OpenToonz: TRUE Beginners' Tutorial

hey guys today I'm going to do a tutorial for the absolute 100% beginner I'm going to assume that you know absolutely nothing about open tunes and I'm going to try and walk you through the process the workflow of open tunes how it does things how it goes about animating so yeah let's go ahead and get started so there are a number of ways to animate using open tunes and I'm going to go ahead and show you a few of them but going into this the one thing that sets open Tunes apart from a lot of other animation programs like anime studio and flash there'll be flash or I guess it's called Adobe animate now is that it's really essentially a built to be a digital version of traditional animation the traditional animation process so it takes that traditional animation process and then just digitizes it now it's not completely you're not completely bound to that process but that is the foundation of this program and and understanding that can really help you to understand what's why this where this program differs from other programs is because it is set up that way essentially the way the traditional animation works is you have your animator and his assistants if he's lucky I guess and they draw all the individual drawings for the animation once they have them all drawn they take what's called an exposure sheet which is a sheet of paper with a with looks essentially like this like the xsheet in open toons it looks exactly like this and what it is is it each little box indicates a frame along a timeline that moves vertically and in each box the animator will then write in which drawing shows up in that particular frame and so that's essentially what the exposure sheet is for is he's telling the cameramen which drawing should appear at which frame and then the cameraman will take the collection of drawings and exposure sheet and put them in the right order and take pictures of them as the exposure she directs them to and then after that they have their footage they have all the individual frames of the animation and they cut them together and add just like any other movie and that's really the sort of the foundation of Open Tunes is built on this process where you you go in and you do your drawings and then you put them in the exposure sheet and that's how you create your animation as you do your drawings beforehand and then you put the drawings into the exposure sheet letting the program know okay at this point in time I want this drawing to show up at this point in time I want this drawing show up now of course it's digital so there's more flexibility and there's more things you can do and you're not strictly bound to that process and that's what we're going to go over today I'm going to show you the basics just sort of hashing out how this program works how it expects you to do your animation and like I said there's a few ways and I'm going to show you them so let's go ahead and get started so I should say I'm using open tunes 1.0 0.3 if you don't have that just go get it it's every version that they come out with is adding new features that are very good and this one in particular has some very important features so there's no reason to stay with one point no point to go get one point 0.3 and that because that's what I'm using here and you're going to want to use it trust me so this is what you see the first time you open open tunes kind of confusing I even what is all this stuff well let's just start up the top we have our menu bar pretty standard stuff right but when we come over here we have all these buttons and you click these buttons and the whole screen changes and there's you know some similarities some similar things but I mean what does all this mean right well what these are is these are called rooms and essentially what a room is is it's a workspace and each room is just a pre all it is is a preset collection of windows so if we come over here to the windows tab on the menu essentially every room is just a different variation of this set number of windows right and they each have a different function and a different use while you're doing your animation and basically you all the rooms are is useful collections of these different rooms to get a certain task done you can change them you can change you can rearrange these rooms rename them at different windows remove windows there are some really good tutorials out there on that so I won't go too and depth into that all we need to know right now is that these rooms are essentially just workspaces don't get too hung up on them because you can literally make your own that has exactly the windows you need so it's more important to understand what all the different windows do now I'm going to go ahead there are three rooms that we're going to be using today that are really going to concern us and that is drawing animation and browser so because these are modifiable you can actually move them so I'm going to move drawing to the front I'm going to move animation to the front and a move browser to the front those are the three we're going to be using today all right so the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to chain we're going to change a little bit of this setup animation is a pretty good room a good workspace there's just a few things I want to change first thing I want to change is we're going to move this bar off here and this bar off here what this is this is the toolbar and the toolbar options we're going to close those out we're going to go to our windows and we're going to bring in the combo viewer and essentially the combo viewer is a lot is it looks like this right you're seeing sort of the same view but so the combo viewer is just is nice because it already has the toolbar and the tool options bar built into it so we go ahead and dock the combo of you are up here we move this viewer out so that we can close it and we can adjust it like this can adjust from any side you can adjust all these windows but as you can see it has the tool bar built into it and it has the tool option bar which is this bar that's empty right now but if I go to a tool it'll give me the options for that individual tool okay so we're going to also go to our drawing room and we're going to do the same thing we're just going to use the combo viewer because it and I guess you don't have to do this but this is how I like to do things it just is more convenient for me it looks like this was out to the side like that there we go all right so now