Chapter 10: How to Create a Traditional Animation

The first step to complete a traditional paperless animation is the rough construction, which is the skeleton of your animation. You would usually start with the main action. For example, to animate a walk cycle, you will start with the torso motion and the legs. Head, arms and clothes will be added later during the secondary animation.

For a satisfactory animation, complete the main action before adding all the details. If you start animating all the details right away, you will lose a lot of time if you have to make corrections. Your animation will often look too rigid.

Cleaning Up

When your rough animation is completed, it is time to clean it up and ink it. This step is also called tracing. It consists of tracing solid and clean lines over the rough animation to close any open zones. This is the final paperless animation step before the ink and paint step.

You will need to add a new drawing layer to draw your clean. This is the equivalent of adding a sheet of paper and tracing the rough using the animation disk. This method allows you to keep the roughs and the cleans intact. You only need to disable the rough layer to prevent it from appearing in the scene.

If you plan on tracing your animation in the Drawing view, you can turn on the light table to display all the layers in your project.