This lesson will focus on the Bouncing Ball exercise. Feel free to start from scratch or open one of the accompanying demo files.

Transcription

1 This will be the first of an on-going series of Flipbook tutorials created by animator, Andre Quijano. The tutorials will cover a variety of exercises and fundamentals that animators, of all skill levels learn and practice to improve their process and understanding of motion with traditional, 2D animation. This lesson will focus on the Bouncing Ball exercise. Feel free to start from scratch or open one of the accompanying demo files. <add link>

2 STARTING A NEW FLIPBOOK To get started, you ll need to select New FlipBook under the File menu in SketchBook. This will open a Settings window where you can choose canvas size, frame rate and number of frames for your flipbook. The settings used in this exercise can be seen in the image below. *Flipbook is a tool only available in the Pro level of autodesk SketchBook.

3 FIPBOOK TIMELINE Here s a breakdown of the Flipbook timeline, that will open after you choose your Settings and click OK. On the left, you have your frame creation controls. Adding a key frame or empty frame, duplicate and delete. In the middle is the working zone where you select the frame to draw or make edits to. The slider at the bottom of the window sets the number of frames visible in the timeline at any given time. On the right you ll find controls for playback and ghosting frames (onion skinning). The layer editor will also change a little in Flipbook mode. As there are four layers per frame. Background Color, Background, Midground and Foreground.

4 STARTING A NEW FLIPBOOK It s important to experiment and play around with how you want your workspace layout to be setup. so that you can work comfortably. For this tutorial, the default pencil tool was used. Double clicking on the icon will open up the Brush Properties and the pencil is set to 10B/10.0 The first step in this exercise is to select the background layer and draw a line across the canvas creating a floor or ground plane for our ball to bounce on.

5 WORKING WITH KEYFRAMES Motion can be created using as little as two images to tell and create the story of what s going to happen from point to point. The major points are called Keyframes, and for this exercise, we will start by creating three keyframes. First we set where our ball starts from above the floor. Now, select the second frame to sketch where the ball makes contact with the floor. It can be a little difficult to recall the original position of the ball, and that s where the Ghosting buttons (onion skinning) come in handy. Turning on ghosting frames allows you to see a number of frames underneath or ahead of the current frame. Also don t be afraid to be sketchy and rough with your lines, it s the motion we are after.

6 INBETWEENS AND TIMING One more ball is placed teh ground on a third keyframe. Now that we have our keyframes drawn, we can add more frames in between the keyframes. Ironically, these frames are known as inbetweens. It shoudl be noted that we cannot just add frames in any order, as you need to consider timing of the bounce. With careful timing you can create a sense of motion more convincingly just drawing one object s place next to another. When a ball is dropped, you can see how the force of gravity takes affect. The ball will initially pick up speed and when it hits the ground, the ball will bounce and push itself back up. Have a look at Example File 02 and see a clear difference using timing between two bouncing balls A and B. KEYFRAME 1 INBETWEENS KEYFRAME 2 INBETWEENS KEYFRAME 3

7 INBETWEENS AND TIMING Now we can start adding frames inbetween keyframes 1f and 2f. First, click on frame 2f and click the icon to insert an empty frame. Then add a new frame by clicking the icon. A good way to start is by sketching a ball in the midpoint between both of the existingframes. As the ball drops, it should start out slow and pick up speed as gravity pulls down on it so we ll add two more frames; one between 1f and 2f again and another between 3f and 4f.

8 REVIEW You can experiment with adding additional frames to get a feel for the motion. There is another way to draw frames without having to press so many buttons by turning on the Auto Keyframe feature. Let s click and drag our third keyframe to the right, leaving plenty of frames in between and select the next empty frame in the timeline. With Auto Keyframe active (highlighted in Red), you can skip the step of adding a Keyframe after selecting an empty frame. In other words, you can draw inside a blank frame to reduce the number of clicks, making it easier to animate.

9 MOVEMENT Once you have sketched in a series of frames, press Play in the playback controls (or press Enter ) to watch the magic unfold as you have created a bouncing ball animation. Congratulations! Now you could go back and clean up the frames or add more frames to smooth out the motion, but that s up to you. Hopefully you have gained the feeling of creating motion. You should have something similar to Example 01.gif Click on the image below to open the file in a new tab.

10 STARTING A NEW FLIPBOOK A stationary bouncing ball is a nice start but how about moving? Moving from one side to another or bouncing and making the ball get lower and dribble to a stop. Challenge yourself and experiment but if you do get stuck you can check out example files 04 and 05 So practice plenty and move onto the second tutorial: The FlourSack