OpenToonz Tutorial Collection, Parts 00 to 08

hey everyone i am paul Tillery animator and author of thunder club if you found this through the Thunder cluck tumblr you've probably seen the tutor Tuesday art tutorials by Maiko illustrator meg Whitworth she has been super busy with her job on Archer so to keep tutorials coming on the blog I'm starting a video series about working in open tunes open tunes is a powerful program that has its roots in studio ghibli and it's open source which means it's free for anyone to use if you'd like to read more check out this article linked below a little bit about me on 2014 I made a short film called Thunder cluck chicken of Thor and I was hired as a professor of animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design since then I got a book deal for Thunder cluck and I went on hiatus from teaching in 2018 with the book coming out that fall I started learning open tunes for the book trailer and I should note I also used Adobe programs for some style is Asian and compositing but I used open tunes for character animation the program definitely takes some getting used to and by once you do it's really rewarding when I started using open tunes I found it pretty overwhelming so I want to teach it in a way that is easy to digest and goal-oriented these first few sections will build up toward animating and exporting a simple jib like this if you're totally new to open tunes I recommend watching the full collection in order but if you've dabbled a little bit if you're just trying to fill on some knowledge guts I've also made each video available individually now we're gonna take it from the start with how to install the program and where the installation puts the files so that's coming up next to start with you'll want to download the appropriate version of open tunes from github dot io there's a direct link in this video's description or you can just google open tunes and it should be the top result on the main page click the download link and then the green button and then you can choose to download for Windows or Mac one thing to note since the program is open-source there are some custom modified versions available but to try to keep everything standardized I'll be demoing with the official release from github when you launch the Installer depending on your security settings you might need to get permission to actually install the program for example my Mac initially rejected the installation so I had to go into my security settings to allow it the general consensus is that it's safe but feel free to scan the Installer with antivirus software if you want to be extra sure running the Installer most of the default settings are fine though I do prefer not to make a desktop shortcut also I'm gonna uncheck that once you've installed you have the option to launch the program right away but first it's a good idea to get familiar with where to find the related files on your hard drive so for now let's uncheck this box and find those files on Windows on the C Drive you should see a folder called open toon stuff and that's where you'll be saving projects work I recommend adding this to the file explorers quick access list the application itself is in the program files within a subfolder for open timmons there is a lot in here so look for the application with its green icon and go ahead and pin this to the taskbar on Mac the application is in the Applications folder and imagine that right next to it should be an open toon subfolder and this contains the open tunes stuff folder where your work will be saved again I recommend adding these to quick access and the doc once you've got it installed double click the program to start it up and in the next section we'll take a look at the launch menu before you start animating the startup menu is what you'll see when you first launch the program if you just want to draw for fun you can enter a scene name like test and click create scene and skip ahead to the next section but if your eventual goal is to make real projects it's good to know what we're looking at here alright the startup menu can look like a lot at first so let's break it into three sections choose project determines where files will be saved create a new scene has settings for the actual file will be working in and open scene will give easy access to recently saved work once we actually have some looking at choose project it's currently set to sandbox and so let's see what that means we go back to our open toon stuff folder there's a subfolder called sandbox and this is where our work today will be saved once we get to something more serious we can put it in the projects folder and but for today's test sandbox is fine under create a new scene the three main items to look at our scene name resolution and framerate if you're curious about the rest you can check the video description for more details the scene name is what our file will be called and we'll enter that in just a bit resolution will be the pixel dimensions for our scene and 1920 by 1080 is fine finally framerate should be 24 frames per second that's film standard and it's what will work in for the demos once you've got all that confirmed to enter the scene name as tests v1 and click create scene to get started so although that was just a long-winded way of saying right now you don't need to change anything but in the future you might and now you know what it all means so next up let's talk about the interface this is an introduction