Make 2D animations for FREE with OpenToonz - Full beginners guide

hello friends do you want to animate for free well with open tunes 1.6 now out you can and today i'll animate this classic ball bounce animation to show you how to get started with a quick run through of all the essentials you'll need to start from creating your projects and starting drawing using the onion skin working with the timeline and then rendering to a final video file to share with your friends and stay tuned to the end for details of my next stage introduction video where i'll show you more animation techniques and open tunes tips let's get started after installing open tunes on first running this is what you'll see the programs in the background with a pop-up window at the front here to create your project and the project is just a collection of all the files that make up your animation so click new project button and then choose the folder we want to create your project i showed you how you can set up your documents folder in here in last week's video so give your project a name and then click ok and that creates your project folder named as you just entered in the projects folder in your opentune stuff if i go inside there you'll see the folders created as part of your project and it's important to know where this folder is so that you can find your rendered animation so you can share your project with other people and also so you can comfortably share your assets between projects but that parts for another day so before you start drawing you need a scene within this project and you can have a number of scenes in a single project but i'd say it's best to start with one scene per project in the beginning so in the same dialogue in the cname section type in a name for your scene change the output resolution if you don't want hd for the output but standard hd is fine for now and change the frame rate from 24 if you don't want 24 fps you most likely will but we'll get into that a little bit later on and then click create scene and now we're ready to draw and for that you can just choose the brush tool at the top of the toolbar here and then you'll start drawing and your drawing will be represented in the timeline in frame 1 by this green colored square and notice this is called drawing level a drawing number one and you see all of your drawings for drawing level a in the level strip at the top right here and for most users drawing in your empty scene is a good way to start an animation but it's worth knowing that there's three types of drawing levels and once you start using them you should start creating drawing levels before you start drawing by clicking one of these three buttons here and once you've got a drawing level created you can also click the raster tab up here and choose one of the raster brushes to have a different brush to draw with and personally i like sketching with this sketch brush at the top of the list here so if you make a mistake you can just click on the eraser button here and check that the type is set to normal and the mode is set to lines and that'll erase the lines that you've drawn with the brush tool but not any of your coloured fills we'll look at using colours next time and there are all the modes and settings on this options bar that i won't cover today but you can read about them in the online docs from the help menu or by pressing f1 so let's just increase the size of the eraser and then erase this line i've already drawn and using the brush tool let's draw our first circle then to create the animation you need to have a number of drawings slightly different from each other to create the illusion of movement so you just click into frame two on your timeline in the same layer or column as it's called in open tunes and then draw your next image and this will create drawing number two in drawing level a like that but it can be tricky to know where to draw the next drawing without seeing the previous one so you can turn on the onion skin feature and i'll cover that in more detail in a future video but for now just hover over the area to the left of the current frame and you'll see these two dots appear click the lower dot and then you'll see the previous drawing appear above it in red and by clicking the lower dot it means that as you move to a different frame you'll be able to see the previous drawing whichever frame you're on so again i'll use the erase tool to raise the line i've just drawn and back to the brush tool let's draw the second position for this circle so then you can just move to the next frame and add a new drawing each time but instead of clicking on the timeline you can just press the right arrow key on your keyboard to move between frames which can make this process much simpler so simply draw the next circle press right and then draw the next one press right and so on and to look through your animation you can drag the slider below the bar here to go through each frame or you can hit play to see your animation playing at full speed so let's drag this back to frame number one and then hit play or you can press the loop play button to the right here to see your animation playing continuously and do notice the small white triangles on the top of the timeline here these specify which frames are played when you click play so if they're not right just drag them to where you want to play between and this is clearly playing too fast there's two main things you can do about that first you can slow down playback by changing the playback speed that's this fps setting here and you might remember that you set this to 24fps when you first created your scene so you can just drag the bar or click these buttons to choose a more appropriate speed and then click play and you can adjust it while the animation is playing to find the best speed for your particular animation but this is only the playback speed when viewing your animation which is still really useful to adjust so you can look for any problems while animating but if you want to make this speed the actual speed for your animation change it in the dialog from the egg sheet menu scene settings and then type the new number in here but we'll leave that on 24 for now so i can show you the second way to fix the playback speed so let's bring this back up to 24 and the second way to fix the playback speed is to show each drawing for more frames and there's lots of ways you can do that but let me show you two of the easiest ways first you can select on a single drawing and then you see this little handle appear to the right and just click and drag that out to show the same drawing for more frames and this is tedious to do for lots of drawings so you can also select a number of drawings on the timeline and choose how many frames to show each of them for so let's bring these back down to show for one again and then click and drag over all of these drawings and each drawing is currently shown here for one frame and if i press the button above the toolbar here that says twos each drawing will be shown for two frames and then select those drawings and i can choose to show them for three drawings and you can change them to a higher frame rate elsewhere but that's for another time so now if i click and drag this white end play marker to the end of the drawings here and then press loop play you'll now see the animation playing much slower so being on threes is far too slow at 24 frames per second so let's highlight the drawings again click twos move the play marker back to frame 14 here and hit loop play again and that's a much better pace but each drawing being shown for two frames at 24 fps so before we go any further here's an important thing about the timeline and your drawings by dragging the slider at the bottom of the timeline you can zoom in and out on the timeline to show more frames or fewer frames but when you can see the drawing numbers on the timeline notice these are also shown in what's called the level strip on the right hand side and that shows all of the drawings made for this level level a which at a minute shows exactly the same number of drawings seven but it does mean that if you delete a drawing from the timeline by right clicking and choosing delete or you can just select