How to keep your 2D Animation Consistent and Solid

are you wondering about how you can keep your character animation drawings consistent and solved throughout the shot what if I told you it's not just about talent but it's also about some methods and techniques that you can use too and that can hopefully make the process easier for you and yes these are techniques used by professionals to [Music] [Music] hey guys it's city cupen TOA and today I'd like to talk about keeping your animation solid and consistent throughout and in this video I'm really just gonna be talking about 2d animation this is a topic that's been heavily requested and these are tips and techniques that are derived from actual traditional animation practices and how you can transition those techniques into the digital workspace but before I get into technique in methodology I have three top advice I'd like to share before getting into solid and consistent drawing number one is to learn how to break down complex shapes into simple primitives such as cubes and spheres having the solid foundation is important before you add any accessories that add more detail to the design so once you have your solid primitives you can just add those on top of your solid primitives later on on a second pass for example this is because an animation you're going to be doing a lot of drawings of that character and you have to learn how to break down that character into simpler shapes number two is to think about how solid objects work in spatial depth so when an object rotates for example there are some spacing rules that you have to think about to maintain its solid form spacing can help describe things such as slow in and slow out how fast an object accelerates how fast an object decelerates and whether there's constant speed or not spacing is one of the most important ingredients when it comes to having smooth animation and even choppy animation can read off as smooth if they're spaced really well but how does this relate to solid drawing well imagine having a character's head rotate around just right in front of you and let's say this character has a big nose or big snout if we were to switch to a top-down point of view then that character's head would rotate as if it was looking like a clock now if we were to switch to our normal view and track the nose for example while tracking the clock view you'll notice the nose kind of has a slope and in slowed out from our point of view but in the clock view it's a constant ongoing speed another thing I'd like to bring up is how the 3/4 view has its nose somewhat similar to the side view this is because the protruding part of the object covers a lot of spatial information especially that protruding part going closer to the sides of our point of view if we were just to in between a front view and a side view without thinking of the spatial information things like the nose or snout shrinking will happen so really think about seeing your objects in different perspectives another thing that I forgot to bring up is to really utilize your arcs this is another thing that a lot of beginner animators miss out on and if you don't pay attention to your arts especially if you have something rotating and if you just have point A to point B just moving straight without paying attention to the arcs things will shrink like I showed in this demo the last tip I have is just to work on your salt drawing skills so keep drawing keep practicing your draftsmanship practice drawing form and practice staying consistent with that form and really the only way you to get better at this is to keep doing it and to keep practicing now let's talk about techniques and how to keep your animations solid and consistent so method and technique number one the shift in trace also known as the placing trace this is a traditional animation technique it's where an animator takes a drawing off their animation peg shuffles it and manipulates it so it matches the angle of the drawing you want to add more consistency this is also to make an animators job easier to make an in-between of a head-turning even though the head is at different places of the paper you can still keep the design to proportions much more consistent when you're just focused on in-betweening the head at a fixed position so while flipping back and forth is great for feeling out the movement in the drawing for consistency wise there are techniques that can make things easier so because I don't have an animation desk or a light table with me right now I'll show this technique with Photoshop a software that's definitely not recommended for animation now because I don't have a set up an animation desk or light table I'm going to have to show this example digitally and how traditional animators utilize to shift and trace so this is my first drawing so imagine this whole thing is a paper this is drawing a the characters about to swing a crow and then drawing beef the character already swings to crowbar and right now I'm just going to quickly tie down drawing a so I have a more solid drawing here's my tie down for pose a or drawing a even though it's still sort of rough and loose I can still define and read what my shapes are and the form behind the character and now I want to apply the same thing with drawing B Jeremih tie down and drawing being you know super rough and how do I keep this consistent with drawing a and the way place and trace or shift and trace works is that you take a drawing off the animation peg and you align it to your next drawing that you want to make it more solid so before I even apply placing trace I want to just make a placeholder for how I want to align my drawings it's still very loose it's still very rough and what you want to practice doing is try and make your the join that you want to solidify try and flip between your drawings back and forth this is