to the open tunes interface there is a lot that we could cover on this and today's material will just be the tip of the iceberg really all that we need to get started first note in the upper right there are some tabs called rooms and by default we're in one called basics rooms are collections of panels that can be used for different purposes and we'll explore some of these rooms later but for today basics is all we need the interface is customizable which is kind of a double-edged sword in a future video we will make a custom interface but for right now I want to stick with the defaults and I want to make sure we're all seeing the same thing so I recommend clicking windows lock room pains to prevent moving things around by accident within basics there is a lot of stuff and we're just going to focus on five areas today those are the viewer the toolbar the level strip the xsheet and the level pallet the other panels we'll talk about some in future videos but for right now and don't even worry about them a little more detail about our five main panels going from left to right in the toolbar we've got a number of tools and we'll talk about some in the next section when we start drawing the viewer is where you will see and work on the imagery of your animation a level strip and the xsheet in open toons a level is a collection of drawings that go together and the exit where you arrange the order and timing of how those drawings will show up in your animation so in the interface the level strip is where you'll see drawings listed out for the current level currently blank because they haven't made a level yet and the xsheet is where we'll arrange the timing for those drawings finally the level palette is where we'll see the colors available for a current level again since we haven't yet made a level right now it's blank again for now I recommend against customizing the tutorials will be easiest to follow if we're seeing the same thing if you accidentally change the interface and can't figure out how to change it back you can click windows reset to default rooms be aware this won't have an effect right away but if you close the program and reopen it should be back to default if you've been working be sure to save your work before doing so so that is the interface now that we're a little more familiar with that next up let's introduce some drawing tools alright for sections in will finally start with the drawing tools and for that we'll need to make a new level so to make a new level I'm going to click file new level and that brings up the new level panel most of the default settings here should be fine but one thing will want to enter manually is a name for our level I've opened Tunes names levels automatically and they just go ABCD and it becomes hard to tell what's what so I'm going to call this level first Jif drawings the other settings should all be fine but make sure that type is set to tunes vector in the future we might talk about some of the other options here but for right now Tunes a vector level is what we want so with all that confirmed click OK to make the level when you do note a few things have appeared down in the level palette we now have black and white swatches and that black is what our brush tool will draw with automatically over in the level strip note we've got a new thumbnail for the first drawing in our level currently blank and over in the xsheet this block means that our first drawing has automatically been placed in our animation these numbers in the xsheet indicate frame numbers for our animation so this block means that our first drawing has automatically been placed on frame one all right I'm gonna demo some tools the hotkeys are listed here and I'll announce them as I use them all right first for navigating around in the viewer if you press and hold space you can use the hand tool to drag your canvas around when we're zoomed in this close it's kind of hard to see that happening so to zoom out you can press and hold Shift + space and then click and drag down to zoom out or up to zoom in when we're pulled back like this this white rectangle is going to be the canvas that we're working in and note it has a little animation disk design around it so that's cute once we've got our canvas in view and like this let's do a quick test drawing so I'm gonna tap V to switch to my brush tool and then I'll do a line a line a line and a happy face alright before we go any further let's take a look at the brush tool settings up at the top of the screen size min and Max will determine the thickness of our brushstrokes if you've got pressure sensitivity your brushstroke will range from the minimum value to the max if you don't have pressure sensitivity it'll just be that maximum thickness you can change these values by clicking and dragging on the sliders here or by clicking on the fields and entering numbers that way so here's an example with a thicker stroke there for today's exercise I'm just going to go back to that default 1 to 5 range then accuracy here we will talk about this more in a future video about vector or brush strokes but right now just know that leaving it at 20 should be fine finally smooth over here when drawing digitally it is natural for there to be a little bit of a wobble that you might not want if you increase this smooth the value that can help get rid of that with new brushstrokes that you're drawing but be wary of setting this value too high if you go too high with it it starts working against you