This is a quick beginner's guide
to OpenToonz, a free 2d animation software that you can use to
bring your characters to life. If you want to learn 2d aimation you came to the right
YouTube channel. This video is focusing on the technology and what buttons to click
in a software, but to get more information about the principles and
physics of animation, please also watch the other videos in this playlist. OpenToonz
is available for Mac and Windows. Just follow this link here, or click on it in the video
description, download the software, and when you open it, it
should greet you with this start screen. OpenToonz organizes your animation into different
projects. Each project is not just one
file, but it's split up into multiple scenes, and all the drawings
and color palettes that you create for these scenes are saved under
this project. One project is not a single file. It's many files.
So this is why at the very top right here, you have
to make the choice: "What project does this animation belong to?"
And when you're just starting out with OpenToonz, there will only be
one project: the sandbox project. If you just want to toy around with OpenToonz, try some things,
do your first animation exercises, stuff like this, then you can just
work in the sandbox project. But if you're doing a bigger
project, like a real short film, you should definitely create a new
project. By default OpenToonz only knows one project location
to save all your projects to. I show you in another video that is linked up here and
in the video description, how you can create your own project location,
wherever you want it to be. But for the beginning, let's just
use the sandbox project for toying around. That's more than enough for all your test animations and your first
steps into OpenToonz. Next up let's give our test
scene a fun name. Usually in an animation project, a
scene would be a shot - meaning a moment of your film from
one cut to the next. And you would create a new scene for every cut that you
do in the film. And then later assemble your film in a video editing software. The
save location down here, you would usually never change, because that is
what the project is for. The project usually manages the save
location of your scenes. So unless you know what you're
doing, don't change the save path. Here, you can set the resolution of your video that you
will get in the end. And usually you would leave this at 1920 x1080 pixels,
because this is full HD. There's the standard all over the internet. 24 frames per second is also
a very common frame rate for cinema and internet,
so let's just keep it like that. And before we create our first scene, make sure down here that
you have auto save activated. I like to have set it
to auto saving every five minutes. So if worst case OpenToonz crashes,
there's a power outage, who knows what, you know that you're only
going to lose five minutes of work. And with that being set up,
we can create our scene. In OpenToonz 1.5 the timeline is now how it
is in most other animation software - it's horizontal, going from left to
right. In earlier versions the timeline was going from top
to bottom and that's reminiscent of the old animation x-sheet that animators
would use during traditional animation. You can still get this if view back, if you prefer that
with that switch button here, and there are also other animation workspaces
up here for different parts of the animation process, and some of
them also have a vertical timeline. But for this tutorial, we're going to stay in the default drawing
view with the horizontal timeline that you'll find in most other animation
software as well. This section here is called the viewport. You can use the mouse wheel
to zoom in and out. And if you want to pen
your viewport around, you can use the hand tool by holding the
space bar and left clicking. Then you can direct the viewport
around, or you click the middle mouse button and drag
your viewport around that way. If you want to make sure
that you see your entire camera image, then you can right click
the viewport and choose "fit to window" or hit "alt+9" as
a keyboard shortcut. In the timeline the playback handle is currently
at frame 1. If we now activate our brush tool, either by clicking on the
brush in the toolbox, or by hitting "B" on your keyboard, you
can start a drawing on this frame 1. And by just starting to draw
up here, down in the timeline we created our first drawing labeled
"A1". And this drawing A1 is a so-called bitmap
layer, bitmap layers, a good choice. If you want to play around
with special brushes or very soft brushes. Lowering the Hardness value up
here in the brush settings, - you can also toy around with the size -
we get this very soft brush. Brushes like this only work on
bitmap layers. Let's see how the selection tool behaves on bitmap layers. The selection
tool you can find in the toolbar up here, or you just
press "S" on your keyboard. I like to set my selection
tool to a freehand selection, so I get this lasso that I can draw around
parts of my drawing. And as you can see, the selection tool cuts into the
lines and just takes this whole section, and we can move this
whole section. So, this is how the selection tool behaves on bitmap layers - like
cutting into a piece of paper. There's another type of layer called a vector layer. And we get
it by clicking on this icon down here - we create
a new vector layer. As you can see in the timeline, we now have the bitmap
layer that we created first on column 1, and we have a new column
2 that holds our vector drawings. The most notable difference between a
vector and a bitmap layer is that if you zoom in your
drawing, doesn't get pixely. On the bitmap layer