it and press the delete key but you'll notice the drawing drawing number two that i've just deleted is still shown in the level strip it hasn't actually been deleted it's just the exposure of that drawing that's been removed from the timeline and if you want it back you can select it in the level strip and then click and drag it back onto the timeline and again we can extend that out for two frames and it's moved all the rest of the frames along so now i can click the top bar the darker area above those frames and that'll select all of those and allow me to move them back to join the original so think of each drawing level as a collection of drawings that you've created and exposed on the timeline at the same time and that's really important to understand so that you don't think you've accidentally deleted your drawings when they are still available in the level strip so i'll just finish off this animation by creating a loop and i could draw the ball bouncing back up but instead i'm going to repeat these same drawings to show you how to work with the timeline in open tunes and the simplest way is to use this swing button here on the toolbar and there are other buttons on the toolbar that you'll want to investigate but i'll leave that up to you but first let me show you how you could use copy and paste so to make this easier let me select all of the drawings and put them back down onto ones so there's only one copy of each drawing in the timeline so then i'll select drawing number six by clicking on it i'll press ctrl c i'll clicking the empty frame frame eight and press ctrl v and i can do that now with each drawing so drawing number five i can select it press ctrl c move into the next blank frame and press ctrl v and again if you paste it in the wrong place you can just select the dark bar at the top of the drawing here and move it to the right place on the timeline but copying and pasting each individual drawing is pretty slow so if i click and drag over those last two drawings and press delete again that removes the exposure of them on the timeline it doesn't delete the drawings i can now click and drag over all of the drawings apart from the first one and press the swing button and this copies all the selected drawing and paste a copy of them in reverse on the timeline so the drawings are shown from 1 through to 7 and then from seven back down to number two ready for the cycle to repeat back onto drawing one so it's important to not have an extra copy of drawing one otherwise when the animation plays drawing one could be shown twice first on frame 1 and then on frame 13 so let me click and drag the end play marker to finish on frame 12 which is drawing number two and then if i press loop play we'll see that animation of the ball bouncing but too fast again because it's been shown on ones so then if we select all of the drawings and then click the two's button now all of those drawings will be showing for two frames so the animation will play slower i'll move the play marker to the end of the drawings which is frame 24 i'll hit save all from the menu there and that saves all of the drawings in your scene and please do use save all to save your your scenes and your drawings don't choose any of the other save options as that could save just one part of the animation so save all to make sure everything is saved and then hit loop play and that's now a very simple very basic ball bounce animation and i won't worry too much about neatness or consistent consistency too much today this is just the pencil test but let me show you just one last trick before we render out this animation and that's if you find a drawing in a frame that isn't quite in the right place you can move the lines using the selection tool at the top of the toolbar here so if i click on one of the drawings and i choose the onion skin for the previous drawing and i could choose either frame one or two here it's still the same drawing but i like to choose the first instance of the drawing and then click on frame five which is the following drawing drawing number three and now you can see a red circle shown in the previous drawing and the green line showing the following drawing so if i wanted to move the pencil line on drawing number two narrow to the start to create more of an ease in at the top of the bounce with the selection tool selected i will change the type to rectangular and i can draw a rectangle around that circle and i can just click and drag anywhere in that rectangle and then just move the drawing narrow to the previous drawing you can also resize the drawings so here i need to make the drawing slightly smaller so i can use the handles at the side and move it left and right to position it better so let me hit loop play and now there's more of an ease in at the top of that bounce so this is the final pencil test and i could do more with it making it neater or making the sizes more consistent but that's not for today's lesson so i think i've given you enough to get you started sketching and beginning your animation with open tunes but once you've finished your animation you'll want to share it with your friends and if you haven't already you can also join my discord server and share your animation with the open tunes community you'll find a link to that down in the description and there you'll also find more help with open tunes and you can also ask for advice about your drawings your animation or about the program so to render your animation go to the render menu and then choose output settings and there's lots of settings here that you can change but the main ones that you need are to set the frame numbers for your animation so from frame 1 to 24 as we've got here select the folder where you want your rendered animation to be generated in and this defaults to plus outputs and the plus means it'll be in your projects folder that we looked at earlier so if i go to that and it's this outputs folder here and then give your file a name if it's different to your scene name so let's just change that choose the output type you can either choose a video format or an image format if you want an image file for each frame which can often be quite useful and if you follow my ffmpeg video which i'll link to down in the description you can add more file formats including mp4 and gif formats which are the two main file types that i render to so please do take a look at that and then once you're ready just click render and let's take a look at that in the explorer so let's just double click the mp4 file i've just generated and we see the ball bounce occur for one repetition it only plays from frames 1 to 24 but if you render out to the gif format it'll render on a loop and play continuously but one thing to remember about a gif animation is the background is transparent until you either add a background into your animation or if you go to the egg sheets menu and choose scene settings you'll notice here the background color has got this checkerboard pattern and that means it'll render as transparent in file formats where it can do so so for gif animations or png images and all you need to do is to increase the alpha slider and now you'll have a white background to your animation and you can change the other sliders to create a different background color if you prefer but for now let's stick with having a white background so then with gif chosen let's just choose render and that renders pretty quickly for 24 frames here and then back to explorer let's open the gif animation and now we see the bouncing ball repeated continuously as the gif animation so that's how i created this short pencil test animation and i hope you found this video useful if so please give it a thumbs up it really helps the channel so that's the basics with animating with open tunes but there's so much more to learn and this video here will show you all the essential tips to take you to the next level with open tunes so do check that out and i'll see you next time for more animation with open tunes and that's at guaranty

Channel: Darren T

Views: 72,899

Keywords: animation, opentoonz, 2d animation, animate for free, opentoonz 1.6 beginners guide

Id: XdlqwRN9ecM

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022