we're kind of back to what it was all right all right now that we have our rooms set up let's go ahead and create a new project let's go over to our browser folder now what we have here is this is a browser of your computer but it also has these folders here which are in your open tunes directory or library a history and the project route which is set up when you first install open tunes and then you also have this sandbox box project and that's what this little icon means is this is an actual project and if we open it we see these subfolders within it and the sandbox is the default that comes with it it's essentially you know I pretty much what the name suggests you can just use it for practicing or getting to know the program and stuff like this but it's basically the default the default project that Open Tunes comes with and starts you out on this little red dot to the left of it means that that project is the one you have selected so what we're going to do is we're going to actually create a new project and so if we open up our project root director we can see all the projects that we have besides the sandbox so I have this project here which I created for a different a different animation I'm working on let's go ahead and create a new project so if we click file come down to new project we click new project this dialog box will open and essentially what this is is we're just naming the folders and subfolders in our projects directory and the project is the project folder will be the project name so if we name this tutorial it's going to create a folder called tutorial in our project root directory and then these other folders here are going to be subfolders within the tutorial directory right so these will be sub directories within your tutorial directory and these will just store various parts of your animation as well as things you might want to put into the animation so we're going to leave these as they are if you don't have 1.0 0.3 you'll have to fill these in you can name them whatever you want I'm just going to leave them like this and you can click these checkboxes and what these do is every time you create a new level new drawings it'll save them under a subfolder within your drawings subfolder that is the name of the scene you're working on what that means will make more sense later but we'll just go ahead and select these and click OK and as you can see now we have another project in our project root directory and the little red dot next to it indicates that it is now the active the active project all right now that we have a project let's go ahead and create our first scene now a scene essentially can be as big and extensive a portion of animation or as small a portion of animation as you'd like it can be a single shot or it can be an entire episode as far as I know you can go as long as you want with a scene but it's going to just get more and more hard to navigate because essentially what a scene is is its own X sheet right which is essentially your timeline and each of these is a frame in time and time progresses downward so you first frame your second frame your third frame and if you're doing 24 frames per second which is standard for most animation you will have 24 frames per second and so from here to here will be one second so you can see if you're going to do something like an entire movie in one scene it will fairly quickly become a huge hassle to navigate but as far as I know you could do it I have not personally reached any limits on the xsheet as far as how many frames you can actually have in once and so that's what a scene is a scene is essentially your X sheet and The Associated camera views and everything and we'll get into that more but generally what I usually do is I will have if I have a series of similar shots I'll have them in one scene or like for instance if I have a few different close-ups of a character that are going to show up in different times in an animation I might do them all in one scene and then I can just cut them apart with a video editor but generally as scene for me is usually a single shot or a single scene as the name suggests so what we're going to do is we're going to create our first scene let's go to file and new scene and let's go to file and let's save our scene save scene as and it put automatically puts us in our tutorial subdirectory and then in our scenes subdirectory and let's go ahead and give it the name scene one and it's going to create everything we need all right so now as you can see up here we're working in scene one as well as in our X sheet we are working on scene one so in the hierarchy of open Tunes the way it manages things we have our projects we have our scenes and then we have levels and what a level is is essentially a collection of drawings now the order of the drawings in that is completely irrelevant to the final animation it's just literally a collection of drawings and then you take those drawings and you put them onto the xsheet until open tunes essentially where you want them to show up what frame you want them to show up how long you want them to show up you can have them show up multiple times for multiple frames but so beneath the scene is the level and levels can be used they aren't necessarily beneath the scene because you can use the same level throughout different scenes for instance if you have a level which is the animation of a character walking a particular character walking we'll say Bob his walking animation is level named Bob walk and if you wanted to use that level in multiple scene you could you could even use it in different projects so it's kind of convenient the way that open toons does it is that you you are always creating a sort of separate collection of drawings that you could then send anywhere within the same scene between different scenes or even between different projects and that's kind of a convenient way to do it and in most in the animation programs that I've worked with that are more based off of sort of the illustration style where they have layers you can't really I mean you can duplicate layers but you have to sort of export them to import them into different places but that process is already taken care of with open toons because that's how it how it handles things it handles things in collections of drawings that you then tell the program when you want to show them to show up in any given scene in any given project right so we could create our new level here but what we're going to do is we're