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Animating Traditionally

In Studio, you can easily animate traditionally and work entirely digitally. The process of hand-drawn animation through traditional animation procedures has been divided to lead you easily through the process.

Animating

The first step to complete is the rough animation, 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 moves and the legs. The head, arms, and clothes are added later, during the secondary animation.

For a satisfactory animation, complete the main action before adding all the details. If you start animating the details right away, you lose a lot of time if you have to do corrections, and your animation often looks too rigid.

To animate:

2.

In the Drawing Tools toolbar, select the Brush tool or press [@].

6.

In the Onion Skin toolbar, click the Enable Onion Skin button.

7.

From the Onion Skin toolbar, click the onion skin's Previous or Next drawing buttons and from their drop-downs, select the number of previous and next visible drawings that you think you will need.

Cleaning Up

When your rough animation is ready, it is time to clean it up and ink it. The clean-up is also called tracing. It consists of tracing solid and clean lines over the rough animation to get closed zones. This is the final paperless animation step before the ink and paint step.

You need to add a new drawing layer to draw your clean drawings. This is the equivalent of adding a sheet of paper and tracing over the rough using the animation disk.

If you plan on tracing your animation in the Drawing view, you need to turn on the
Light Table feature in order to display all the layers of your project.

To trace your animation in a new layer:

1.

In the Timeline view toolbar, click the Add Drawing Layer button.

4.

Click the Menu button, and select Lock > Lock. This is to prevent any accidental changes.

10.

In the Onion Skin toolbar, select the Enable Onion Skin button and extend the previous and next drawing numbers.

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.

Power Painting

When you create a traditional digital animation, you need to paint each drawing one at a time. But you can use the Paint All tool to automatically paint closed zones in the same location within an element. To use the Paint All tool, you click a zone in a drawing object. Toon Boom Studio then flips through all of the drawings in the element to see if there is a closed zone in the location you clicked. If there is, it fills the zone with the same colour. This saves you a lot of time when painting your animation.

To power paint drawings in an element:

‣

Windows: In the Onion Skin toolbar, click the Show Onion Skin button.

The previous and next drawings appears in both the Drawing and Camera view.

4.

Select the Paint tool from the Drawing Tools toolbar or select Tools > Drawing Tools > Paint.

5.

Press [Shift] + [Alt] and click a zone that many drawings in the element share.

Studio evaluates all of the drawings in the element to determine if there is a closed zone beneath where you clicked.

Setting the Timing

Playing Back Your Animation

You can play back your animation in the Camera view using the Playback toolbar.

To play back your animation:

3.

In the Playback toolbar, click the Loop button if you want the playback to loop.

4.

In the Playback toolbar, click the Play button to start the animation.