it's starting to show every single pixel of the 1920 x 10
80 pixels that we have for the resolution that we set. Vector
strokes - they are recalculated on whatever scale
you see them on, so they don't get pixely. The selection tool behaves a little
bit different on vector layers. You can select individual strokes, not
just sections. You can just click on a
stroke to select the entire brush stroke. And if you draw a lasso selection around brush strokes, it's not
a cut-out like it did for the bitmap layer. It just selects all the brush
strokes that are within this selection. As you can see, if we scale up the vector drawings, they
don't get pixely or funky looking. But if we scale up the
drawing on the bitmap layer, it starts to look a little bit
ugly because it cannot invent pixel. It can only work with the pixel that it had when this
drawing was created. And this is starting to show
when you scale up lines. For this reason, personally, I like to
work in vector a lot because I like to be able to
select individual strokes, I like to be able to
scale my drawings up and down, if I feel like I need
to change things. But of course your animation should have a very
clear outline style for this. If you want to have like
lots of gradients or you want to work with like charcoal textures
on your brushes, then you might want to have a closer look
at bitmap layers. We're going to continue with vector
layers. Vector brushes have a few unique functions that you can't use
on bitmap layers. One very interesting setting is the
accuracy setting. If you set the accuracy very
low, it's going to smooth out your drawing. If you do a wonky wobbly line like this, it will smooth
it out to just one line with not many details. Vice versa,
if you switch the accuracy very high, it will keep the line
as jittery as you drew it. If the accuracy setting makes your
line smoother, what is the smooth setting for? If you set it
very low, your line is going to appear right there where you're
cursor Is. If you set it very high, your line will lag
behind the cursor, and it takes a little bit
of time to catch up. You can use this to steer
your lines in curves. Play around with both accuracy and smooth until
you have something that you like. You will see that if you
use them cleverly, you can create lines that look a lot smoother
and "flowier" and nicer than you might be able to
do just out of your wrist. Another cool option that we have
with vector strokes is that we can use the contour point editor
tool down here - the keyboard shortcut is "C" -
with the contour point editor tool you can click and drag individual
points of your line. And you can also click on
a point and delete it with the delete key if it gives you like a
wobble that you don't want to have in your line. When you have
a point selected, those tangent handles will appear that allow you to
control how your line flows. So this tool gives
You a lot of control over your line, and you can use
it to refine your drawing endlessly. As a rule of thumb, you should have a vector point on
the top of a curve. If you click on such a
point and you move around the tangents, you can see how both
sides of the tangents are linked together. If you put one side down,
the other side will move up. For very sharp corners
you might need tangents like these that are not moving both sides
at the same time. And you get that by clicking on a tangent side and holding
the "alt" key. Now you can move one
tangent site independent from the other. And vice versa,
if your tangents are broken in this way, you can hit the "alt" key
and once again, they will move together. There's another tool that I wanted
to show you real quick. It's hidden under this arrow in the toolbar, there you'll find
the pump tool. And with the pump tool, you can make parts of your brush
stroke, thicker or thinner. But of course, one drawing does not make
an animation. We need to make a second
frame. To navigate around on the timeline, you can use
the keyboard arrows. Pressing the left and right arrow keys goes forward
or backward on the timeline. Let's create our next drawing right
next to the first one that we created. So, let's just go one frame forward. And now you can start drawing again, and it will create a
new drawing on frame 2. On the timeline you can see that our drawings,
they have names. We just created the vector drawings,
B1 and B2. You need to think about these
drawings as unique files. On the right-hand side here in this level panel -
a level is just a stack of drawings - on the right up
here, you can see a familiar name. This is the level B that
we created by drawing the vector layer. And this level B holds both
of our drawings 1 and 2. So what we were calling a
layer is technically a level. And you have to think about a level, more like a binder
that you can pull your drawings from. You can keep adding to our
level B drawing stack by just continuing to the right on the
timeline and continuing to draw. If you right, click on the
timeline, we can create a new level. It can be a vector level, and the system will automatically give
it a name - in this case it's Level C. The drawing stack on the right changes. We know, see the drawings - and there's only this one drawing - four
level C. One layer, one column of your animation, can hold a drawings
from different levels. So levels are a great way
to group your drawings. All the drawings for one character
could be in one level. Or maybe just all drawings for that
character's mouth can be in one level. And these levels you can use
in all scenes of that same project. So even if you create a new scene, you still have access
to all the levels that you created, and you can reuse them
in different scenes. On the timeline.