with open toons over correcting lines that you might want to come out curvier if you ever tried to draw and you feel like open toons is changing your lines too much check them this smooth value and see if reducing it helps I like to set it at about 5 when I'm working all right once we've got some brush strokes in place let's talk about how to select them I'm gonna tap s to switch over to my select tool and then I can click on brush strokes to select them individually I can press and hold shift to add more strokes to my selection or I can click and drag to do a marquee selection with that marquee it is rectangular by default but if you click on this drop down menu in the upper left you can change that to freehand which I prefer that lets you draw the shape of your own marquee once you've got brush strokes selected you can click and drag on the strokes themselves to move them around you can click and drag on these control points to scale or you can click and drag just outside of the corners to rotate a couple things to note if you've worked in Toon Boom it might be in your muscle memory and that a marquee only has to overlap with a stroke to select it that's not the case in open toons and open toons your marquee needs to go all the way around a stroke to get it selected honestly there are pros and cons for either approach there a bigger issue is that if you've got a selection and then you use either the hand tool or the zoom tool to navigate note that makes you lose your selection and hitting ctrl Z to undo doesn't get your selection back it just undoes whatever transformation you last applied so that's not ideal there are some posts on github with users asking the developers to change this in the meantime it's definitely something to be aware of so this has been fun but it's not what I want to animate so let's talk about how to delete selections the hotkeys for deleting are a little particular on Windows to delete a selection it opened you have to use the Delete key be aware that the backspace key doesn't do the trick so be sure to use delete on Mac if you're on a laptop it gets a little trickier I believe it's supposed to be the backspace key not delete that deletes things and open tunes and my Mac doesn't have a backspace key what does work for me is to hold the function key and then press Delete if you're in the same boat you can remember this as FM delete so since I am demoing in Windows here to wipe out these brush strokes I'm going to select them all remember backspace doesn't work so I'm going to hit delete to wipe them out now we're back to a blank canvas to animate on for real one final word of warning if you click on the thumbnail for your drawing in your level strip that will isolate just the drawing without the canvas and if your drawing is blank that means you end up in this gray void where you can't really tell where you are to get your canvas back you'll want to click on the cell in the xsheet that contains a drawing and now we're back to our canvas so keep that in mind if you end up in this grey void click on the cell and the X sheet 1 tool I did not demo is the eraser if you've used other digital art software you might find the eraser and open toons a little bit odd in a future video I'll talk about how vector strokes work why the eraser is the way it is and what other options you have for refining line work but for right now I recommend just not using the eraser since we're just experimenting don't worry too much about making your lines perfect so now we're familiar with some drawing tools and we're back to a blank canvas next up we'll actually draw a character and add some frames all right once we practice those drawing tools this is where it really gets fun time to draw a character so let's get drawing now I'm gonna give myself a little bit more space to draw by clicking and dragging on this dark line between the viewer and the level palette if I drag that down I can make my viewer a little bit larger and I got a bit more space to draw on I'm going to draw a cartoon chicken natch so I'll hit B for the brush tool and I'm gonna start with a simple egg-like shape so we'll do that then I'm gonna give for the chicken a little beak would be like a little sideways D shape here and then let's do some kind of kirby like line eyes here and let's give the chicken a comb now so up top we'll do a little of this and there we go beautiful there is our first drawing to make another drawing so we can actually animate between two different poses or expressions here over in the xsheet note we've got a little X underneath our first frame here with the first strong from our level if we click on that X we can navigate to frame two of the animation currently blank and if we draw on that will do that egg shape again notice we've got a new frame here in the animation we've got the new drawing here in the level so the animation begins now for this one I'm going to switch it up just a little bit I will do the beak again this time for the eyes I'm going to go half hooded and looking over in this direction and then got to have that comb again all right if we want to compare how these two frames fit together we can either click between them in the xsheet so first frame second frame first frame second frame or we can use the less than greater than keys on the keyboard technically comma or period oh okay we've got our foes 1 and our pose 2 let's add an in-between here so I'm going to want to move what's currently on frame 2 down to frame 3 and