why I encourage flipping is so that you can feel it out and really really try to feel it out and you can do this on the same rough drawing but with digital what's great about that is you can make a new layer and just draw on top of your rough and that's the beauty of digital digital medium and traditional animation some animators animate in red color race normally it looks more you know like when you're actually working with it but when you shoot it for a pencil test it's just as dark as pencil lines and usually for a first pass traditional animators use cholerae so it they can still animate rough and then draw their tie down on the same drawing but with digital you know you can you can have lay more layers on top of layers to do that so notice how I'm just roughly defining this is where I think the head will go this is how I think the shapes will look like just a rough and okay maybe maybe that's enough for now and maybe I can just use that my my place hold it so now I'm going to utilize the placement race and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take drawing a outs off its pegs and I'm going to turn a light table or turn the opacity down take it you know take drawing a off the pegs and align it to the drawing I want to tie down so you know rotate your paper or rotate your your drawing and then just try and make it fit the angle of your next drawing and I'm just gonna hide my rough because I'm just gonna focus on the head for this case and now that I'm seeing the head now and now I have a placeholder for my character it's like okay I can see the glasses the glasses are shaped like that and it's instead of just like trying to eyeball it all the way now the the drawing is much closer to what I have and I can start defining okay then there's I can define where the side of the head and I'm gonna make sure okay the hairline is here and I'm gonna keep it consistent to that the mustache notice I'm thinking okay there's more information on the top of the head so this is gonna be bigger and this is gonna be smaller because the chin is actually going away from us so that's gonna help us a lot but because I have my drawing a as a guide I can actually use that as a placeholder and how I want to draw up my shapes and really trying to find your shapes and just seeing it okay I'm just eyeballing the where the eyebrows are and these drawings can always be fixed later on I think because there's more information the head maybe the head the hairline goes a bit and there's more information on his hair right all right so now I can take my drawing a off so if I were to restock all my drawings back to where they should be drawing a drawing be drawing a drawing be and now I have something to work with for the solid drawing and from here I can I can just finish the shapes I feel like the body isn't as important for me more than the head but if you want to keep the body consistent with the proportions and the design then you can use any can adjust your your drawing a you can you can take it off the pegs again and angle it to your torso and you know and now I realize oh actually it's much bigger than what I initially planned and then I can go back and really really define the shape and I'm just gonna rough it out quickly you can even just like use to play some trace is just to make a rough placeholder and how you guys can use it to be and how you guys can use it to make more consistent looking drawings for your animation how to keep proportions struck throughout your drawings so here's my tie down of drawing a and my tie down of join B I made a breakdown for both of these drawings but just this drawing over here here's him about to swing he swings and he's finished swinging and now I want to make my breakdown as consistent as anna solid as drawing a and drawing B now there are two options that I could do or talk about from here I could try and angle my two drawings from here and here and try and make it match the angle here or I can tell myself you know what I'm just going to act the head as if it was just inbetweening between the two drawings normally so I'm gonna do the first example first so what I can do and I'm just gonna grab my my first drawing over here so this is drawing a and I can just like move that over here you know adjust the opacity then I can grab my drawing B and I'm just gonna adjust it so I can just make sure it matches the middle try and try and keep everything as a midpoint so this is just one example on how you can do it from here and honestly I'll just hide my rough drawing and I'm just gonna make a new drawing using these these two drawings only these two drawings so my in between I'm just gonna treat the head as normal in between so now I'm just looking at both of the heads for these and now I'm using placing trays to define what the head drive will look like using these two as references what I did is that I'm inbetweening normally how I usually do but what I did with placing trace is that I made it easier for myself instead of trying to eyeball between two big major poses I wanted to hyper focus on just the head and make sure that everything is as close as possible for me to in between and I can always snap back my drawings back into place or you can make a duplicate of that that drawing and see notice how I'm using my two drawing so I can see oh that's the first that's the notice from the first drawing a and that's knows from drawing B and I'm just making rough in-betweens from here and just trying to get the importance from there and even though the spacing is a bit big it's at least easier for me to track it compared to trying to track two drawings that are at opposite ends of the page and I can always fix it later on when I do flip it and you know when I flip it I can always see oh there are some issues here and there but yeah with the placement trace it just makes things a