Learn Procreate Dreams! (Beginner Friendly Animation Class)

today I'm going to show you everything you need to know to start making animations in procreate dreams we're going to cover the basics and we're also going to cover some of the incredible Advanced features that will push your animations to the next level it doesn't matter if you're a complete beginner or a season professional I really think you can get something out of this class I've been lucky enough to be working with the awesome team at procreate for the last 8 months I'm really excited to share the tips and tricks I learned along the way I've put together a guide PDF and all my working files for free in the link below so if you don't feel confident drawing character or your own backgrounds you can use my files and follow along let's jump in okay I've got my iPad here I'll use procreate dreams and this is our theater this is where all of our animations live I'll click this plus button up here and this will give us a few templates to open I'm going to use WID screen I'll set the resolution here by pressing the 4K and then in the top button here I'll set our frame rate to 12 frames per second and I'll set the duration to 5 Seconds now I'll press draw and we've got our stage at the top and our timeline at the bottom I'll make sure I've selected the brush I'm using the 6B pencil and we can set our color here I've just set mine to Black and I'll make my first drawing I'll just draw a line like this but I'm feeling a little bit cramped I can zoom in like this or if I want to get rid of this timeline so I don't feel so cramped I can just grab it at the top and just drag it down now we're in what's called flip book mode I'm not quite happy with this first line so I'll use two fingers tap to undo and now I'll make another pass at it I'm going to draw an I so I'll start with the Top Line bottom line and I'll draw a little pupil this is our first frame of Animation now if I want to make our second frame I can tap on the flip book and say plus now I can draw my second frame but I can't see my previous frame so to help me out here I can use what's called onion skinning so onion skinning we go to the corner here this little timer I'll click on this and I'll say show onion skin now I can draw my second frame so I'll zoom in with my two fingers just the normal iPad pinch zoom and I'll draw a frame with the eye slightly more closed so what I'm going to do is animate a blink this eye will blink the top eyelid moves a lot more than the bottom eyelid add another frame just using that little plus button here now it's accelerating so it's moving a little bit faster in this third frame now I'll draw a closed frame and then I'll open up the eye again now because I want this to loop I need to see the the very last frame so I can change my on skin settings here and increase the number of frames before so I can see my first frame now I'll just softly move back into that first frame okay zoom out now I'll move out of flipbook mode by just dragging the top and smashing it into the bottom and I can move around our timeline with two fingers and you can see here on our timeline we've got one drawing for each of the drawings we had set out on on our timeline so if I want to play I can press this play icon here now we've got a nice little blink well if you want a slightly cleaner version of the play mode you can use four fingers tap on the screen and that'll enter preview mode if you use one finger it'll bring up the play button and I press play at the bottom I can use four fingers to exit again and I think that's looking pretty cool but before we get any further I just want to highlight one idea here this area here is your main toolbar and at the moment we have this squiggly line highlighted in pink that means we're in draw mode procreate dreams acts quite differently depending on what mode you're in so if I click out of draw mode we lose our stage and we won't be able to enter flipbook mode anymore there's lots of other things that we could be doing here and I'll dig into those later and if you have a feel like the app isn't behaving the way you want it to it could be because you've accidentally pressed one of these buttons here so just check that this icon here is highlighted and you should be okay if you ever want to head back to the theater to see your your other animations just use this button here okay so the first change I might want to make to this is transforming one of these frames I think that this blink frame here is maybe a little bit too high so if I show my onion skin I think that it could push down a little bit the way we do that is exiting drawing mode I'll tap on another frame and come back to this one and now we can see we've got a bounding box around our drawing I can just drag the drawing down where I want it you you can also scale it and if you want to rotate it you can press on one of the corners and then it makes a little tiny Arc icon here and then you can rotate it like this but I like it right here and if I play it back I think that's feeling better the next change I want to make is I want to change the timing of this so at the moment it blinks over and over and over again and that's not something a real person would do I want to have it hold open and then blink so the easiest way in this context to do it would be to l Hold on our content our first frame and say copy and then move to the end and say paste and just L hold and just drag this out and I can navigate with my fingers and I want it to go to 1 second one extra gesture you can use in the timeline at the moment is three fingers if you use three fingers to drag you'll squeeze the timeline like this and if you go up and down it'll make it taller and smaller this is really useful and it's a new gesture for procreate dreams okay so I think this animation is looking pretty cool we're going to do loads more stuff with this in a second but first I want to show you how to export just in case you're ready to export your own video so I'll click on dreams 1 which is the name of our file at the moment and that'll enter into the properties menu and I'll press on share video and say best quality now if I press save video it'll save it to our camera roll or we can export it to apps here so I'll say save video and I'll say okay now we have our first animation it's ready to go okay now we have an eye blinking I think it would be cool to use it on a character so to do that I'm going to start by making this a little bit easier to deal with by combining all of these drawings into a group to do that I'll enter edit mode which is this little icon here and that