the animation and then I'll do a new drawing on frame to note if you just click and drag on this block for frame 2 it's not actually gonna move the thing like we want it to we'll need to click on this slightly lightened tab over on the left side of that cells block if we click and drag on that we should get a highlight around the block and then we can pop it down to the next frame be aware sometimes that can be a little bit finicky even if it seems like your cursor is right up on that thing you might not get that around the block that won't move it you need to see the highlight around the frame you got selected in order to move it to a different frame okay once we've done that we've got an X here between the two frames so we can do one more drawing as an in-between position what I'm gonna do here is squash the character down a little bit and have the eye of squint as kind of a transition from one pose to the next and so we'll do that same egg shape but a little bit more flat that came out kind of wonky so I'm going to do ctrl Z to undo yeah that's better and again we'll do the beak and again we'll do the comb this time for the eyes we'll do a little bit squinty adorable all right so we got pose one pose to pose three but buh-buh-buh-buh-buh all right toggling through on here I'm mostly happy with how they're flowing together but this in-between seems a little bit off-center so I'm gonna hit s to go back to my select tool I'll do my marquee selection around the entire character and then I'm going to shift them over to the side a little bit okay not perfect but it is fun and for today perfection is not the goal one thing though that I am going to change I'm seeing up at the top the comb is getting pretty close to the top border and I'd rather not have that near tangent so I'm going to take all of my frames and move them down I'll select this one and click that down and on to the next frame select that and down you go and then finally the last frame select and down okay final word of warning and I'm gonna do something wrong here so just watch don't follow along remember earlier when I made a new frame I made sure to click on this X and draw within that that created a new drawing in our current level which is what we want we want all of those drawings organized together you can click on any of these cells and start drawing but watch the level strip when I do this if I start drawing here it's not in the same level as the other drawings we were doing so here are our chicken frames all together here if I made a new frame not working in that X Open Tunes automatically made a new level basically if this happens things can get messy it's best to keep your drawings organized together so for right now anytime you want to make a new frame be sure that you are drawing from one of these X's underneath an existing frame we'll talk about more options to avoid this problem in a future video before we start on timing one thing to note about the order of our drawings here if you look closely at these thumbnails you might note that the order in our level strip is not the same as the order in our X sheet and thus in our animation that actually doesn't matter the drawings showed up in a level strip in the order that we drew them but their order and the animation is completely determined by their placement in the X sheet if you want the order in the level strip to match the order in the xsheet you have the option of selecting the three frames here then right-clicking and saying all to renumber and note that we'll make a little pop over here and that in-between becomes drawing number two again doesn't have any effect on your final animation but if you want in this order to match this order that's an option okay now we've got a few frames drawn and we can manually scrub through them next up we'll talk about how to preview playback and how to adjust timing in the xsheet so we've got a frames drawn and it's time to see how they look animated as I said in the previous section we can manually preview the sequence of drawings by hitting the less than greater than Keys also we can go forward forward back back that is what our drawings look like played in sequence but that doesn't give us an accurate sense of their timing in the actual animation that we would export here to see how these would look playing back at real time we'll either want to click this button with arrows going in a cycle or hit L on the keyboard as in loop so I'm gonna hit L and oh so that is way too fast I'm gonna hit L again to stop playback here and the issue is right now each of our drawings is only onscreen for one frame that since our animation is playing at 24 frames per second that means that all three of these drawings together are only adding up to one eighth of a second in the animation and that's just looping over and over again so for a little more clarity I'm going to extend each drawing so that it's onscreen for more than just a single frame to do that I'm going to click on the cell for my first drawing here notice that a little tab becomes visible at the bottom of the cell and if I click and drag on that tab I can extend the number of frames for which this drawing is on-screen note here's the name of the drawing and there's a little line underneath it to indicate how many frames it's being extended across so I just dragged that tab to make my first drawing onscreen for 6 frames instead of 1 I'll do the same thing for my second drawing here I'm gonna select it cell and then click