going to go to our drawing room and we're going to create our new level here let's go ahead and create our new level here let's call it let's just call it level Ruff's what we're going to do is we're going to create a rough level and then we're going to create a clean level where we go over those roughs and what we're going to do here is we'll do our roughs as a raster layer that way we can be more free with it and then we'll do our clean layer as a vector layer and make a nice clean final product what we have here is it's going to create a it's going to save all this level in a in our subfolder drawings which is in our directory tutorial which is in our project root directory and it's going to say that then in a subdirectory called scene one so it's saving it under a folder called scene one but we could use this level anywhere we want but this is where it's going to be saved so for now let's go ahead and click OK all right now first I'm drawing what we have over here is our level strip and as you can see the level we have open is level Ruff's the one we just created and what this window here is is called the level strip and it is essentially allows us to look at the drawings within our level in the order that they are saved within the level the order they are in here doesn't necessarily have to be the order that they show up in our final animation what we're doing here is creating the individual drawings to then put into our animation we're not doing any real animating per se right now we're just making the drawings for our animation so this is sort of like if you if you think back to the traditional animation techniques if you've ever seen the video a video of a an animator with a you know stack of paper on some pegs and he's like flipping back and forth through them and drawing on them this is this is what this room is in open toons is it's the animator just doing the drawings and so let's take a look at this room so we have our combo beer over here which allows us to see our workspace and all of our tools and our tool options over here we have the level palette and the level palette is linked to our level level Russ right and essentially what the palette is is the colors that we are using in that level so these are the colors we can select from to draw in our level and then below it we have the style editor which okay I should be cleared I was calling these colors they are called styles in open tunes so we have by default a transparent style this is an alpha style and you can't change it you can't do anything with it and then we have it by default we have a black so if we were to take our brush and scribble around a bit it would do it in this color if we were to select our alpha we would basically be erasing although there is a separate eraser tool so I'm going to go ahead and undo all this now let's say we wanted to change this color like we don't want to use this black let's change it to a blue for our roughs okay so we can come down here we can adjust in any of these fields we can adjust it here we can adjust over here as well for saturation and value and then we can also use these bars here so I'm going to do is I'm going to put us in the red saturate us all the way make us real bright and actually now let's make a blue so we can pull this over to the blue here and we can make it lighter here where we could adjust it here to make it lighter so basically you can fiddle around with that and you can pretty much see how these will work but we haven't changed the color yet we have to hit apply so when we hit apply it'll set our color to blue and you can have Auto apply so that any change you make will automatically show up as you can see but I like to leave that off so that I don't accidentally change my colors when I'm not when I don't want to yet so let's have that go ahead and have this blue be our rough I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out a little bit so and now if we want it to create another color to use let's say we wanted to red we can right-click here or actually anywhere in here and do new style and it's going to duplicate whatever style we had selected and then we can say let's make it red let's make a nice rich red boom so that's how you create new colors to use in your artwork all right yeah let's get started on drawing our drawings for our animation I'm going to go ahead and do the standard bouncing ball animation nice and simple something that we are all probably familiar with and let's go ahead and select our blue I've got my brush selected that size works for me and we're going to draw so right now I have my first drawing selected I've only got one drawing and this red box means this one is selected right so I'm just going to draw a ball coming into the frame like that okay now we're going to right click and insert I have it set to shortcut I so we go ahead and click insert and whenever you insert it's going to insert the new drawing above the one you had selected and we don't want that right now we want to have it show up below now the order does not matter here if I wanted to have the next drawing above this one so for instance so the ball is coming down so here's our first one here's our next one right I could do that but it's just like the animator who is sitting there with the stack of paper on pegs it's best to keep them in an order that is similar to the final order you're going to go with so I'm going to undo that drawing and we can select both of these using shift or ctrl and click reverse and that'll swap them and you can do this with more than just two drawings if you want you reverse a whole stack of drawings but and so here is the reason why I want to try and maintain an order as close to the final animation as possible one reason is the onion skin so if you see this half circle above our selected drawing here we click it it's going to automatically put this little dot here we can click the stop and make it go away but what this is doing is it's saying okay wherever I am whatever drawing I am on I'm going to show an onion skin of the previous one and so this is why the order here is worth consideration because when you're using the onion skin tool to see the previous drawing you want to be seeing the actual previous drawing and then another reason you want to try and maintain an order as close to your final animation order as possible is so that you can flip through them and I think it's up and down arrows by default so you can cycle through by going up and down