will give me the option to draw a line over all of our drawings you can't do this with your finger you have to use the apple pencil to do this and then L hold and say group now all of these drawings live in this little tiny box they're all in one track and we can press this button here and we can see that they're all in this group so what this means is if I exit edit mode and now I'm not in drawing mode either I'll get a bounding box around the whole group which means I can scale it up I can move it and one thing I've noticed with groups is that they often create the Anchor Point which is the point in which it rotates and scales around at a slightly Strange point sometimes it's over off the screen and sometimes it's in the middle of the drawing so what I'm going to do is say in this corner icon here I'm say edit anchor and this will show us the Crosshair where our anchor point is we can move it around with our finger and I'm going to put it right in the middle of the eye now I'll go to the corner of the screen and press done and now when we scale it scales around that ankle so now we've got our eye it blinks just like it did before but most characters have two eyes so I'm going to I don't need to animate two eyes I can just duplicate this so I'll move this over here long hold on our group and you would think that you'd say duplicate but that actually duplicates the group on the same layer or the same track of the timeline so that just makes it Loop twice I'll undo that l Hold on the group and say track options so tracks are basically layers on the timeline so I want to duplicate this entire track so I'll say track options duplicate now I've got two tracks two eyes and I'll say flip horizontal and I'll move it over here and now I've got two eyes blinking at me okay so we have our two eyes here I think it's time to draw a character there's a couple of ways we could do this firstly we could just draw it straight into dreams and that's really easy I'll say create new content track uh I'll enter draw mode I'll select a dark line and I'll just drag this down so we're in flipbook mode which will make it easier then I'll just draw a really basic character maybe draw some ears little mouth some hair um and then if we want to fill in this character just select a skin color and drag the skin color onto the character the one thing to look out for though is if you have drawn out outside of the canvas you just need to fill in the areas outside the canvas separately then exit flipbook mode just make sure we're at the same length as our character animation by extending this drawing out and then drag it below our character so we can see the eyes if you ever want to change the opacity of a drawing while you're making it there's a couple of ways to do it firstly we can tap on the playhead here and say filter opacity and then adjust the opacity like this the slightly unusual element of this is that this is a a key framable element so if I go to another frame change the opacity now it'll change the opacity over time which is very useful but maybe not what you want all the time the other way to do it is to go into the layer setting just like in procreate click on the n and change the opacity slider here so that's you know that's this is a fun character but I think we can get a little bit more fancy um and to do that I'm going to take a character that I've already designed from procreate so I'll enter procreate from my doc and I'll just drag my procreate file over into our dreams file says importing and now we've imported this as one big object so I can move it around where I want it and I've got these all set up on separate layers and you can download this file yourself if you want to use my character it's in the link below I'll just drag it below my eyes but I want to turn off the eyes there's a couple of ways we can do that if I enter drawing mode we get our layers option up here and these are all of our procreate layers or if we want to animate them separately we can long hold on the drawing and say convert layers to tracks and that will break up our procreate file into a dreams file with lots of tracks so now I can just turn off my eyes on that track actually I'll just delete them entirely and now I'll Transform our whole character so there it's about the same size as their eyes and one last step I'll do is I'll create a new track and I'll color in behind the eyes now so to select this white color I can just long hold with my finger and that will select whatever color I'm on so that's skin color or I can go to the white color I'll to flipbook mode again just to give myself some more screen space and I'll just go through frame by frame just like we did with the animation and fill in behind the eyes this obviously isn't an essential step it's just something that I think works better with this design and the one last step I'll do is just make sure that our character at the bottom is the same length as the rest of our animation so we could drag the end of it or we can click on the playhead clappy here and say edit split and then l Hold say delete content now the character is the same length on the timeline as our eye animation lastly just group all of this together okay now we have our character blinking it's looking pretty cool and if you've made it this far you pretty much have all the information you need to make any 2D animation you want but what I want to do is make this shot feel more cinematic and I'm going to use a style of Animation that doesn't require you to redraw every frame it's much faster and it really can take your animation to the next level we're going to use animated key frames and effects now this is an element of procreate dreams where it really excels and I'm quite frankly blown away that the team was able to put so much power into an app like this and still have it flow as smoothly as it does so let's jump into the key framing animation one second and I want this camera move to last between 3 and 4 seconds so I'll just duplicate this so that our Loop happens a few times now I'll quickly group all this together and now we're ready to set our first key frame to set our first key frame make sure our group is selected and then tap on The Clapper and then say move move and scale so I'm going to set the key frame maybe about this big now I'll go to my the end of my animation tap on The Clapper say move and scale again and I'm just going to scale it down so now when I press play we've got this motion that makes it feel like we're moving away from the character we speed up and slow down and we can also see below our track we've got two key frames which are