'tweening with OpenToonz - How to use the vector inbetween feature - OpenToonz Tutorial

would you like to use opentoonz's inbetweening tool to help with basic animations to create effects like these with just two drawings firstly i'd like to say that i believe hand animating will always give a better result if you're good at drawing but if you're not or if you've got a mechanical movement to animate then the animate tool or the auto-in-betweener is a good alternative for instance animating a pendulum the animation on the left-hand side is hand-animated and i was able to add some character to it by having it bob a little at both ends and the one on the right is animated using the animate tool and you can probably easily see the difference the one using the animation tool although smooth is very mechanical and this can be the problem it can stand out amongst hand animation and the same is true for animation from the in-between tool but it can still be a very good way to add animation so let me give you the five-minute overview before i get into showing more detailed ways to use it and as always you can find timestamps in the description if you'd like to skip or go back to a section so firstly you need to understand the difference between adding drawings to a level as shown in the level strip and not necessarily shown in the animation and then exposing these drawings in the timeline or the x sheet as frames in your animation and to set up auto in between we have to use the level strip and then would later add them to your timeline and you might already have the level strip showing but if not you can add it from the windows menu and now just talking to the right hand side but you'll notice that you can't actually dock the full height at the right hand side while the screen is maximized so you need to restore it and then you can dock it to the full height just like that and the level strip shows thumbnails of each drawing which is quite handy having them large as we have here but you can only see eight drawings at a time and to animate a slower movement i prefer to have smaller images in the level strip so we'll change the size of that you can do that in the preferences dialog in the file menu if you go to the interface section under icon size that's the standard size you get 160 pixels by 90. so i'll just half them down to 80 and 45 and as you notice there's an asterisk next to icon size so you need to restart open tunes for this to take effect so i'll just do that and now we can see 13 full images instead of the eight we had previously so that'll make it easier to set up the in-betweening so the basics for using the in-between tool is draw one image on one frame and a different image on the second you add some blank frames in between and then hit the in-between button so i'll just add a vector level to do that in and you can draw using the pen but for this first example i use the geometry tools so i'll add a rectangle at the top left on this first frame and on the next one i'll change that into a circle okay so i'd like the in-between tool to change the image from the square to the circle but also move it across the screen as it changes so as i said previously we need to do this in the level strip so just select on the final frame and then you can either right click and choose to insert a single frame or you can go down to add frames to add some blank frames or you can tap the insert key which is the easiest way so i'll just add 10 blank frames in between so the whole animation lasts for 12 frames and all you need to do is select on the first frame you hold the shift key select on the last so all the frames are selected and then you see the in-between button all of the drawings in between and you hit one of those and then you get the interpolation option for this first animation i'll just choose linear and we'll take a look at the other three in a second and then hit the in-between button and you'll see the drawings in the level strip change from square down through to a circle as it goes to the right now these drawings are set up in the level strip but we need to expose them on the timeline to get them into the animation so there's two main ways you can do this one is to delete frame 12 from the timeline and then you can select from two hold the shift key down to 12 and then click and drag on any of the red boxes here and you can move that selection of frames into the timeline and then you have them here or if i just remove those again or we can use a couple of shortcuts to expose all of the frames so what we can do first is select on drawing one and you see a little drag handle to the right if you click and drag that to the right it extends frame one over then selecting frame number two and then we use a keyboard shortcut to change drawing number one into drawing number two and that's the w key and if you go to the sales menu item you can see where that comes from pressing w move to the next drawing in the level and pressing q moves to the previous drawing in the level so if we just select on frame number two and then press w you'll see it goes to drawing number two if i press it again it goes to draw number three four five six and when you get to the top of number 12 it cycles around back to number one and pressing q just goes in the reverse direction so we'll leave that on drawing number two and as you noticed before if you've selected on one frame and then use a drag handle you extend that single frame over but if you select and highlight two frames that have two sequential drawings on and then when you drag on the drag handle it'll continue extending the sequence of drawings if you go further than the number of drawings there are they show in red so you simply drop back down to 12. and now if you play the animation you see the square turn to the circle as it moves across the screen and for simple animations i'll show you another shortcut that helps to test them if you highlight all of the frames and then right click and go to edit cell numbers if you choose swing it'll add the same frames you've selected but in reverse order so this means you've now got a cyclic animation where the square turns the circle and then reverses back to the square back to frame one so you hit the loot plate and watch the animation continue so that's the basic way auto in between them works but there are some issues you'll have to bear in mind and solutions to them i'll show you in a sec but first let me show you the three other spacing options [Music] okay so i've got four levels here all going from identical squares through to identical circles but you'll notice for press play that the speed of the change is different for each one now i won't go to this in great detail but it gives you a bit of basic control over how quick the change happens so if i change the order of the layers to match the on-screen animations so the ease in and out is at the bottom then it's ease out just above it ease in above that and near at the top so you can see the second and fourth move out from the beginning slower that's because they've got ease in for the animation and the bottom two items revive at the circle a little slower because they've got ease out now the inbetween tool doesn't give you any control over this but it's a good start and once the auto and between drawings are created you can of course add your own inbetween drawings to extend the animation or to slow down parts of it or you can hold the drawings in the animation while just extending the frames as they're shown so if i extend the extreme drawings on frames 1 and 12 and then perhaps make frames 10 11 work on twos and on the opposite side 10 and 11 so they'll move slower so if i hit play so that's the basics of the auto in-betweener but you'll almost never have to between such simple shape so let's take a look at more complex in-betweening so with anything