you can cycle through your drawing side and this allows you to flip the way that a traditional animator would where he's flipping back and forth between the drawings to see them next to each other in rapid succession so now that we have this I'm going to go ahead and draw my next drawing I have the onion skin on you can deactivate it by right clicking and handy activate same you can activate it that same way and actually let's go over the onion skins a little bit more so you can't see it right now but there is another half circle on the bottom here if I go up here you can see it so there's another half circle here so now what we've done is we are seeing the next drawing and we can choose how many drawings ahead of the drawing were on we want to see by clicking here and dragging also we could just click right right about where those circles show up so now we are seeing the three drawings ahead of the current drawing skipping the fourth one and then seeing the fifth six so wherever we go it will show us those drawings as you can see if you want to clear it out you just click those little circles again right and you can do the same for seeing previous drawings you can say I want to see the previous drawing and the drawing before that you can go ahead and drag this way say I don't want to see the second one before that but I want to see the third one before that so you get the picture you can adjust what you're seeing another thing you can do is select certain drawings to always show up and if you see where this circle is and you go to the left there another circle shows up and you can do that on any of your drawings and so no matter where you go no matter what drawing you have selected you can still see the onion skin for that drawing where you have this circle selected so for instance if I select this one I am always seeing the onion skin for that no matter where I go I will see the onion skin for this drawing all right so that's the onion skins in a nutshell let's go ahead and do our second drawing so I've got this empty drawing selected and it's onions skin is showing me the one before I'm seeing the onion skin right here let's go ahead and draw the ball coming further into frame and now I can turn off the onion skin and swipe back and forth in rapid succession and sort of see my how my animation might look once I actually put it on my exposure sheet my X sheet and now let's go ahead and add a new drawing in insert and as you can see it added it above which is not where I want it so again we have to hit reverse and just to save ourselves from having to do that every single time what I like to do is leave a blank drawing at the bottom so that I can always just click on that one do insert and it'll insert right above that one which is the next drawing I want to do all right let's go ahead and turn our onion get on will do before-and-after before before-and-after the selected drawing all right so let's have the ball come in let's have it stretch a little bit oops alright and let's continue we'll click this one insert we've got a nice new drawing to work with and we will continue this process until we have all the drawings we want now for this one I want sort of the opposite of this drawing so I'm going to turn this onion skin on so that I can kind of see it and create a nice reflection of it and then off so that's something you can do just so you now insert let's make another nice stretchy one and continue alright now let's cycle through I'm going to turn the onion skin off real quick so we can just sort of see all right the ball comes in and bounces boink now I don't like how big this particular drawing is because it of course I'm not trying to be perfect with this but just to show you for an example hmm I don't like how big that is how can I adjust this of course I could erase it and redraw it or I could take the select tool and the Select tool is used for editing drawings within your level and it is essentially a marquee so I have it set to freehand so I'm going to select it like this I'm going to right click and turn on my onion skin so I can still have a sense of where I'm at and let's shrink it up a bit you can use the handles just like you are probably used to with other programs you can do rotation as well and click outside of it and it's done and changed all right that looks pretty good I'm going to turn off the onion skin again just make sure I like this all that looks good ok now I have a set of drawings now let's go ahead and put them into our animation let's let's make them into an animation because right now all we have is a selection of drawings right alright now that we have our individual drawings we can go to our animation window and expose them in our X sheet now as you can see it's created a new column for us with the first drawing of our level our level ruffs exposed on the first frame now let's just take a look at this this room's set up real quick so we have our combo viewer which we're relatively used to we have our exposure sheet which we're about to get real used to and we have over here the level strip which we also had in our drawing room it's the same window the level strip and this allows us to look at our drawings and we can go ahead and drag them in anywhere we want we can create a whole nother column and even once we are in that column we can drag the drawing around wherever we like so I'm going to go ahead and actually select it and delete it and let's go ahead and look back at our level strip and so we have our first drawing exposed on the first frame in column 1 let's go ahead and take our other drawings and I'm going to click the first one hold shift click the last one that selects them all and we have a few options we can right click and do expose an X sheet and what that is going to do is expose them in a new column here let's go ahead and undo that because what we actually want to do is have them show up right here below the first drawing in column one so I'm just going to click and hold on the first that I had selected and as you can see I'm now being allowed to place them where I would like I could do them in a new column I'm going to go ahead and do them in the same column and over here you can see that these numbers are blue and these numbers are white and what that essentially means is the blue numbers are in the current play cycle so these little triangles here are the start and stop marker and that essentially says I want my animation to start here and end here and the blue numbers