Using hooks - to connect hand drawn-frames in cut-out animation - OpenToonz Tutorial

would you like to make your cutout characters more flexible by introducing hand drawn elements but without losing the connection benefits of cutout animation well that's what hooks are for and what we'll be looking at today hello ladies and gents and welcome to today's video if you're new here my name is Darren and I make weekly tutorials for open toons and the occasional animation and if that sounds like the kind of thing you're into why not subscribe so you don't miss out over the past few weeks I've shown how you can set up an animator complex character using the stage schematic to connect body parts and this works for a basic moving character and is useful in many situations but when you start to make more complex characters or want more expressive movement by using multiple drawings you'll find that this standard way to connect your character's body parts might not work for you this is because connections using the standard schematic connects each part where it is drawn and doesn't take into account any movement in a single part drawings let me demonstrate so for example here's a character waving and if I just changed the visibility of his shorts slightly so they look see-through to his body you can see how I've rotated his body slightly to try and give some more expression to the wave and to help I've drawn the bottom part to his body with a curve to try and keep it aligned with the shorts but what if I want him to be more expressive and not just hinge that pivot points like we have here having your character do a big wave we can't keep rotating the body it'll look too stiff and you can always use a plastic tool to change its shape and we'll start looking at that next week and besides we might want to show the clothing differently or even transform the body altogether so to do that we just draw a few different frames for the body and I've done that's already as you can see over here succeed drawings two three and four where the body leans to the right in a way that you can't do with the rotation tool and also I've drawn these lines to give creases in the clothing which is a very simple drawing here that shows the basic idea of how you can draw separate drawings for each movement but still sit within the cutout character rig but after I also show the head and the arms you'll see the problem of this and although the drawings and the body moves the arms and head still sit in the same position and don't follow the new body drawings and of course there's no way that open students can know to move the collection points all the way to move them to so you have to do something about it and of course you could just move the arms of each frame like this but it's so time-consuming to do for every single frame and really you lose the benefit of setting up a rig if you're manually placing them for each frame but there is a way you can fix it and it's using hooks hooks live to place and move connection points on drawings in the same level to keep collective parts well connected let me show you okay so the first thing we'll do is we'll select the hook tool which is this chap here and the only option you get with this tool is to snap the hook tool to lines we're done with that today because I want to just put hooks anywhere we choose so I don't take that and all we need to do with the hook tool is to define the points where different body parts connect to each other so to start with the body by selecting the body column so we want three hook points one for the head and one for each of the arms and remember the hot points are just for connecting parts they don't deal with rotation of the part that's the work through the center point on the animation tool but most likely the hot point will need to be where the item rotates so let's put the three hot points on and all you need to do is tap on the screen where you want the hook point and we want three so we'll have one for the head just here one for the right arm just here and one for the left arm and if you get them wrong you can always click and drag to move them to where you need them to be so what that's done is it set up the three whole point of the body I'm drawing number one and we'll deal with your the drawings in a second so let's just connect the parts so the head we select that we don't want to put the adjoining hook point on the head which would be around here on the right arm which would be around here and on the left arm but you'll notice that the numbering of the Hotpoint starts at one for each separate body part so the head and both arms only have one hub point but the body has three okay so let's just move those for the other drawings so for good drug number two on the body you'll notice the drawing change but the whole points haven't go from drawing one to drawing two and then through two three and four of course it's all we need to do is to go to each drawing in turn and we've each hook points where it needs to be to allow each body part to join on this drawing so a little bit too first then we'll connect them and then we'll do drawing three and four and you might see it more clearly so on the body hook point number one is for the head so that needs to move it's about there the arm is moving to here and the right arm is approximately there so if we go to this schematic and I've got a separate view for that so you can see the shorts are the route item connected to the table followed by the body the head hangs off the body the right arm one is connected to the body with its remaining parts and then the left arm one is connected to the body as well with its pieces so the minute got connected in line for the blue ball on the child body part through to the red ball on the parent and each child body part can only have one parent but the parents could have many children but by connecting them this way each part sits as though it's drawn on a piece of paper just placed on top of its parent so that when you draw a new image for the body part it doesn't move the child what we need to do is click the hook point by a number so the head connect hop point number one on the body the right arm to hook point number two and the left arm to point number three it's very simple to do firstly to click the button at the bottom right here which changes from a generic connection point to a specific connection point it's all we need to do is set the hook numbers on each of the connection points now the minutes all three connections are go into one point on the body so if we just delete those by clicking and dragging and turning the lines blue let's up on the Delete key so it's very simple to take these body parts together for go to frame 1 so I can see the standard bodies we connect them so all you need to do is to make the connections of the hook points from the head to the body as in both arms to the body and at the connection markers that state either A or B you just need to set the hook point number of which on the three child body parts there's only one hook but on the body part this three hooks so all I need to do on the connection points marked a or b it's at the hook point on that body part I connect it to the hook point on the adjoining body part so on the head there's only one hook point so we changed that to number one by clicking and dragging on these arrows connect that to the body we notice it created the second connection point ready for later so on the body the head is connected to a hook point number one so again we click and drag on these arrows and move that to number one the right arm again only has one hook point so hover over B until you see the arrows click and drag until it says number one then connect that to the spare connection point on the body and again hover over it and change this to hook point number two and arm immediately snaps to the right hand side of his body the left arm again only has one connection point to a change that to one drag that to the spare connection point on here and then change it to hot point number three and that is it's fairly straightforward so on the body this three hook points one two and three and they're connected to the only hook point on the head and both arms pull point number one but this now has the benefit of any Goods drawing number two will remove the hook points earlier both arms and head follow so you can see the head and arms follow to the side as the drawing changes but forget join number three we haven't moved the hot points so the head and arms aren't connected so let's take a quick look at that so you simply select the hook tool make sure you've got the body selected in the exit or the timeline and you see the three hook points and now because we've connected the hook points in the schematic as we drag the hook point the body part will move with it which is why sometimes it's easier to move the hot point on the body once you've connected them together so let's move them so the arm first will click and drag that over to the right here the right arm is there and the head is in the center drawing them before it moves over slightly again for all of them and of course to make the animation work properly you need to add rotation correctly so I'll just fix up the animation now to work with the new body so instead of rotating the body or use these new drawings so the first thing we'll do is to delete these keys so we'll select all four of them and tap delete so the point where it was leaning over these frames here will then need to show the lean so there we go a more expressive wave using hooks is used whenever one linked drawing changes showing the character moving so as you can see this worked for the character leaning but it could just as easily be used it's character twists turns moves or transforms in any other way so hopefully we'll have sparked off plenty of ideas for you for making inflexible character rigs but to make them flexible without hand drawing frames that I have today you can use the plastic tool and that's what we'll be going through next week and that's a Darren T [Music]

Channel: Darren T

Views: 5,992

Keywords: animation, opentoonz, cut-out animation, puppet animation, hook tool

Id: kB7dxNuHAqA

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 06 2018