OpenToonz Animation Powerhouse Software (Free & Open Source!)

ladies and gentlemen it's mike here at game from scratch and today we're going to be checking out an open source animation powerhouse i'm actually kind of shocked i haven't covered it on this channel to this point in time and it is a program called open tunes now this here you can see in front of you this is open too so we're going to walk through the very basics of using this application in action but this is basically an open source 2d animation software in terms of who uses this the most famous would be studio ghibli the people behind princess mononoke uh spirited away etc some of the most popular animes they used open tunes to create them and this is kind of the closest you've got to what blender is to 3d open tunes is to open source 2d tools there is a lot of power in this program now we'll get back to some of the details about open tunes in a little bit it is available for windows and mac from the website which by the way is opentunes.github.io tunes for the zed uh there is also a linux version available we'll get back to that and look over some of these details in a little bit but first let's do some hands-on this is a project you can download kind of showcases what you can do in open tunes we're also going to create our own masterpiece space marine on a beach for the beach ball in just a few minutes but here you can see the kind of animations that you can make now this is organized into a number of different levels the terminology you'll find when working with open toons is a little bit strange it comes from i think more of a traditional 2d animation perspective so as a learning curve you're going to find things a little bit confusing over time but you guys this tool here for uh basically com compositing and drawing your scenes we'll look at some of the drawing tools in a second when we start from the very beginning and then you've got other different views here so you've got the ability to set fixed palettes um that you've got so i'll go back over here we'll pick our character so over here pick our character as our animated guide right here so we got this guy right here uh we can go ahead and see here we've got uh palettes applied to the particular character so you can work with a fixed color set palette you've got fine-tuned control over all of those things in the palette the cool thing here is if you change something in a palette so for example his clothing i can go ahead here and change them to red in this case and then clothing dark i could change to i don't know a different color of red and that will apply across the entire scene so go back here you're now going to notice all of your scenes across all of your frames now have that update so it makes making changes across your entire scene very uh easy uh and it also this is uh very shareable so you can reuse all these different assets and such like so you could have your color palettes you can save them globally use them between projects and so on and then we get into some really complicated stuff some you can do uh special effects and so here you can see uh a matting special effect being used here you can see here something just doing uh brightness control on the scene so here i'll go to the rendered view and now what we can do is do things like change the brightness like so or we can change the contrast like so and you've got a ton of these special effects again we'll get back to that when we do the demonstration in just a second plus you've got a function for managing things over time basically for changing data um over time your timeline here is vertical uh it changes between vertical and horizontal between drawing modes it is again sometimes a little bit less intuitive than you would imagine but i think the easiest way to probably showcase open tunes is to start from scratch so we're going to do is create a new scene here um so discard the changes create it anyways all right so here we've got our scene you can also bring in traditional assets i think i've got some ready to go so over here yep so what i'm going to do is i'm going to drop in this background scene uh you can either import it or load it that way if you make changes to the original they'll convert over or not uh so i'm going to go ahead and do an import because we're not going to be changing it i've already imported it once so it's asking me to overwrite it all right so here we are in our scene i'm going to go up here and use this tool right here which is like the positioning tool and we'll switch to scale mode and i'm just going to scale this so it fits entirely like so all right so there in our timeline we have um a scene to work with now as i mentioned timeline we're going to make this say 30 frames so i'm going to pick the 30th frame and i'm going to set the stop marker there so our animation goes from here to here and now we've got our background and i want this background layer to last across all of those frames i'm just going to drag this across right there so now we have this sunny beach there for all of our scenes now what we're going to do is bring in a space marine animation now this is an animated gif i've downloaded off the web it's not my work uh but it does look good so i'm gonna come over here grab all the individual frames but you don't actually have to because i've got them named in the way that uh open tunes wants so instead i can just grab into one frame like so and we will import it we'll overwrite and apply all right so there is our space marine on a beach and we're in scale mode too i don't want that i want to be in position mode all right there we go so we got our space marine all the various different frames are available here you can reuse the frames in the scene basically by dragging them in you're gonna notice each one was actually quite short in duration so what we want to do is basically just grab each frame and make it i don't know three a piece so each frame is going to last for three frames oops come on over here all right there we go and over so if you're using if you're creating your art in uh say krita or photoshop or 3d renders from blender as you can see you can obviously import it in here you can actually even bring in uh the last frame we're gonna hold it for a while all right there we go so now we have our cool animation going on here let's go ahead and play it all right like so our playback speed is pretty high so let's let's drop that vote in half and play it all right so we got an idle animation we can loop it right here so there is our space marine on a beach it's a happy fellow we're good to go there so what else can we do here well we can get into uh traditional