OpenToonz Lesson 6 - Levels and Columns

welcome back to another Open Tunes tutorial in this video we're going to be creating a basic animation that's gonna help us learn about levels and different drawings within our levels and how those drawings interact with the X sheet or timeline this is really important to understand and once you can wrap your head around it open tunings just becomes much more usable and you're gonna get a lot less frustrated so to get started let's click the brush tool I want to call your attention to this the levels right now so it says no current level what we need to do before we really do anything we should always just create a level you should get in the habit of going to file new level but I want to show you that if you don't do that it's really easy to accidentally create a level because if we just start drawing here we've just accidentally or maybe intentionally but we just created a level called level B and so level B now has one drawing this is drawing of this circle and we can drop down and select and toggle between whether we're in no level or B so we can select any level here oh this is a good some time to point out too if we just click on our drawing so not our time line but our drawing it shows just what we have drawn it shows only what we've drawn or what we've imported in in this level so that's why we're not seeing the white background we're not seeing the dotted line here that says camera one because we didn't draw camera one we didn't draw this red dotted line we didn't do this red X in the center of the canvas so if we want to see just what we have drawn we just click here and since it's vector it doesn't matter where it is or how large it is I'm zooming in and out with my scroll wheel to kind of do this it doesn't really matter and so if we want to draw something else the way these levels work if I click down here I have a new blank canvas sort of I can just click and I can draw something maybe I want to have like a tree happening in my animation so I can just start to draw like a tree here that I want to be able to use in my background okay cool and I come down and click down here on a new drawing under my level and don't confuse the drawings here with what's happening in the timeline there's no order there's no sequential anything happening here it's just a drawing so this is a cloud that I'm going to happen as part of my scene and then maybe I want to have some you know sort of some mountains like this with like a hill happening here as my main part of my scene and then I'll work out I'll work all this stuff in in a minute here to actually be in the frame but so let's just say I have those things what else what is kind of nice to have let's click here let's do like the Sun and again I'm not paying any attention to how large this is or where it is because we can change all of that later so now I have a couple different drawing things here they're all sort of different sizes and just sort of randomly floating here in space and if I want to see what they look like relative to my frame I can actually put them in a frame so right now I only have one drawing in my frame drawing one is in frame one and so that's why it's showing this the border showing the extents of the of what we'll see when we actually render it out and we have this circle here if we want to see the tree instead in frame one we can double click and just type in to hit enter now we see that the tree is there if you want to see the cloud we double click and hit 3 so what this is telling us is in frame 1 right now we are showing from level B drawing number 3 which is a cloud if I want to do drawing number 5 I can just double click and type 5 and hit enter and now we're seeing from level B worth seeing drawing number 5 and so let's say we want to do let's do it let's actually do this number 4 double click and do 4 so I want to have this beep the main part and it's sort of not exactly where I want I want this to be more centered so we can move this by clicking here on this animate tool and this is a tool we're going to use quite a bit so we'll click on that and right now we can change by default its position but we can change lots of things size rotation but let's just do position and then we can click on the center part and we can move it to here and if we needed to we could scale it a little bit as well to be a different size so I'll just scale it just so that those the edges of this barely go outside of the the and us that we're working on that's pretty good and maybe I will actually move it down and go back to the animate tool and we'll move it so notice I'm actually moving the drawing this can imagine this drawing is drawn on top of a like a plastic a clear sheet of paper and so we we could have come in here and selected the whole thing and then tried to resize it but I didn't do that that's not the way I wanted to do it we could we could have moved it and resized it and if we actually do that now it's gonna mess it up in our frame over here and that's why instead of changing the actual drawing I just used the animate tool to change where the drawing is located in our in our animation so that makes sense I think it will in a second here let's bring in the Sun we want the Sun to be also in line with this so we'll put it in column two we'll left-click the Sun and we'll drag it over to column two frame one so now it's overlapping it looks kind of weird now but we can actually go to scale and we can change the size oops control Z I was accidentally on the wrong one so now we can change the size of the Sun we'll put it here we can change the position of it and we'll move the Sun to over there and now if we want a cloud or a couple clouds we just left click on the cloud drawing drag it over to column three the reason we're not putting it in column one if we put it down in column one then we'll just see the cloud all by itself the way the columns work in the xsheet is everything horizontally gets overlapped on top of each other so I'm gonna delete that one just and then we'll go back to this cloud and resize it so we go to scale using the animate tool and then we just left-click and go in towards the center of it to scale is what we're doing and then we change this to position and we can move it around and what's nice about this is we could have a cloud off to the side here we can scroll over to column four oh and if you just click on column four like I just did you notice our level strip goes away and it says there's no current level so to get back to the drawings in our level B we just go to this drop-down and go to and then we can see our drawings we can choose and maybe I want to bring in the cloud again left click the cloud bring it in so now I have the cloud again but now I'm just looking at the drawing whatever I have selected if I want to look at what's happening in frame 1 of our animation I can click over here and now I can actually scale this hope this is making sense it I think it probably is and so we can put this cloud and maybe we want to change this now have this cloud be maybe even smaller and have it be right here ok so then what we can do is we have this scene here that'll look pretty nice we could go in and color it too and do all kinds of things but I'm just keeping it basic right now we have this scene that we could use and now we could actually draw we could do lets go file new level and call this person if you want to animate a person on top of this well now we're working in new level person we have a blank drawing and it put this person over here in column 5 so we have all these columns now that are just overlapping on top of each other so now we can actually draw as if he's here on this scene we can draw a person in here and now whatever this whatever we do with this person will happen independently of every other object on this scene does that make sense so if we want to if we go down to frame 2 now everything disappears everything and we can draw the second frame of what this person is going to see if we do onions onion skin we can see we can like redraw this person and have them start to do something different but if we want to see if we want the background to still be there and be the same what we have to do I'm going to resize this a little bit so we can see more of these columns we select hold down shift and select all four of these and there's a little gray handle it appears we can just drag this down and so as long as as long as as far as we drag it down it'll just stay constant so now we have this happening and the background is all staying the same so now we can just go ahead and keep drawing our person right here we just go down and just keep trying and this is if we were doing frame by frame and then pretty soon here I'll show you a way that we can automatically move some of these objects differently and again the nice part about this is if ever we change something like if we want if we don't like the way the sun's looking we can go in and make a change to it real quick by just clicking on the actual drawing of the Sun turn off onion skin and then we can go in and we can just change grab the eraser and we can change a part of this drawing to be different and then it will then the Sun has that change now on every frame of our animation now I'm going to drag this just so we can see just that part of the animation I just did there and let's play back now we have a little bit of animation happening here with just the character and the background is staying the same now you might be wondering like why did I do that I could have just drawn all of these on the same drawing if they're gonna stay the same anyway and that's because we don't have to have them stay the same we could actually move these in the next video we're gonna talk more about doing automated animations and having like these clouds and move across the sky by themselves without having to redraw them every time so thanks for watching hopefully found it informative go ahead and leave your comments and questions below and I look forward to seeing you in the next video

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 76,935

Keywords: free, tjfree, free software, open source, opentoonz, learn opentoonz, opentoonz level, opentoons vector level, opentoonz timeline, opentoonz column, opentoonz layers, opentoonz animation, opentoonz merge, opentoonz combine, free animation software, opentoonz xsheet

Id: lXbH7O3IEdI

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2019