also indicate the same thing any time a number falls within these two markers it is blue or turquoise and that means that will be the extent of the animation when you hit play or when you hit loop so if we hit play we'll see actually got a select in here if we hit play we'll see the animation plays and then we have emptiness and once it gets to the bottom it goes back to the top and stops if we hit loop it'll just play through over and over and over again now this bracket is simply these these start and stop markers are simply for your use when observing what's going on in your combo viewer these aren't necessarily the final animation so if you know you're working on an animation and you just want to see a certain part looped over and over and over again you can just select that right this is not the actual final output rendered animation that's something you set elsewhere these are just for your convenience while you are working with your X sheet all right now I got that out of the way as you can see there's also an onion skin here works the same way as in the level strip I'm going to go ahead and just turn it off once again you can right click and hit deactivate and let's go ahead and loop this animation and see what we see pretty nice now if you wanted to have each drawing last two frames that I think the term is its animated in twos then we can right select them all you can do that either by clicking the top one holding shift and clicking the bottom one or you can simply click and drag and you can select them all then you right click hit reframe frame on twos now as you can see the amount that will be played will just be frame one through frame nine we can go ahead and extend this we can either click and drag it or we can right click where we want it to be and we can set the stop marker that's where it'll end now let's hit the loop and see what we see looks pretty good all right so now let's say we wanted to change one of these drawings let's say we can actually click if we click on the numbers we can click and drag and scrub through let's just scrub through right here like oh I still I still don't quite like this one so let's go ahead and select it and we can still edit the drawing itself by using the Select tool we can also add to the drawing like if I wanted to add a little some some little splat lines those have just been added to this drawing drawing number five of level roughs so as we can see right here that drawing has been changed so you can actually draw from the x sheet like this and in fact if we said hmmm I want to add a new drawing right here after this one let's turn the onion skin on I want to add another drawing right here we can select that frame and we can we can draw in it right and it creates a new one number eleven and the reason it's number eleven and not ten you see this one says nine so it says eleven is because of the blank one we had buffering right here so it's created a new frame for us automatically right here and if we wanted to because we have the blank one here still that's our number ten we can go ahead and reverse these but then what happens is this is still set to number eleven which is as we can see it's a blank one so we can change this by making it ten instead and then there we have it and if we want we can extend it so that it's on twos like the rest of the images and let's go ahead and loop this and see our animation all right so say now for some reason we wanted to add a frame between this one and this one we could go ahead and highlight these two and if you click over on the left here where you see this sort of like bar you can drag your frames your drawings rather and we can go here and let's turn on the onion skin real quick and let's say we wanted to add just add another circle right here now it doesn't make much sense I guess we're having it slowed down here's what we'll do let's have that onion skin ahead - since we're framing in twos we'll have an onion skin ahead - and back - that way we can really see which one is what's ahead and what's behind and so I'm going to help go ahead and take my select tool and once again the Select tool edits the drawing and I'm just going to move this right here so I guess we're having the ball slowed down up here a bit off the onion skin and we're having a cut out slow down don't forget to extend that slows down let's see it looped and so it really slows down at the top there all right so essentially what I have shown you is how to animate the way that that is the foundation of this program you draw the drawings out and then you go to your exposure sheet and you put the drawings in the exposure sheet and I've also showed you how you can insert drawings into the exposure sheet do new drawings and now what I'm going to show you is how you can do this whole process without going to your drawing room you can do that whole process in here and we'll do that with the cleans that we're going to create for these roughs so what we're going to do is we're going to create a new level we'll select this column and let's create a new level this time we're going to create a vector layout layer level I'm sorry a vector level and let's call it level Keynes once again it is saving in the scene 1 folder subdirectory rather and there's no size options because it's a vector drawing it has no size it's completely scalable and so we're going to click OK and now we've got a new column and it has a new level and the new level is completely empty we've just got our one blank drawing and so what we're going to do this time is we're going to draw from the xsheet looking into the combo viewer and looking it through the camera lens essentially here and so what we're going to do is we're going to go on each frame where we want to draw a clean drawing and just draw it so let's start with the first string now we are using vectors and I'm going to go ahead and do a I'm going to extend my tools here and let's just use the circle tool so I'm going to go to my geometry tool set the shape to circle and make a circle here and now we can go ahead and since we're drawing from here instead of our drawing room we might want to go ahead and add our style or our student I'm sorry our palate here's our palette so this level has the two default styles that you start with an alpha transparent alpha and a black so we'll just go ahead and use the black so as you can see the columns are sort of layered on top of one another and the ones on the right fall above the columns on the left