bit more easier because let's say okay I'm gonna I'm gonna save it from there and let's say I put back my drawings back into that place and if I flip back and forth the heads are a bit more consistent and I didn't really have to keep flipping back and forth between this and that I'm sorry between this and this so I can get this drawing what I did was just move the head from here and here and just move it in the center so I can use that as a reference for here so that's one way of doing the in-between for place and trace and I'll show you another way that doing this with the same drawings but what if I just want to keep the angle of my breakdown drawing rather than just a direct in-between well what you can do is you can grab your first drawing so drawing amc's and drawing a as an example and what you can do is try and make it match the angle of your breakdown or in between so I'm gonna rotate it I'm gonna just try and make sure it fits that I'm not gonna try and change the size or anything like that because I think that will that will make it even more troublesome and then I can grab my second drawing and also rotate the angles so it fits the angle of that and at the same time when your interesting angles it makes things so much easier for the in between work so let's say you know I'll just hide my rough drawing for now and I just want to focus on the head so I'm just gonna turn down the opacity for both of these drawings and adjust it so I can see them better and then I can make an in-between from here using the angle that I had in my rough and notice how it's so much easier for me because I've made the heads kind of merge into one I tried my best to make it merge into one instead of the first example where I just moved it simply I actually rotated two drawings for this case kind of like I did for the very first example with placing trace where I did have to rotate the head and notice how just by rotating the head it's again like I'm having a much lighter and easier time just trying to in between things I don't have to keep flipping back and forth I can just eyeball it and it can still look closer like everything will be in proportion when I put all these drawings back into where they should be and you know keep in mind of form and shape things that are protruding like noses or things that are at the edge of a shape will have a lot more spacing like what I mean is the nose because the nose is much more protruded it's gonna it's gonna be a bit more out it's gonna favor more of the last drawing where it's more sideways and then I can put my drawings back where they belong and I'm gonna do that and if I flip back and forth at least I have something to work with and I can go back and go okay you know I can see oh okay by flipping back in fourth there we go so no matter what you might also want to consider flipping back and forth but at least it's consistent with the proportions and everything else and where everything should be so then I can grab my my rough juggles like if I wanted to the placement race with the body again then I can grab my last drawing turn down opacity rotated so it fits the the angle of my breakdown same with my first drawing my first key pose is I can angle it and turn down the opacity and make sure it fits that angle and now I have something to work with in terms of wanting to retain the the proportions so I can say okay I can still sort of see the rough and I can see the the body is around here and that's where it should stop and I can just turn off or put back the drawings back where they belong and now I have something that's a bit more proportionally consistent to my next drawings so that's an example of placing trace now whatever I did here in Photoshop can be achieved in any other software what I did was just treated the whole process as if it was like on paper where I just rotated drawings here and there but other hand-drawn animation softwares have an approach and how you can achieve the whole shift and trace technique TV paint has a really great way of approaching the shift in place technique the way they implemented dis technique and TV paint is that you can actually adjust and manipulate your onion skins or light table so by using a light table option you can actually grab the onion skin drawings of your previous and next frames and rotate them and manipulate them however you want the great thing about this is that it doesn't actually affect the finished drawing or the frames itself and what's great is that it's still very easy to flip between your drawings if just relying on the light table or onion skinning gets a little bit too tricky what's great about the TV paint placement trace option is that not only can you rotate move around your onion skin drawings but you can also change the size so for example a character's walking towards us from the background to the foreground it's easier to keep track of the faces if you're just focusing on manipulating those onion skin drunks on the face to match the size of the proportion of the character depending on where that character is let's look at teen boom harmony they have their own way of approaching shift and trace - to me it's a little more tricky than TV paint simpler approach but I feel like - boom really thought more about the animator and how to me it does feel a bit more traditional - boom has another window or tab called drawings and think of it as a virtual desk or another desk in your room where you can just place and send your drawings - and Toon Boom you can send your animation drawings to the drawing tab or this virtual desk and you can edit the drawing without affecting the timeline at all but what's great about this tab is that it does allow for ships and trace techniques where you can actually edit the orientation of the drawing whether it's rotation or transformation and adjust it to your drawing that