Using the plastic tool for cut out animation - OpenToonz tutorial

hello friends and welcome to a look at using the plastic tool as a simplified way to create cut out animation so last week i chose the drawing of frye from futurama to use as a base for animating him to help keep consistency with the character and then i showed two ways that you can add life and animation to them and that's by animating smaller parts of the drawing and in my case that's the eyes and mouth but obviously you can animate any individual parts of the character whether it be the arms legs body or whatever then also by using the plastic tool to move the overall character a little so he's not so static and the outcome is really nice but the plastic tool can only animate the drawing that you have so for instance for this drawing the arm is drawn in front of the body so you can't move it outside of the body and of course you can draw the arm on a separate column and connect it to this level as i've shown in other videos and you can see these in my playlist called cut out animation and i showed a simple version using bb8 with just two bones and also a more complicated one using a skeleton but before you know it the more complicated you make it you'll have so many columns it can get quite unwieldy with one column for the body one for each leg one for each arm then there's the head and the face pieces and if you want more subtle movement you might add a plastic tool mesh to each of these so you can easily get more than a dozen columns for one character which just gets crazy after a while and for a lot of animation you don't need to animate each of these pieces so you don't necessarily need to build a full body skeleton and i can't remember who said it but in a tutorial i watched an animator said that for cutouts animation there isn't one rig to rule them all so you're likely going to create a different rig depending on the situation that you're using the character in so only rig the parts of the character they actually want to move and for some animation that means no rig at all however you can use the plastic tool as a kind of rig so today i'd like to show that alternative so as i said obviously you can't see behind the arm to see the body so what we need to do to be able to use the plastic tool in a single column is to have the arm drawn not in front of the body and the way to do that is just to draw it to the side so what i'm doing here is i'm raising the arm on this drawing so i'm drawing in the jackets and trousers as i imagine they are behind the arm then once that was done i drew the arm to one side then i copy and pasted that to each of the rest of the drawings in the level now ordinarily if you knew you wanted to do this from the start you just draw the arm separate from the body and then as you duplicated the drawing to make amendments to the face it would already have the separated arm in place it is important to have the separated arm in the same place on each drawing so that when we create the mesh in the next stage it covers the arm on each drawing so you don't see a change between the movement of the arm as you change from drawing to drawing so the next stage is to add a plastic tool mesh so go to drawer number one go to the plastic tool and hit create mesh and as i did previously i added a slight margin to cover the changes in the mouth shapes to make sure they're contained within the mesh and then hit apply and because we already had a mesh previously it's asked what we want to do if one's replaced that mesh or create a new one and i'm happy to delete the old mesh level entirely so i'll just hit apply okay so there's the mesh over the drawing and you'll notice that although the two pieces of fry are separate on screen anywhere where there's ink in the drawing has a mesh drawn around it so simply extend the mesh to the end of the animation and then we'll create the skeleton so we change the mode to build skeleton we'll zoom out and now build the skeleton similar to last time so starting at the feet to approximately the waist to the neck top of the head and then from any other node i'll go from the root it doesn't really matter you then go to the shoulder elbow wrist and hand and as before i'll paint rigid on the legs so they don't move as i animate be careful not to paint rigid over the hand and then change the animate mode and check that that's all works so he can lean backwards and forwards and his head goes backwards and forwards and the arm bends at the elbow and can rotate okay so as we did before you right click on any joint node and choose set global rest key and that places all of the nodes back to their original start positions what we need is a new start position so the arm is in the correct place so we need to move the top of the arm to the shoulder of the body and because we've got the tick box ticked that says keep distance can only move in an arc around the point where it's joined which is actually quite close but it's not quite right so untick keep distance and then drag that to the shoulder we zoom in and then place it exactly where we want it that's fine and then tick keep distance again to ensure we don't stretch any other parts of the body so the animation we want is that as fry looks towards us he's made some movements so a few frames before we'll add a global key to keep him in this position so during the first whatever that is dozen or so frames he stays still and then leading up to frame two in these frames i want him to lean backwards a little bit look up a little bit and then i want the arm to come forward so simply rotate the arm forward and at the elbow bring the hand down a little bit so between those few frames the arc moves forward at the same time so one thing i've noticed is that the arm moves slightly away from the shoulder as the character leans back just there and that's because the shoulder bone or joint is connected to the heel now i shouldn't really have done that to get away around this what i should have done if i go back to build skeleton is i should have put a joint from anywhere on here to near the shoulder on the body and then from the shoulder to the shoulder joint of the arm and then as this point on the body moves left and right or stretches up and down the arm joint will stay the same distance away so we'll stay connected visually connected to the body so if i actually make that change now by clicking on and deleting each of the joints here so there we go that's fry animated in a single column using the plastic tool to simulate cutout animation why not give it a go yourself and see what you can animate using the plastic tool and i'll see you next week for another video and that's a guarantee [Music] you

Channel: Darren T

Views: 50,072

Keywords: animation, opentoonz, fry from futurama, animating philip j fry, opentoonz cut out animation, opentoonz plastic tool animation

Id: Ge3orj0eg5U

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020