so this is below this column so we made a new drawing and we're going to go ahead and extend it so that it shows up for two frames an important thing to know when drawing from the X sheet is that if you aren't either drawing on a predetermined drawing or on the X at the bottom you see there's an X at the bottom of both of these these sets of frames if you're not drawing on this X you're going to be creating a new level right so what I've done essentially here is I have if you look here I have level cleans this is my level cleans and this new drawing I did is a level that it automatically created called level a so anytime you just go into a blank frame and draw it's going to create a new level so we don't want we don't need a bunch of levels for this we can do this all with the same level so we're going to do our new drawings on the X at the bottom of a selection of frames to add a new frame a new drawing rather to that given level right so if I was to draw here it would add a new drawing to level ruffs if I was to draw here it would add a new drawing to level cleans and this is exactly where we want to be so we're going to create a new drawing all right let's extend it to and create drawing here and I'm going to create a circle and then I'm going to take my select tool and the Select tool works a little differently in vectors it's no longer it can be a marquee but these are the shapes that you create and a vector are actual their own actual objects so I can just click on it and then I have access to it to manipulate I don't have to select the whole thing now I can manipulate it like this and let's say I can just do this rotate it a little bit and then there we have it right or if I undo this another option we have is the control point edit tool which is this tool right here I'm sorry not that tool it is this tool right here control point edit tool and once again we select the object we want to manipulate and because these are vectors we have control points now what I'm going to do is manipulate these handles till I have the right shape so I'm going to put my control points I can click on a control point to move that control point and then I can click on these little handles to manipulate how the line goes through that control point and I'm just going to manipulate it this way so this is just to show you a few different options you have for manipulating vectors all right that looks good enough to me let's extend it and now we can do this drawing and let's create our circle and then once again we'll use the control point edit tool and we can just sort of maneuver everything into position that works extend it and the reason I'm extending these right now instead of just waiting till the end is because I want to draw on this level so I need to be drawing on this this X like I discussed before and because we want our next frame to be here at 5 and there's no X here you would be creating a new level another option we have is if we select the level the column with the level that we want to add to once again we could go in here and insert a new one we can reverse these so that other one is on the bottom reverse right and then we can take this blank one and put it right here so that we're drawing in the right level but it seems to me like it's just easier to go like this just back right but that also goes to show you that the same way we were drawing in the drawing room by inserting new drawings into the level strip you can do that here as well this level strip functions exactly the same the only difference between this view besides these two windows down here which we'll talk about and the lack of a style editor is the xsheet and so that's why right now I'm showing you how you can draw from the xsheet as opposed to just drawing from the level strip so essentially in this view you can do everything that you were doing in this room once again the rooms are just a small or just a predetermined set of windows sorted in a certain way but as long as you have the level strip here and you have access to your you know palette and you can open up your palette at sorry your studio palette you can open up your palette editor style editor rather and you could dock it here for instance and and then here we have between this these two windows and the level strip we have everything we have in the so that's just goes to show you that it's really kind of the rooms are as arbitrary as you want them to be essentially so let's go ahead and just continue with these cleans alright so let's go ahead and get our control points position all right so it's rough but it'll it'll do and now we're going to draw in with a brush we're going to draw our little explosion marks and see for the thickness of my brush I have it set to us constant thickness so in order to make the tops of these smaller we can use our pump tool and we can let's set the size down we can just sort of make the tips tiny and I feel like a lot of a lot of the tools and things like that can have been explained pretty well in other videos so I'm not going to focus on them too much but I'm more so focused on showing you how the animation process works with open toons you all right now let's zoom out and if we loop it we see both the rough and the clean now let's go ahead and we can make it so that we aren't seeing our rough that seeing this column which is our has a rough levels on it by clicking this button right here so that makes it so we can't see it right now but this eyeball here means that when we do render the final animation it will show up so we'll go ahead and turn that off too and in fact we could probably just delete this column but I'll leave it there for now so now let's see the loop with just our cleans point point all right so now I'm going to show you another way to animate and that is by simply manipulating the column itself not the drawings I'm going to remove this column okay and let's create a new level I'm going to create a new level called level ball okay and it's going to be a vector layer level rather all right and that's where I was selected so that's where it left it all right so now we're going to go ahead and draw a ball with our geometry tool let's just make a ball like this all right so with this form of animation what we're going to do is animate the column rather than using separate drawings to create an animation we're going to just move the column around in the camera space and so what we're going to do is we're actually going to take this individual drawing