and drag on its tab to extend it on-screen for 6 frames and then I'll do the same thing for my third drawing here so once I've made that change to the timing I'm gonna hit L to preview playback again alright and that's getting more clear and than what we had before I'll hit L to stop it again one thing that I'm noticing when I was previewing earlier using the less than greater than Keys I can still do that to hop from one drawing to another I like to preview going from eyes open to blink to open to blink and then we start over again so open blink open blink open blink open blink with the current arrangement in the xsheet we've got open blink open and then the loop starts again and we're missing that second blink so to get that second blink I'm gonna take these cells for the blink drawing in the xsheet so I'll click on frame seven cell hold shift and click on frame 12 cell that selects those cells with this drawing and then I'm going to hit ctrl C to copy and then click here at frame 19 and hit control V to paste so now that I've repeated that blink drawing if I hit L to preview the loop again now I'm happier with that sense of open blink open blink open blink open blink okay final note for a little bit more visual interest right now each drawing is on screen for the same amount of time so this drawing is on four six frames this drawing for six frames this drawing for six frames this for six frames the visual interest will be a bit stronger if I hold the eyes open positions a bit longer and then make the blink positions a bit quicker so to achieve that instead of six frames six frames six frames six frames I'm gonna try eight frames open four frames closed eight frames open four frames closed to achieve that I'm going to take the first two cells of my blink drawing here so I'll click on this cell at frame seven and press and hold shift and click on the cell at frame eight and then I'm going to hit delete to clear those cells out now I want to extend this drawing to fill in those two empty cells earlier I was able to extend drawings by clicking and dragging on this tab we can still do that but it's not going to get the result that we want because when I do that it's going to maintain that gap and push the other cells forward since that's not what we want we'll need to do something else to fill in these blanks cells to achieve that I'm gonna click on this blank cell right click and then choose fill in empty cells and that will extend the previous drawing to fill in that gap then I'll do the same thing at the end here for the second repetition of our blinks drawing I'm gonna select these first two cells hit delete to clear them out select the end of the empty cells here right-click and say fill in empty cells and now we've got eyes open for 8 frames blink for 4 eyes open for 8 frames blink for four if I a tell to preview that playback now I'm a little bit happier with that timing we could definitely go further with more in between drawings and more finesse but for a simple introductory test animation I'm satisfied with this alright we've accomplished so much let's be sure to save our work we'll talk about that next all right this part is gonna be pretty brief saving is pretty basic but I do want to note which command to use and where it saves your files okay before I save this masterpiece let's take one more look at that open toon stuff folder so I'm gonna go back to the C Drive open tunes stuff and then we're working in the sandbox folder within that sandbox folder let's take a look in scenes and then drawings and notice that they're both currently empty except for an XML file so now let's save we've got a couple options here but click on file notice there is save all save scene and save levels what we'll want to do is click Save all that's gonna cover all bases so if we click Save all now if we go back in our drawings folder note we've got something new here it's a pl/i file and then in our scenes we've got a tnz file so the tnz file is the format for open toon scenes and the pl/i file within our drawings folder is the information for this level that we have made you want to make sure that you're saving all of that so again you'll want to use the save all function here in a future video on project management will talk about the save scene and save scene as but for right now just use that save all alright now we've got our file saved so if the program closes we can get it right back next up we'll talk about how to export the animation in a format that we can share [Music] now we're gonna talk about how to export a jiff and we'll have to jump through some hoops to make that possible as a heads up we've had our creative fun and this part is going to be a little more technical so consider this like the final boss for these introductory tutorials to see where we want the export option to appear click on file output settings it's about three-quarters of the way down the list that opens up this panel and what we'll want to focus on is under file settings this drop down menu chooses what kind of file format you're going to export your animation as most of these formats are image sequences which are great for bigger projects not so great for sharing your work online and note that jiff is not currently available so we're gonna close this down to get a hint at what's limiting our options I'm gonna click file and then I'll just try clicking fast render to mp4 here and that's going to give us an error message it says ffmpeg not found Open Tunes