Using the Plastic Tool with cut-out animation - OpenToonz Tutorial

do you want to add more movement to your KTAR characters glutes hand drawing each animation but how about using the plastic tool to add that flexibility to them well that's what we'll look at today hello ladies and gents and welcome to today's video if you 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 to follow along over the past few weeks we've taken look at cutout animation and we've gone through the basics of rigging a simple character with bb-8 a more complex character skeleton skeleton with plenty of tips for animating and working with open tunes alternative ways to connect them using hooks and then over the last two weeks I'll walk you through the basics of using the plastic tool using internal skeletons and general deformations and you'll find the link to this playlist in the description below and it might be worth watching these to catch up with the basics before watching this one but this week I want to continue with the plastic tool to show how you can make use of it within cutout animation try the different kind of flexibility to your characters without having to draw a separate drawings and today I've got three ways to use it to animate the main character try to make items outside of but associated with your character and to make the body parts fit together better as they move so first we use a plastic tool to make part of the body more flexible and animate that so you can use it to add more movement without drawing frame by frame for instance to show the character taking a deep breath that's what we need to do is on the body level add a plastic mesh okay and then to build the skeleton and as always after you've built the skeleton you have to make sure that the character animates as you expect them to yep that's fine and if you take a look at the new mesh column in the schematic you'll see it's automatically been inserted before that jewel body drawing so let's just animate him [Music] you okay so notice now that his body size changes that the arms are no longer connected in the previous video I showed how you could use the hook tool to keep moving parts connected which works great when you've animated frame-by-frame but if you've got a mesh you can't add a hook point to it what you can do is to connect two vertices in the skeleton so when I built the skeleton are purposely put a point at the point where the left arm connects where the head connects and I need to add another one where the right arm connects as well and then if you go to the schematic instead of connecting just point to point with the red and blue circles clicking this button allows us to connect directly between hook points or between vertices of a skeleton so what we want to change is instead of the arm connecting to the body drawing we wanted to connect the body mesh to one of the specific vertices so if I take a look at that and if you hover over any of the vertices you'll see a number in brackets so the arm is number seven vertex the head is number five and the right arm is number eight so the left arm needs to go to point number seven so we connect this through to a new connection point on the body mesh and then we change that by clicking and dragging on the arrows up to number seven but then what sometimes happens is the body part is offset so all you need to do is to go to the first frame to the left arm and then adjust its position and I'll just do the same of the head and again I'll fix the offset and the same for the right arm and now you see is the character breathe both forearms in the head move with the body so you can use a plastic tool to add a mesh in the skeleton to each part of your body and then while animating using the standard animate tool with position and rotation you can also add some extra flexibility but depending on the movement that you add you want to make the connections between the body parts using the vertices in the mesh which makes it slightly more complicated so the second and simplest way to use a plastic tool is to use it animate part of your character that is not part of the main skeleton like a hat scarf eyebrows or in this case two mustache okay so because the mustache is separate from the main body you haven't got to worry about any kind of connection and you can just animate it independently of the other body parts so let's add a small animation for that okay so they're just a little City animation with mustache so the final way we're going to use the plastic tool today it's to use it to help the joint fit better together when the body parts move so for instance when you rotate the arm using the animator or skeleton tool you sometimes see a gap between the arm and the body you could try and line the center points for rotation and the drawing to hide the gap a little bit but by using the plastic tool we don't need to worry too much about aligning them let's take a quick look so what I'll do is I'll animate this character lifting this way to put his head with the left arm and then we use a plastic tool to make the joint fit together better [Music] and now I've got a skeleton on the arm mesh I can connect the vertex number two of the arm to vertex number seven of the body so that when the body moves that arm moves with it [Music] so that's the animation for the arm movement but the arm doesn't quite fit into the shoulder as you might expect it's what we can do is to animate these extra joins that I've put into the side of the arm to try and make it fit better into the body so I'm frame one you can move that up to there and perhaps bring this one down a little bit and then just make sure it stays connected there you go through the animation so here's a perfect example of where the joint doesn't fit properly the drawing you see disappears behind the body but there's a corner sticking out and you could change the drawing to a circle this round here let's try and make it look more natural but by using the plastic tool you can just stretch that corner to fit inside the body okay so let's take a look at that and now the arm fits much better and you can treat this further if you want to but hopefully you can see how it helps to join your characters body parts together so you can see how the plastic tool can be used to make your cutout characters much more flexible without having to draw a frame-by-frame as much and in a couple of weeks I'll be showing how I move the line where the two parts of the left arm intersect and where the right arm joins the body but next week I'll be taking a look at what to do if you have multiple drawings to the level to add specific hand positions or for a character turn around but if they have the same external shape and size they'll work just fine as it is but if not then the mesh won't cover it and you won't be able to use it so for instance for a head turn a single machine skeleton isn't appropriate it just won't fit and any part of the mustache that drew the moustache mesh will be shown so you need to add a separate mesh for each drawing and that's what we'll be looking at next week and that's a Darrin tee [Music]

Channel: Darren T

Views: 8,426

Keywords: animation, opentoonz, cut-out animation, plastic tool in opentoonz

Id: nyFQ5AlZRs8

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 27 2018