and have that drawing show up throughout the entirety of these 22 frames and now we're going to click our first frame frame 1 and we're going to click the edit tool and what the Edit tool does is it edits the column it has nothing to do with the drawing and everything to do with the column all we're doing is editing the column and so if we select that a tool and we select position we can now place where we want that column to appear at frame 1 and you can see that a little key has shown up here and what that means is its created a keyframe specifically for the position of column three so at frame one we're going to have column three be right here now if we go down to the last frame frame twenty-two and now we move the column over to the other side what we've just done is created another keyframe that says at frame 22 the ball must be here and what Open Tunes is then done is automatically created the animation of the column moving from position a to position B so if we scrub through we see the column actually moves from left to right it automatically calculates it and it's really important to note that this has not edited the drawing at all we're not editing the drawing at all as you can see the drawing is still just the circle right in the center of the frame but we've taken the column itself and we've moved the column so now if we go to say frame 12 and we move the column down to right here we now have the ball swinging like a pendulum almost so we've got a general motion if we go now if we go to seven and we move it up this way and again we go to 17 we move it up this way we get more of a bouncing motion right it kind of arcs down all right so if we loop this ball comes in hits the ground and bounces back up now you'll notice that we're missing some squash and stretch it looks a little stiff but we'll take care of that in a second what I want to show you now is how we can look at the specific very specific values of these individual keyframes which we can manipulate their positions here right we can click the move them we can even copy and paste them or we can go into our function editor and what this is going to show us is if we select column three you see how the folder is yellow now we are seeing its values and what we're seeing here is its east west north south value so that's the position that we've edited and then there's a whole slew of other values and at each point where the letters are orange like this there is a keyframe so these orange boxes are essentially the key frames we have set here and if we manipulate these values like for instance let's say we wanted this to be up a little more like at a hundred we could just adjust that hit enter and now the ball as you can see if I undo it goes to a position of negative 100 rather than negative 130 and you'll also notice that the values in between the key frames automatically change and that's what a key frame is the key frame is what you set and then what happens in between is what open tunes does automatically now you can have open Tunes calculate this differently by selecting within a given two key points you see how it automatically selects all of these frames we can come over here and adjust its interpolation so speed in speed out is what it's set to right now but if we wanted to have it set to linear we could select linear click apply and it will move in a much the speed is constant now I'm going to undo that because it actually looks kind of good with the speed and speed out all right now what I'm going to do is we're going to have the ball squash once it hits the bottom so let's move to where it's at the bottom and let's select our edit tool we're going to select scale and we're going to do maintain mass and what this does is if I hold ctrl I can edit it on a horizontal and the vertical axis and as you can see it maintains the actual volume of the original object which is really nice for keeping the you're keeping your the size of your object constant clear squash and stretch all right so now you'll notice it's flat the whole time and that's because if you look here we created a keyframe here but there's no other keyframes so it's just assuming that that's how it's always going to be now if we go to frame 1 we can select it in here these are the same frames as you see listed here if we select one and I'm going to hold ctrl and scale it back to circle then we will see that it squashes right there and if we go to the end again we can either shape it back to a circular circle manually or we can come in here and select these values ctrl C to copy them click down here ctrl V and it will automatically paste in the new key point and your keyframe rather and then do the interpolation for us so there you have it it's smushes at the bottom now the problem now is that it begins smooshing immediately so in order to fix that what we can do is we can just copy these this value again and we'll paste it right right about here so as you can see right now it stays at this value until it reaches this point where it begins its squash and then it will grow back out so again we can paste that value here and then it will remain constant so now we have more of an accurate bounce when it hits the ground let's see it Lieut all right so that is a another way of animating using open tunes is using the automatic interpolation the manipulation of columns using the edit tool and using keyframes and then also using the function editor to adjust any given value so that's one way of doing it with some adjustment this could be a pretty decent animation but now let's check out using paths so I'm going to go ahead and take the hour drawing from level ball and make a new column out of it and we're going to extend the column down to 22 we're going to get rid of this column we don't need to see it anymore and we're going to use a path so instead of setting the individual points where it will where the ball will travel as keyframes we're going to create a path that the ball will follow and the way we do that is in the stage schematic now what the stage schematic is showing us is the table which is what we're drawing on and the camera which is what we're seeing through as well as all the different columns now we can fit it to the screen by clicking this button and so we have column 1 2 3 4 we're working with column 4 now so let's select column 4 and let's hit this button here which is a path at a path and the path automatically connects to node the node 4 column 4 now all we need to do is draw the