drawing we can also do some kind of cool animation so if we wanted to we can just do traditional keyframed animation here so for example i can go back to frame number one here uh and we could grab this guy using the move tool right here and then we go to frame number five move him over a little bit frame number nine move him over a little bit frame number 13 move him over a bit and you'll see how this goes so we'll just go over here and then we'll go to the very end where he's exiting stage left all right there we go so now we've got uh kind of a neat animation of him moving so let's go ahead and see that all right there we go so we've got pretty easy to do traditional keyframe movement you can see the keys that are generated as we moved across another neat thing that you could do is as you are moving across we can actually see the keyframe so there you can see the keyframes between animation for frame one and frame five so here i can jump here we can go back the other direction as well and we can um onion skin that way so i can grab one so there we can see the previous frame we can actually do a couple so we can actually have a nice sequence of animation we can see what we've done we can actually go in either direction so we can go and see what our frames are going to do in the other direction as well very useful if you're going from frame to frame to frame in your animation all right so that's the basics of bringing in traditional animation on top of that open tunes also is a drawing application so you're competing with the likes of toon boom and adobe animate for the most part and animate is kind of the successor to flash so when we're drawing here we can do this by creating a new layer so we can do sorry level again they have their own terminology for everything you've got three options here i'm only really going to cover two so you've got their tunes raster level a normal raster level and a vector level raster levels is basically you are working with pixels uh whereas vectors you are dealing with math the nice thing about vector graphics like think about svgs adobe illustrator that kind of thing is as you scale them they stay resolution independent so and the more you zoom in it's math it's not individual pixels so you don't have any degradation of qualities that you can scale things up or down over as much you want and we'll start with that style all right so we're gonna do a single frame all right there we go so we now have this new track right here i'm gonna go ahead and call this beach ball all right so there is our beach ball in the scene uh to get going with it oh it created a sorry i was at frame uh 29 when i created it by the way you can grab things by their handle at the top here like come on you and grab them at the top and drag them that way so back to frame one here we now can basically start creating our beach ball creating tools uh you've got a number of controls over here we're going to show you the very basics i could do it simply this way and use uh straight out shapes which would make a whole lot of sense but instead i'm going to show you drawing with a brush uh you can draw over the brush up here you've got your paint control so this is the width of your brush accuracy you can think of kind of like how much assistance it will give you to smooth out your brush strokes so if you are very jittery you're going to want to set the accuracy i believe to quite low and the more so uh you increase this the more it will assist your work so if you have twitchy hands like me you're going to probably want a lowish accuracy and smoothness actually is sort of like the lag behind where you draw uh you're going to want to play with these two uh to get a result you like i'm going to turn smoothness down slightly uh and this is where i like it to be by the way if you've got a stylus hooked up this works with typical drawing tablets and now we just go ahead and draw like so so you see how i'm lagging behind the actual cursor that is being controlled uh by the smoothing value so we got a closed line here uh we can now go ahead and do color fill by the way you can fill multiple ways so you can actually fill um inside of things like shapes or you can actually fill the lines or you can fill everything if you wish and you've got control over how to fill you could select based off of like freehand selection or basically what you just created so we got that now we can go ahead and create and fill this thing with a color colors work off of palettes so you see over here we have black defined so far so we can add a new color to our palette uh and we can just go ahead and change it so let's make this a red beach ball color control over here i got it on auto mode so it automatically create a new color for me uh by the way you can name these colors so if i wanted to i could call this beach ball and then if i change beach ball in the scene it will update all frames with that color from that color palette which is definitely useful so go ahead we can draw our single color over here now you're going to notice this seems kind of like layers it's kind of reusable as sprites in the scene they call them levels you can reuse these across different um shapes and so on so you saw even when we were dealing with this guy each individual frame came in as a level it's kind of confusing to get used to at first but that is what is being created over here so here is our beach ball at zeroth frame and now what we're going to do is basically jump forward a little bit in the timeline like so and you can hit d and it'll start drawing a new frame or you can quite literally just um start drawing now here you can see our because we have it set to do multiple um onion skins here we can buy we can get rid of them so if we don't need that level detail we can add one back in get rid of that one right there all right so there you see since frame one to now uh we have this onion skinning going on so now we're gonna do is basically just draw another frame down say here like so now what i'm going to do is undo that and i'm going to do the same thing all right so drawing mode right so now all i need to do is select my palette entry where is my palette uh line level palettes all right i screw oh paint all right not sure how to select it until i start painting so hopefully i can change it after the fact all right that was not ideal but um all right so let's let's undo that we should now have it selected so there's some just usability issues going on all right so i'm drawing very very poorly as you can see there is our next frame and we can go to the next frame right here and then we can go ahead and draw here's our squished ball like so and then