you want to make consistent what's great about this option is that you can choose which drawings you want to place and trace so if you have a dry at the end of the animation but you have a drawing that you want to use as reference at somewhere in the middle of the animation then you can send that drawing specifically to this window and make a new drawing in the same window and then place that new drawing into your actual animation timeline now when I use Adobe animate or flash the thing with flash is that it wasn't really made with the traditional animator in mind it's made for people who are into the multimedia scene or into symbol based animation meaning that there's a library you can reuse of mouth shapes head shapes poses etc I feel like Adobe animate or Flash's library system is great because it's simple and easy to understand and he can read wrongs that you've made in the past again and again without having to do any weird complex stuff like some programs but the way I do shift and trace in flash is that I turn drawings that I want to use as my replace holders as symbols and then with symbols you can adjust the opacity the color how bright it is and you can lay them on in different layers in your animation and in using those layers I would adjust my drawing to match the angle of the actual characters animation and on top of the character animation I'll make my in between using my laid out drawings as reference for the in-between so flash or Adobe animate is probably the closest thing and how I did it in Adobe Photoshop if you're using a different animation software than these three you may want to look into how your animation software does place and trace or improvise it like I would do it in Photoshop make duplicates of those drawings in a different layer and adjust the opacity and orientation yourself so what other tips do I have and trying to keep your drawings more consistent and solid besides shift and trace which was probably the biggest one that I want to talk about for this video the second biggest one that I can think about is to utilize character layout drawings it can be a single joint it could be a few drawings or it could be a drawing with multiple drawings of the character at different sections of the shot so if I was animating a character running up the stairs I would make several drawings of the character on top of the stairs a drawing of the character at the bottom of the stairs and a drawing of the character on the middle of the stairs I would probably draw it in the same frame I would use a line where I would connect the head to the head of the other pose the torso to the next torso of the next pose it's just so that I can help keep my character in track when I do animate on top of this placeholder drawing this technique is useful especially for rough animation when you animate rough it's bound to happen that things are going to shrink and grow throughout the animation but with a placeholder it will help you keep in track in where to place your poses for your actual animation all the animation demos that I show in my animation course always utilizes this layout and as a discipline that you guys might want to start getting into so before you even start animating your animation shot make a few layout drawings that describe the size the proportion and the position of the character in the scene that way it will help you be more consistent with your animation on the first pass the third method that I can only think about right now just for the sake of keeping consistent with your animation shot is to flip like a madman if you've been following my work and how I approach teaching animation I always talk about flipping between your drawings and I would encourage you guys just to flip a lot more than to rely on your onion skin I'm not saying you should stop using the onion skin I'm saying that you should only depend on it flipping allows you to feel the movement of the drawing while at the same time feel how drawings relate to each other depending on where they are in the animation timeline flipping will actually help you see and feel the movement of objects that won't really be felt or seen when you're just trying to draw in between lines between two drawings there's a method that I love to use when I flip between my drawings called dot-to-dot or the point-to-point method where when I draw in betweens I would just use dots to indicate where the tip or an accent of a part of the character is and then just draw the dots to layout the art and movement and basically draw my lines connecting to those dots this is so that I keep track of those accents if you guys want to see me utilizes technique even more check out my in-betweening full demo that I have up on YouTube and it's also included in my teeny animation course anyways those are the top tips methods and advice that I can talk about when it comes to keeping your drawings consistent but in the end it's also the practice of learning how to draw better improving your draftsmanship and breaking things down into much more simpler shapes and forms anyways thank you guys so much for watching this video and I hope you guys learned a lot from it interested in learning hand-drawn animation or learning how to finish an animated shot from beginning to end have a look at the store where you'll find the complete introduction to 2d animation video course tutorials and other resources learn classical animation approaches drawing lectures techniques and other process videos visit the store through the link in the description below

Channel: Toniko Pantoja

Views: 213,013

Keywords: Toniko Pantoja, Youtube, Animation, Tutorial, Advice, Lesson, Vlog, Adobe, Photoshop, Animate, Flash, After Effetcts, Premiere, Video, Film, Drawing, Tips, Gestures, consistent, solid, form

Id: vsZCr0xcke0

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020