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Animation
Now that you're kinda familiar with drawing in Animator, let's try to do a few frames of animation. Basically, to make a picture "move" you'll have to draw each picture in small increments of motion, then show each increment on a specific length of time. Let's make a smiley look from left to right. First draw the eyes looking to the left. Then draw the eyes looking at the right. This is already fine in itself. But if you want to make it smooth, you would have to add more frames in between the start and end picture. You know in animated features, you will see in the credits like a list of animators, and "in-betweeners". "In-betweeners" are those who draw the frames in-between specific frames. Like for example the director wants to have a drawing of a person in a specific position in a specific timeframe, and in another position after that. The artists would draw those two frames and then the "in-betweeners" would draw the frames in-between them. Get it? It was explained in a "the making" of a certain animated movie. I forgot what it was. yeah whatever. Coz this is my united states of whatever... oops, got carried away. :)
Now that you have a frame for the look left and look right, insert a frame between them. Click on the frame where you want the inserted frame to go after. So in this case, click on the look left frame and click on the New Frame button. This will then ask you how many frames you want inserted. it actually asks you where you want the new frame, but just leave it on After Current Frame all the time, and leave the Fill new frames... checked. It's easier to delete than to redraw. And it's easier to draw the next frame with the current frame in front of you. Draw the eyes one pixel to the right. Do this for as many frames as you want until you get to the look right frame. Test the animation by clicking on Play. See? The smiley looked from left to right. If you want to see it in a faster speed, just decrease the Jif's (not GIFs but it sounds the same) on the corresponding frame. A Jif is a fraction of a second. I forgot the actual value, I think it's like 1/100 of a second. It's a shortened term for Jiffy, like, "be there in a Jiffy", which is ideally a short period of time. Somehow they made it into a time unit. Jif's, haha.
Since playing that short animation makes the smiley look from left to right then snap back to looking left, it's ugly. so you should have frames after that to make it look left again. Of course, instead of drawing the in-between frames of looking from right to left, just copy the left to right frames and do it in reverse, ending up in looking left. Play that and it will look better.
The speed of your animation depends on the frame timing and the amount of frames in-between positions. Sometimes you want to make your movements go really fast while being able to show movement. You can actually trick the eyes into seeing many frames in just a short period of time. Well, you can actually make a lot of frames and make them show fast (FPS gamers know this pretty much), but GIFs somehow have a limit on how fast a frame can go, so it won't look as good in animator as when saved into a GIF. Anyway, the trick is to draw multiple positions in one frame. You would notice this (as in REALLY notice) in Cartoon Network's Johnny Bravo cartoon. You can see his arms swing around so fast, but in reality, it's just a half circle in one frame. to show him move his arm from top to bottom, you would need at least four frames to show movement. But with this method, you can do it in three. One with the arms up, then a half circle, than the arms down. If you play Capcom's Marvel vs Capcom type games, you'll notice it there too. Cheap isn't it?
Here's a sample that I used in Mile_high and Spexor's smiley:
With all the frames ready to be finalized, we now move them to Photoshop. Just select the whole screen from each frame and copy-paste each to Photoshop. With each pasting in PS, it pastes them in separate layers. Now we would have to take out all the white pixels to give transparency. With your Magic Wand tool, select white and delete it. For your Magic Wand options, set Tolerance to 1 and uncheck every checkbox you see. This will allow you to delete all white pixels and leave the black ones. The problem here is you would have to do this on every layer. If you have a long animation, well, you know you'll be deleting whites for quite a while (if you know a method on how to delete all white pixels on all layers, let me know).
Once you've transparency'd your frames, add a frame at the very bottom for the smiley head color. This will help you keep do the main coloring once. Just leave that color layer visible. Now since some frames are repeated, like the frames between the look left to right animation, you only need that layer/frame only once. No need to have two or more layers with the same pic. You can use them in Image Ready anyway. Before you save and exit PS, leave all layers un-visible. Save then exit PS. I will explain this in Image Ready.
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Table of Contents
- Main
- Drawing
- Animation
- Finalization
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