You can move a cluster of drawings. By clicking up here in
this darker area, you will get the entire area of drawings that
are next to each other, and you can move them as a
chunk in the timeline. If, just for fun, we click on the
play button to see our animation, of course, it's just a mess -
all those frames go by far too quickly. So we need to extend the
time exposure of our drawings, so they are seen for more
than just one frame. And a good way to do
this is to make a selection - in this case, we click on
one of the drawings - and any selection has this gray handle at
the top right corner. You can click and drag this
to push everything on the timeline. And this is an excellent way
to time your animation, to extend the exposure for drawings, to make
sure that they're seen for a longer time. Now, let's go back to our
level panel here at the top right corner. If we select any of the
drawings we've already created, we go in something like a focus mode where
we can only see this drawing. We can click and drag a drawing from the layer panel into
the timeline. If we drag drawing number 1,
you can see that on the timeline we now have drawing number 1
over here. And this drawing is not a duplicate - it is an instance of that
same exact drawing. That means, if we alter any of the frames named B1,
all instances of this frame, all over the timeline, they will change
as well. So if we go to the
beginning of our animation, where there's also an instance of B1 and we
draw this wonderful hat into it, it also appears later where we
used that same drawing again. So this is the difference between
a frame and a drawing. A frame is the unit that
you have on the timeline. Frame one, two, three, four, five - that's
the time. And the drawing can be reused
and drawings with the same name are the exact same drawing - they
are linked. And this has a lot of advantages - you only need to color them
once - but let's say you want to clone a drawing,
you want to duplicate it, and you don't want it to be
linked anymore because you maybe just want to alter it a bit
to create your next frame. So, one way to do this is to extend the exposure, and
then anywhere on this exposure just hit "D" and it's going to
create a new drawing - as you can see, this has
a new name - but the lines, the content is the same as
from B1, but they are no longer linked. If we now add something to this new drawing, you can see
that only has the line on the drawing named B6. You can also make a selection of all your lines, copy the
lines and paste them on a new frame. This will give you a drawing
with a new name, but the lines are the same as from
where you copy and pasted them. If you're copy and paste drawings on the timeline, this will copy
and paste an instance of these drawings. So if you "ctrl+C" and "ctrl+V" on the timeline, these
drawings will be linked. A very important tool for animation
is the onion skin. The onion skin allows you to see the previous and the next
frames shining through your drawings. In OpenToonz, you can activate them by clicking on bubbles to the
left and right of the playhead marker. So these red dots will allow previous frames to shine through in
red, and you can set them in any distance you like and
how many you want. And future frames to the right
of the playhead will show through in green, if you activate them with these
green bubbles - those green and red dots - they will follow the play
marker around, and they will always expose things
from the viewpoint of the play marker, but you can also hit
those blue bubbles a little further up to expose a fixed frame
that you did previously. For example, if you always want to see your frame 1, because
you use that as a reference frame, then this drawing will always
show through in red as well, but it will not move around
with the play marker. You can quickly toggle onion,
skin on and off by double clicking the red and green part
of the play marker. And last but not least, I want to show you how you
can work with colors on vector layers, because there are some very
cool things here that you can only do with vector layers that
are extremely useful. First up, we have to create a fill color. We do that by just clicking
on the "+" symbol here. We can change the color up here. Don't forget to hit apply to save the color to that color
swatch. The color swatches or "styles", as OpenToonz calls them, are saved
to the level. So if suddenly all of your colors are vanished, it's because you
have selected a different level. Later, if you get a little more
advanced with OpenToonz, you can make your pallets global,
you can load pallets from one level into another - but that's something
for another day. Let's grab the fill tool in the toolbar - you can just click on it,
or if you're a pro, use the keyboard shortcut "F". And
then with fulfill tool, you can just click into any closed shape
to fill it. This shape over here is not
quite closed, but with this setting up here, the close gap tool,
you can make it so that OpenToonz also closes gaps in your
linework. And in this case, this worked pretty well. However, if you work with vector
layers, you should make it a habit to make sure that your
linework is closed. And you have a couple of options for that: you can use the brush tool
and close the line - make sure to select the right color for that -
or you can use the contour point editor tool to make sure
that the lines meet. One interesting detail here: even if the lines look
closed, like they are right here, a vector software can only really
"see" the middle lines. So to make sure that it is a really closed, this inner
line that you see with the contour point editor, those lines have
to meet. And now this shape is 100% for certain closed, and we can fill
it with no problem. But you know what's the really cool thing
about colors in a vector layer? They are linked to the color swatch. If we color our ghost and we later decide, no, we
want it to be a different color. No problem. We can just edit this color
swatch to be a different color. And on every frame, in every drawing where we use this color
swatch, this color will be changed. This can save you a lot
of work if you like to change your mind. So if you want to change
the color of your main character's shirt after you've already animated and
colored everything, you can do that. Or maybe later on you decide
that your animation should play at dusk, when it's already a little darker,
you can still change all of your colors by just changing the
color swatches. Oh, and if you're getting tired of clicking on "apply" to
make a color save to the color swatch, you can also activate
this "auto" button to see whatever you change with your colors instantly
on your drawings. And this concludes our jump into
the basics of OpenToonz. Obviously, there's so much more that
the software has to offer. We only scratched the surface, but
I think this is everything you need to get started with some
basic frame by frame animation exercises. If you're like, "Hey, I like
this guy's a videos! I want to support him," then you are in luck! Because
now brand new, we have a Patreon. And what I'm really excited about
is the group mentoring tier on Patreon. If you join the group mentoring tier, you are invited to a
secret special livestream every month where you can bring your animation, your
character design, your story, your animatic, your demoreel, whatever you're working
on, and I will give you a critique. I will draw over it, give you tips and tricks and advice
on how to make it even better. And this is a reoccurring monthly thing. So if you need something to
keep you productive, keep you on track so you get your project done,
I would be very happy to see you in this workshop. In any case,
thank you so very much for watching. I hope to see you again on the channel or in a
live stream or on Patreon. Have a nice day and keep on Animating.
