patreon um I guess I should spam it I I kind of forgot to like talk about it at all but one thing I would like to do is I'd like to teach more um animation stuff but uh it's hard because you know I do these for free and I'm always happy to share things I'm always going to put out videos for free but you know um I would like to reward people who uh support me on patreon so things that are you know maybe more in depth like that maybe I'll do like a stream on patreon first and then upload it to YouTube afterwards maybe something like that but it's definitely going to be on YouTube at some point it's not going to be stuck behind a paywall I don't like doing that but um but yeah if you'd like to support me or if you just like what I do and would like to throw me a book I that means the world to me um thank you for even thinking of it um but yeah I'd like to do more patreon stuff just to uh you know have more exclusive content up there and maybe do more in-depth stuff uh so yeah we'll definitely do another class on on puppeted rigs uh honestly it would be really hard to go through it all in another four hours but it's it's possible it's doable so we could definitely do that I would definitely it's definitely on something I want to do all right so we've done our drawings 15 and 19 so our next drawings are 21 and 13. so let's start with 13. we'll blank that out and the closer in betweens get you know the more uh the smaller the movement is going to be so that's why easing works is because these drawings get so close together that it really softens out that movement um and that's when onion skin really comes in handy is for these really tiny little increments and then you just like kind of draw in between them um like uh you've heard the if you know the animator survival kit you know the whole thing like he recommends not listening to music I think that is helpful but it's mostly helpful for when you're brainstorming when you're coming up with the keyframes for animation when you're at the point where you're kind of mindlessly doing activities like say doing cleanup or even like certain in-betweens uh that's when I would recommend putting on music or you know something that keeps your mind occupied um thank you Beatrice I appreciate that all right so and then this is our last in between so I know I wanted to do a halfway in between but I'm gonna cheat my timing a little bit actually so I really want to favor this green pose rather than the red pose so on my timing chart when I want to do that usually I'll take away this McDonald's sign showing that it's not a halfway in between and I'll take this drawing and I'll move it way way close to that keyframe and that tells me that it's going to favor this key super duper closely it's not a halfway in between because there's no McDonald's Arch to it right so that way when I go to this in between I know that the ear doesn't go here halfway in between but more closer to right here I'm almost just redrawing the green frame basically the um the future frame so that's the frame that I want to really really favor is the green one so it's not a halfway in between it's super favoring all of these frames here where the green is uh it's getting a little hard to see that green against the grass but that's okay we can make it work um again this is all super duper rough animation um it would all get tied down or cleaned up later this is just a make sure the motion works so this arm would be right about here um any other questions uh before we take off this has been really fun you guys I'm sorry if it was a bit of an info dump at the beginning I haven't taught um classes like this since like November so I'm definitely out of practice but this was great practice I definitely would like to do it again um basically a class like this is something that people would um hiring hire me for so I wanted to put one out there that was basically free um just so people wouldn't have to pay money for it um Tim boom's one of my favorite programs and I want people to stop using Adobe animate and move on to better things um so there we go so you can see how much that cushion's at the end it really comes to a slow down at the end so just to illustrate it should from this animation uh start out slow speed up on the middle breakdown and then slow down at the end so it starts out slow speed up on breakdown and then slow out at the end so just to Loop this just so you can see what it looks like on a loop here's what our finished Motion looks like so this is just one keyframe to another keyframe obviously if we have the whole thing animated it's going to look a lot smoother and uh you know the whole thing would be moving and fun and also uh it's digital we can change our mind later if we want uh that's the nice thing about it not being on paper we don't have to go to the camera every time we want to do a pencil test we can just um uh you know just play it and then change our mind um digital animation is super flexible that way so I'm gonna increase the color on our thumbnail sketch we'll play our animation or quote unquote just pretend that it's finished animation and uh and that will be the end of the stream thank you so much you guys for watching um uh let's play our animation here's what we got so far oh wait where's our cleanup let's turn that on um maybe turn off the highlight and shade because it doesn't look great in the render View oh wait I forgot to I am professional streamer let's turn on the sound play play play play play the rounded two things I can't stand in this world people who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch there are only two things I can't stand in this world people who are intolerant of other people's cultures all right guys um that was it thank you so much um for watching thank you for tuning in thank you for hanging out I hope you learned something this was a lot of fun uh I appreciate y'all go out and animate even if it's not in tune boom go draw something today um and yeah thanks again uh everyone who checked out my patreon and watched and um spread the word I really appreciate it um appreciate you guys and

Channel: Jesse J. Jones

Views: 17,940

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: Cl1LcET86DY

Length: 250min 25sec (15025 seconds)

Published: Sat May 13 2023