Mastering OpenToonz: Discover the hidden potential of the selection tool vs the animate tool

ladies and gentlemen bright fans from around the world welcome to the electrified atmosphere of the open Tunes boxing arena tonight we have a Clash of Titans that will leave you on the edge of your seats in the Red Corner weighing in at about big we've got the undefeated pointy tool that you see in many image editing and animation programs the selection tools blue door now the same size is a tool that looks more anime here is the crowd of open Tunes it's the animates too for years these two tools be misunderstood misused and confused with each other so today we're going to step inside the squid Circle to settle this long-standing debate once and for all to discover which tool is the best for which task let's get ready to rumble round one so starting in the Red Corner with a selection tool choose it from the top here on the toolbar and then on the options toolbar choose how you're going to select an area because the selection tool can work on just a small part of your drawing so choosing the rectangular option select in the frame where your drawing is then draw a rectangle around duanco the dog and now I can use a selection exactly as you might expect so I can just click and drag to move it I can resize it by clicking and dragging on these Corner squares or on one of the squares on the edge or if I hold the shift key and drag on the corner the width and height stay the same ratio which is really handy and I can also rotate it by moving the cursor near to one of the corners and by default you rotate around the center of the image but if you don't want this in the center you can see this little marker and you can click and drag that to anywhere on the image and now we try to rotate it'll rotate around that point really handy however do be aware that once you click away the image is re-rendered onto the screen so if you rotate again it'll rotate from this position and then slowly after a number of changes you'll see the image degrading and there's a knockout trick that you may not have seen before in other software and that is if we highlight this if you hold the control key as you go to the side of the selection you can then cheer the image to move it up and down like this and if I undo that and towards the top you can Shear left and right and if you hold control near the corners you can Shear from the corners it's so useful to twist an image into perspective bam and you can also clip the image once it's highlighted use these buttons on the options Toolbar to flip horizontally or vertically [Music] or you can just change the size by typing directly into these boxes lots of ways to change the selection but this only works one image at a time so if I go to the second drawing you'll see that that isn't affected in any way and nor are any of the others not until you get to the repeater drawing number one here on frame seven not a bad opening Salvo from the selection tool so onto the blue corner and the animation tool how does that compare let's just change to one of the frames here on the animate tool column which is the dranko dog on the right hand side here and then select the animate tool from the very top of the toolbar and the first thing you'll see is that there's no way to choose how you select in fact with the animate tool you don't work with just parts for drawing as you do with the selection tool you work with all of it in fact it's not really the drawing that you're changing at all it's all of the drawings in the column that's this drawing in frame number three all of the following drawings and surprisingly all of the previous drawings in this column so you see that the first drop down contains the column name that we're affecting and the second drop down is the important one that you'll want to change and this lets you choose how you're going to change the drawings and notice in a second as soon as you do something you'll see a key image appear on this frame in the timeline so let's use position first and then we can just drag the drawing around to wherever we want it to go to I noticed the key appeared here on the timeline and if you change your mind about any of the animation tool changes that you make you can always just delete this key just select it and press the delete key and you'll notice that drunkard dog jumps back to his original location this also means that using the animate tool to move your drawings is non-destructive so you can always revert back to the original so next thing let's change the scale simply select scale and then click and drag from the center and you'll see the size change of dranko there or we can change the rotation so again click and drag to rotate in but notice that you rotate around this marker in the center of your canvas if you want to rotate around another area simply choose the center option click and drag that to where you want to rotate from and then when you choose rotate and click to rotate you'll rotate around that point and there's a non-destructive action you won't lose any Clarity when rotating as you do with the selection tool but often the easiest way to change your drawings is to use a different option the all option and this brings up a small pink widget here which matches the tool icon onto the canvas and with this you can drag the center point by clicking in the center of the widget and then you can just reposition by clicking anywhere on screen and then dragging drunk out anywhere with him or you can resize him using these scale options here just click and drag on those small handles to scale either both horizontally and vertically or to scale just horizontally or vertically or the right hand side you've