scale and move key frame so so our next step is to add a background I'll go to the track below and I could draw something in here so and this is maybe how you want to do it you could just draw in some hills some trees but I'm going to take a painting I've already done in procreate so I'll open procreate again from our doc open my background painting and this is a class that will be coming up soon and I'm going to take this background and just drag it into our document I'll quickly make sure it's the same length exit drawing mode and I'll just position it where I want to go okay so now we have our background and I press play but the background's not moving and for the camera move to work we really need to make the C the background move as well so in this case I'll go to the start I just need to move the Anchor Point to make sure it's near the center of the face so it feels like it's the same camera as our character I'll say move move in scale and the key with a camera move like this is that the background needs to shrink less than the character so it feels further away and if our goal is to make this feel cinematic I don't think we should have this camera move speed up and slow down I think it should be one regular speed so we'll go to our our key frame below the track long hold on it say expand transformation and say set using linear and I'm going to do this for each of the keys now a long hold on top and say flaps transform and if I enter preview mode we can see our anim so our next few steps are really interesting we're going to add some animated background elements and we're not going to have to redraw these every time we're going to use a special warping key frame technique to do that we'll also be adding these magical sparkly effects and the cool thing is that you actually have all of the skills you need to make these already so maybe have that in the back of your mind as you watch me work and see if you can figure out how to do that without my help but you you know I'll walk you through it anyway I know that I don't want to draw every frame of these reads as they animate so what I'm going to do is introduce you to a whole new way of animating this is called performance mode the way that you might see performance mode used normally is by animating movement across the screen so here we have a frog and a butterfly that I've animated it's quite similar to a project I did with procreate recently and if I select this mode here this little circle we'll get a ready recording button at the top and this means that we've entered performance mode so what I can do now is take my finger and move it around and dreams captures this motion of our finger and applies the animation to whatever we've selected we don't have to just use performance on move and scale we can use it on lots of different things so what I've actually done here is I've animated the belly of the Frog inflating using performance and this is actually what we're going to use in this animation here so what I'm going to do I'll I'll select draw mode and I'll draw a read I'll exit drawing mode and now I'll press on the play head see we've got options here I'm going to say w and this will create a lattice around the read that I've just drawn and of course I could move this around and animate this like this which is pretty cool but instead I'm going to make a more complicated animation by tracking my hand so I'll select performance mode and I'll select to this point here and use my finger to create a nice little wobble motion now obviously that's only animating one point on the lattice so I'll do that again for different points on the lattice and because these are all slightly offset they create quite an organic interesting motion now I'll just make sure our animation stops when our camera moves stops so I'll drag this back and I'll repeat this step a few times creating a new track for every piece of read that I want add ofate you can see here that I've got my several reads all animated now I'll group them all together and I'll animate them to be animated with the same camera move I'll say move move scale I'll make sure that our Anchor Point is about where our original Anchor Point was and then move move scale and scale them down one last final touch I might do is to make this feel even more cinematic I'm going to add a little bit of a blur to this so I'll select our group filter and then I'll say Gau and blur and I'm just going to turn this up to make it nice and blurry you obviously don't have to do this but I think for this shot it makes it have a little bit more atmosphere and then I will duplicate the track and flip it on the other side so we have two of them so the last thing that I want to add to this animation is some magic sparkly bits around the character and I think that'll just add a bit of interest to you know pretty static scene the good news is that you have all of the skills already to make this yourself but if you want to see what my animation looks like you can download the working files in the link below so if you go to your file it'll look like this but let's uh recreate it now so I'll make a new track and I'll make my first frame which is kind of a little star shape and I'll make my second frame I'll turn on onion skinning which is like a big star shape so this is kind of the maximum size the sparkle will be then I'll make a new frame and now we break apart the star into little sparkles and these Sparkles only move a little bit as they get smaller so they have a very soft easing in their motion and they go down to almost nothing now I'll fill in these I'll choose a yellow color go back to start and just drag and drop just need to make sure that I close all the gaps now use edit tool select all my things long hold and say group now I'll copy this group copy go back to my original drawings and paste and move it around the scene now I'll duplicate it move another one over here duplicate again just duplicate transform and retime these around the image to make it look interesting and now I've got some nice 2D animation over the top so we're really only just scratching the surface of what procreate dreams is capable of stay tuned to the channel for more classes in the fure future and if you want to practice your fundamentals of Animation check out the video I'm sharing on the screen here thanks so much for tuning in I've had a great time making this class and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Alex Grigg // Animation for Anyone

Views: 495,354

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Id: hzbmlyGDJO4

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023