more than a simple shape the in-betweening works by in-betweening lines in the order they were drawn so you have to make sure that you draw them in the same order so let me show you how this can affect in-betweening with an example okay so that's in between and complete you can probably see from the level strip the betweening goes wrong and if i just play the animation you can probably see what happens there so i'm trying to move from a smiley face to a sad face i'm andrew the smiley face the audio i drew it in with the outside of the head first then the left eye as we look at it then the right eye then the nose then the smile so that's one two three four and five when i drew the sad face i do the left eye first then the head then the right eye then the nose then the mouth so this was 1 2 3 4. five so as we move through the animation you'll notice the right eye the nose and the mouth in between okay but the left eye and the head change places so the audio drawing strokes is really important and if you can remember the order when you draw the second drawing that's great but there's two techniques you can use to help you and the first one is guided drawing and guided drawing is useful when you've got a hand drawn lock that you want to maintain it is more useful for organic non-mechanical things so i'll just drill the same face change again so let's draw the first drawing and then we'll go to the second frame with the guided drawing to work you need the onion skin on so i'll turn that on and then you just right click and go to vector guided drawing and then you've got three options and the one you want most often is closest drawing and this shows the vector guarded marks for the drawing nearest the current frame that has onion skin turned on the furthest drawing as you can imagine shows the drawing furthest from the current frame but still has that on your skin turned on and finally all drawings shows all the drawings the onion skin turned on and i'll quickly just show you that now [Music] okay so if we go to the vector guided drawing option and choose the closest drawing nothing's shown at the minute and that's because there's no onion skin turned on for the previous frames so if you turn on your skin for all the previous frames you'll notice for frame five that has the letter e there's some little marks on it and this shows the first stroke that you made with the red mark being the start of the stroke and the blue arrow showing the direction of the stroke okay so if i change this to the furthest drawing it shows the first frame which is the letter a and again you can see the red start position and a circle around here and then back down to the end if i show all frames you can see the first stroke for all the frames and for the letter b and d you can see i made them in two separate lines so the first line for b goes down and the second line will be the circle and for d it goes around and the second line will be the line so if i draw a single stroke it'll ensure the mark for the second stroke define between from this b to the mark i've just made here the line would rotate over and the semicircle would get smaller okay so let's turn that off and take a look at the face example so if i show the layer turn on the onion skin and then really we only need to change this to be the closest drawing but all drawings works in this case so you can see the first stroke i did was an anti-clockwise circle for the outside of the face so you simply draw the shape that circle changes into and in this instance i want to keep it roughly the same so i'll try and trace it fairly well and then second line is the eye again that stays the same then the second eye then the nose finally the mouth going from left to right so i'll draw the sad face and there's no more mark showing lines to transform so it's back to the indrina method so insert some blank drawings select all the drawings hit in between choose the interpolation then again i press w to change drawing 12 rounds drawing two highlight the first two and extend them for 12 frames and again i'll add the swing hold the image at both ends and then hit play so that's guided drawing so the next technique is copy paste edit so let's take a look at that now so copy paste and edit is best for mechanical items like opening doors robots moving that kind of thing but it can be used for all kinds of animations where you don't need to add new lines but just edit or move them it can be useful for all kinds of animations which make simple edits especially ones where you don't need the hand-drawn look so let me first give you a very simple example okay so on frame one i've drawn some rectangles if i just select those three and press ctrl c to copy them and then paste them onto the next frame okay so we can use the select and control point editor tools to edit these shapes so again we just insert some blank frames in between select them all choose the in-between tool the interpolation method and hit in between and then we'll expose them on the timeline and i'll make a repeating animation again let's extend this out okay so let's see how that looks you can see the shapes are moving the point has been introduced and curves have been introduced so let me just show you a practical example for that so there's one thing you could use this technique for and that's to animate an opening door and simulate a little bit of 3d so on the first frame we just draw the door we'll select that copy it and paste it onto the second frame and then using the control point editor we'll edit the points of the door to try and make it look like it's opening i will also want to show the edge of the door so we'll add another rectangle and we want this at a slight angle as the door is not fully open and then we'll select that second rectangle and we'll copy that onto the first drawing because it's got to emerge from somewhere and what we'll do is we'll use the control point editor again to place this on the very edge of the door and make it really really thin by placing the two points on top of each other let's try that so again we'll insert some blank frames and shift select the final frame to highlight them all choose in between we'll leave it at easing the knees out so it starts off and ends a little slower and hit in between and let's just expose onto the timeline [Music] okay let's see how that looks good so that's a quick trick to get a simple effect and quite a clear animation of a door opening and of course i've only given a few simple examples here but you can use this for much more complex in between and finally here's another example where i used auto in between recently i made a really small animation and wanted to have light rays coming through trees in the forest and the whole thing is a very subtle animation and the light rays were especially subtle but i wanted them to move to show that the tree branches above were moving and i thought this was the perfect time to use the auto in between there okay first let me show you the level without the effects and as you can see the level is just a number of misshaped rectangles i later apply a glow blur and transparency effect so that's the auto-in-betweener another tool in your arsenal to be used when the time is right really useful to get smooth action and not difficult to use so why not give it a go yourself so if you like this video please like and share to help the channel and comment below if you have any questions or requests for other tutorials and if you're new to the channel i'd love to have you subscribe be reminded of future tutorials and animations and i'll be back next friday with another video and that's a guarantee [Music] you

Channel: Darren T

Views: 30,714

Keywords: animation, opentoonz, opentoonz tutorials, opentoonz drawing, opentoonz inbetween

Id: zgEw1cyNJL4

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018