path so we're going to select the path we're going to select our brush and we're going to go ahead and draw sort of our bounce are you sure you want to replace the motion path we'll go ahead and click yes and you'll see that the column for automatically attaches to this path which happens because these two nodes are attached and it attached it wherever the center of the column was at the time of creating the path and that's the center of the ball which works for our purposes right now so what we're going to do is we're going to select the column we can select it here or we can select it up here we're going to go to frame 1 so we're going to set a keyframe right here so we're going to take our edit tool set it to position and put the ball in position right here next we're going to go to frame 22 and we're going to position the ball at the end of the path and as you can see it moves along the path when we try and move it from side to side it automatically moves along the path so we set it here at frame 22 and it creates the two keyframes and then interpolates so now if we scrub through we see that it follows the path we can play it so that was a much quicker way of creating that same motion and you have control over the path so for instance if I click path here and I click the control point edit tool which was this guy and select the path I can now see the control points of the path and I can manipulate them as I see fit which can be edited just like control points of a vector shape for now though let's go ahead and make our ball squash and stretch for the squash and stretch we're going to go ahead and have the ball sort of stretch out as it's going down right here so let's set the use the edit tool and use scale and let's squash it down so it's stretched out like that so right here we want it to stretch but as you can see because we only have we opened our function editor and we get rid of column three and select column 4 you can see here's the keyframe for the scale that we just created because there's only the one key frame it just accepts that as constant so before we change that obviously the big problem right here is that it's stretching sideways we want it to stretch lengthwise as if it's stretching towards the ground so what we're going to do is over here there are a few buttons underneath our column right and what these buttons do is determine whether the column follows the path as far as its rotation as well and what we're going to do is hit this little square so that it's a diamond and what that does is it makes it so that it follows the path as far as its rotation as well so now we can go ahead and take our scale tool and bring this back to a circle right here so we have it at a circle at the beginning and then it stretches out and then once again because there's no country there's no keyframe after this it just maintains this value throughout the entirety thereafter so what we're going to do is we're going to copy this value because that looks like a nice circle so we're going to select these two values ctrl C and we're going to paste them paste one right here and one right here because we don't want it to be stretching quite yet so we'll set one right here so because these two values are the same the interpolation stays the same as well so if we scrub through we can see that there's the stretch comes more I might actually bring this down you can highlight them and pull them around just the same way you edit edit drawings in the xsheet as well so now we have it won't stretch just a little bit as it's coming down and then becomes a circle again and then right here let's have it squish down and then immediately after we'll have it quite a meaty left and then we'll copy this value and we'll put it right here and we will also take the stretch value from over here copy it paste it right here and then take our circle value and paste it right here and then it will stay a circle so it's a little rough but you get this you get the idea of how to use a path and then how to use the Edit tool to create keyframes and then how to use the function editor to really get into detail with your keyframes so let's loop it it's a little rough around here you would maybe want to do some rotation adjustments which you can easily easily do with the edit tool and the rotate rotation settings just remember to set keyframes like right here let's go ahead and just click so that we get a keyframe okay and then when we get to here you want the ball to be like this set this to zero okay so we have no rotation meaning that it's just following the path exactly and then it rotates to right there and then we can put 0 in right here again and it might look a little better yeah that looks a lot better all right so there you have four different ways of animating in open tombs and this was in no way an exhaustive list of the functions and abilities of this program there's so much that you can do with this program there are a lot of really great videos out there by the community this I just really wanted to show from a very basic standpoint the process of creating animation at the most basic level in this program because it doesn't work quite the same way as other animation programs so it can be kind of confusing and and kind of intimidating but I really just wanted to show the sort of basic relationships between columns and level strips and levels and the Edit tool and the xsheet and things like this so hopefully this was helpful to some of you out there I know a lot of people have been asking questions and I've been I've been promising to get this out for a while I just really hope that it helps some people sort of understand how this program works because that was really the biggest hurdle is just sort of for me personally was understanding the sort of fundamental process of this program and how it does animation all four of these methods are not exclusive in fact they probably should all be used together in tandem but I wanted to show them separately so that you could really see how how they relate to each other and what is good for aware and what is good to use at what times and that sort of thing so yeah I hope this has been helpful let me know what you guys think in the comments let me know what other videos you guys would want and yeah that's it

Channel: Phil Ray Art

Views: 165,000

Keywords: opentoonz, tutorial, beginners guide, animation

Id: ra_QRc2o9rM

Length: 68min 55sec (4135 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2016