got this skew option to skew him in one of the two different directions and for rotation you've got the option at the top here to click and rotate on that handle and again if you want to rotate around a different point just move the center point to where you want to rotate around and then that's where the rotation will happen and again you've got the option to flip your image using the buttons on the tool options bar to go horizontally or vertically and you can type values into these boxes to make a change so with those changes made you can look at the other images in this column and you'll see that there are just a two cow so for this round I'll have to call it a jaw both tools have got lots of useful features and the selection tool is best to edit a single drawing while you draw and the corner adjustment is invaluable so do make sure you try that out and the anime tool is great for positioning all of your completed drawings whether it's a background or a sequence of images those on to round two round two so for this round let's make the two drunkos bigger than the camera area the first in the Red Corner we use the selection tool on the left hand dranko let's click and highlight him and then we can scale him up holding shift on the corners to make him larger and move him just outside the view so he's just peeking inside the camera area which you can see by this red rectangle here and then if you click away notice that anything outside the drawings canvas area is lost and this is because when I created these drawing levels I made them the same size as the camera and using the selection tool you can only have the drawing within the canvas area and I made a video about that a few weeks ago which you can check out just up here and from the description down below but what about the animate tool well in the blue Corner let's pick a frame in the column that we're going to use with the animate tool choose the animate tool change to the all option and then if we move the center point onto dranko I'll resize him to make him large like it is with the first dog and move him just outside of the camera view area and I can't click away to deselect him but you can see that he's shown inside and outside of the camera area the file showed us the camera view you'll see where he's cut off there so now I can adjust him and not worry about losing part of him so I can rotate him resize or remove him like that and it won't lose any of him what and this also affects the following drawings so again it makes it easy to reposition him or reuse your animation after you finish with it so for this round I have to give it to the animate tool with the selection you can only resize within your canvas area and when you do it's a destructive change so you can't restore back to the original drawing but with the animate tool you can resize and move the drawing anywhere inside or outside the camera and it doesn't break the drawing just delete the key to restore the original drawing plus if you've got a sequence of drawings adding one key on this column aligns them all and if you're finding these tips useful do drop me a comment below and let me know what other tools you'd like to see battle it out and do hit like so this video can spread to other users so let's finish this fight with round three round three so with the selection tool as we've already found out moving one drawing only moves that one drawing so if you want to dranker the dog here to run across the screen you'll have to move each drawing individually to get him to run across the screen and that works pretty well however we've got the drawings repeated there's only actually six unique drawings so when we get to frame seven we show drawer number one again which is actually just another exposure of exactly the same drawing as is shown on frame one so a tip here to help you spot this is if you zoom out of the timeline enough as I have here to show the drawing numbers you'll see when drawings are repeated on the timeline but if you're too zoomed in so that you see just dots for individual drawings it's hard to tell which are unique drawings and which are duplicated drawings so try to keep the timeline zoomed out enough to see the drawing numbers but how does the anime tool cope with this well as you expect this is where the animate tool really excels so if I go to frame one in the animate tool column choose the animate tool and now change to the all option and on frame one I'll play stranco dog just outside of the screen and notice the first key that's added in frame one there and then if I zoom out a little so you can see the end drawing there and then if I move to frame number 30 and then click and drag dranko to move him just the other side of the screen so if I hide the selection tool column and then and go to the first frame and then hit play you'll see dwanko running all the way from right to left knock out and this is something that the selection tool just can't do and do try out both of these tools they're both useful for different tasks even though they might seem very similar at first and thanks to my patreon supporters don't forget you can download this project from patreon so you can experiment with the tools as I have here today but do comment down below to let me know which of these tools struck The Knockout blow for you and let me know which other tools you'd like to see battle it out if you want to see how to use the animate tool for Parallax scrolling check out this video just here and I'll see you all next time for another video and bats a guarantee

Channel: Darren T

Views: 1,503

Keywords: animation, opentoonz, selection tool, animate tool

Id: tZmRCMIYwsU

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023