needs a piece of software called ffmpeg in order to expand its export options and that will include the option to export is jiff ffmpeg is an open source tool for file encoding it doesn't come with open tunes but you can download it separately and have them work together I'm gonna do the main demo for this on Windows and then I'll talk about some differences at the end on Mac - download ffmpeg good ffmpeg chord or just google ffmpeg and it should be the top result once you're on the site you'll want to go to the download page and then be aware this green button up at the top is actually not what we want that gives you a bunch of folders of code and we need the actual executable file which is going to be down under get the packages here for Windows it's pretty straightforward hover over the windows icon and then click windows builds and then click the blue button here for download build once the download is done I'm going to minimize the browser and then let's take a look at what we've got here these are the contents of our downloaded zip file and we're going to need to take this information and move it somewhere and that open tunes can access it more easily so I'm going to copy that and then for ease of access I'm going to paste it directly into my C Drive once it's there for cleanliness I'm going to remove all these extra characters from the name so the folder is just called ffmpeg if windows won't let you do that be aware there are guides online for granting permissions and feel free to post questions in the comments if you're curious all that information we just took out of the folder name indicated the version number and if you'd like to see a record of that inside that ffmpeg folder that version number is still logged in the readme dot txt file so nothing important loss there more importantly let's take a look inside this bin folder and in there that's where we'll find the ffmpeg and dot exe executable file that open tunes needs access to to expand its export options so now that we know where that's located let's go back to open tunes and tell the program where to find it to do that we're going to click file preferences and then we'll need to go to import/export and this ffmpeg path is where we'll tell open tunes how to find that file we just specified to do so we'll click on this dot dot dot button and remember we saved it in the C Drive so I'm gonna click my computer C and then within that I'll choose the ffmpeg folder within that will choose the bin folder we just checked on and since that's where the executable file is with that selected we'll click Choose alright now that that is linked we are almost done that's the information that open tunes needs to expand its export options but if we check on our output settings again we go to file output settings and check that drop-down menu note that Jif unfortunately is still not available to us the thing is we need to close the program and reopen for these changes to take effect so make sure that you've saved and we'll do save all like we talked about in the last video then close the program relaunch reopen that test v1 scene and when we go to file output settings at long last jiff is available to us in this drop-down menu okay once we select jiff as our output format let's take a quick look at our other settings here all the camera settings should be fine we can minimise that down save in outputs means that the jiff we say belt is going to go in the output subfolder of our sandbox folder and then name is what is going to be called by default this goes to our scene name which we entered as test v1 for a little bit more clarity I'm gonna call this chicken v1 and everything else should be fine so let's click render alright once it's done let's find the file if we go to our open toon stuff folder remember we are working in the sandbox and then output is where our export goes and so if we look in that yeah we've got chicken b1 jiff ready for the world to see on Mac the process is similar but with a few key differences first note you've got a couple different download options from ffmpeg org here's what I suggest if you click static builds it will recommend that you use the download version with the long file name on the left here I find it simplest to just download this as a dmg file and when you run that it'll provide the executable file you need which you can manually copy to your Applications folder then in open tunes on a Mac the preferences aren't under file but they're actually under the program name in the menu you'll still want to click import export and then you can assign the ffmpeg path to your Applications folder remember again to save close and reopen and then you can export your jiff so that's that in future videos we'll talk more about cleanup and color which is fun also project management which is less fun but still important so stay tuned I hope you find these videos helpful and if so subscribe for more tutorials and check out thunderclap comm especially if you have any young readers or fans of animation in your life thanks for watching

Channel: Paul Tillery IV

Views: 34,573

Keywords: animation, software, opentoonz, tutorial, beginner, introduction, drawing, gif, installation, download, mac, pc, windows, startup, menu, settings, navigation, zoom, brush, select, selection, levels, frames, level strip, x sheet, timing, saving, file type, file location, export, ffmpeg

Id: 3vUF0z_Hfqs

Length: 34min 39sec (2079 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018