just basically continue the process up so this is kind of handy because we're going to go up to about to where we started from before like so and then we're going to go to this frame right here and we're going to be up i don't know here and then we're going to go to this frame so there's a weird lag out from when i start drawing so i actually have to start drawing for it to update i don't know why it's doing that but that is the case so here we've done it and by the way we go back in uh select our red go to each one fill them in fill them in fill them in fill it in and fill it in all right so there we go we should have a nice weird beach ball bouncing animation all right so let's now that it's figured it out boom boom boom and up it goes all right so that is kind of the basics of drawing on a frame by frame basis now we can do a whole lot more i'm not going to get into uh really the details of that because it's beyond me for the most part but you're going to see here i'm coming to the fx semantic mode here and here you've got a lot of stuff going on so we got the beach ball here we have our background image going there it's all mixed into there and here is our ultimate output now we do some neat stuff here so for example we could take our beach ball we can add an effect in here such as a blur like that we just connect it in like so and then connect it in like so and now we can double tap this guy and you can set the amount of the blur here by the way i believe this means that you can keyframe that value over time so if you want to change the blur value you can change it as you go and you'll notice okay nothing happened so as i go across the frames we're not seeing any blurring nothing like that so how do i get around that well what you need to do is actually preview your scene right here and now you see your blur in and you're also going to notice it's a little slow and that's because it's i don't know it's rendering it's doing its math thing but for a special effect you can right click and you can catch the effect and generally that makes your performance much better so there you go our masterpiece space marine on a beach with a beach ball that looks like a blob from hell that's it that that is kind of the very basics of open tune then ultimately you will render it out uh you can render it out as a video you can render it out as individual frames you've got all kinds of control that way there's a ton of functionality i'm not even getting close to covering there's a ton of functionality for importing inking from external we have all these various different tools down here we've got things like cutout animation tools and so on way beyond the scope of what i'm going to cover in this video i just want to show you the very basics of creating animations using open tunes so if you saw it you at least know how to get started because again it isn't immediately intuitive unless i think you come from a traditional animation background in which case you will probably like it more so a bit more about it if you want to check it out uh it's available at opentunes for the zed.github.io um it started life as a program called tunes tunes is still developed by the way if you're interested you can use this free of charge both commercially and non-commercially it is open source so you can modify it that way it was used at studio ghibli i think it still is um to do uh the well you can see the details of it right there uh there are effects available again we only saw the very basics of effects but we come on back here i will show you uh just the extent of your options here you have a ton of effects so you can add shaders in here we've got particle systems you can create you've got lighting setups you can do just straight out image adjustment so if you just wanted to do something like uh brightness and contrast control we could drop that in there and kind of put it in line like so and feed the output like that and then you can control those values right here so you have this full effects stack there with a ton of effects to work with again some of it can be a little bit confusing there's no question about that uh but it's a very powerful tool with tons of capabilities there is another tool out there gts which is a scanning tool developed by studio ghibli this is a separate thing but it is available for download right here now what you'll find kind of interesting is you go to the downloads you are only going to get options for windows and mac os now if you're a linux user you're thinking hey you said linux don't worry there is at least a flat pack version of it available for download so there is a linux version out there i don't know why it's not officially supported i don't no idea to be honest but it is out there so don't worry about that it is also an open source project it uses the qt um cpus plus language to create things uh in terms of the licensing available it is it's a mixed license do for me sure oh it's bsd3 so pretty straightforward license to work with and then also if you're interested in the commercial version there is tunes still being developed i do not know the difference and that's beyond the scope of what i want to cover in this video too but if for some reason you need a professional version or professional support whatever digital video is continuing to make a commercial version of it there is a 15-day trial of that available as well uh not really the topic of this video today we are talking very specifically about open tunes and just open tunes a super powerful open source animation tool very much used in production in one of the most demanding pipelines in the world so if it works for them in theory it should work for you and it's actually been used to create a couple of video games as well um so yeah definitely an interesting project have you used open tunes and if so what do you think of it if not what are you using in its place there's other options out there so again this is a direct competitor with adobe animate but it also competes with the likes of toon boom uh there's also increasingly krita has animation support blender is getting more and more animation support every year uh but in terms of free and open source traditional 2d animation tools i think open tunes is the best of the best but let me know what you think if there's an alternative out there let me know that as well and i will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 49,263

Keywords: OpenToonz, Open Toonz, Toonz, Software, Review, Animation, Studio Ghibli, Ghibli, Inking, Free, OPen Source, GameDev, Game Development, Traditional Animation, Tutorial

Id: x_kbuQNxzik

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022