Sketch Blog

OpenToonz Animation Timelapse from Draconian Rain on Vimeo . I made this in hopes of showing others that you don't need to be in a studio or use fancy software to make animation with cool looking effects. It's a shame that so many people strongly believe that you need After Effects to create anything halfway decent. It's simply not true. All you need is passion, determination, motivation and a willingness to not only learn but be prepared to do problem solving. After you learn OpenToonz, your only real roadblock is yourself. Keep trying guys. Just keep at it and please always use freeware to learn animation first because so many people after they realise there is not "do it for me" option and find out that you have to do everything yourself, these people give up while others come to find that despite the results they absolutely hate the process and also give up. Don't waste your precious money on paid software until you are certain that animation i...

At some point, you will want to merge certain scenes or projects together. As long as you can navigate to the folder you saved it in, it's very easy to do. Just simply right click and "Load Level" and select the .tnz scene you wish to merge or add to a project. Then simply render as you normally would or send to a renderfarm if that's something you're into. My PC can handle rendering and I only make small projects so it's never been an issue for me personally. Just make sure to fully utilize the Sub-xhseet folder system and you could very easily have a neat and well polished project with a few simple clicks.

Ghosty Process Timelapse from Draconian Rain on Vimeo . It's no secret that I love everything bright and flashy in my art and I have a terrible habit of making my paintings and animations too busy. Which you will see happening in the timelapse video above. My goal was simple enough: Animate a simple ghost in no more than 15 frames at 12fps on loop. For whatever reason I couldn't get Ping Ping loop to work and a few times I tried copy, paste reversed and that was ok, but in the end I used motion path and made sure the movement was fluid enough to not need ping pong looping. I had planned out to keep everything super simple. A basic background or blank background, a simple cartoon ghost. But I couldn't help myself, I had to make the inner body look magical and like it had spiritual energy. Then I had an idea. A while ago now, I watched a TVPaint video where someone created animated brush strokes by holding CTRL while drawing on a series of empty instances. And no ...

The purpose of this animation was to use the gradient tool with a colour set to fading out into transparent. I chose to animate steam from a coffee cup on a still painting. It was very interesting, simple and fun.

Felt kinda down so I created this in tvpaint to cheer myself up. I just wish I had of thought of the type of brush I was using a little more thoroughly because it made painting quite difficult. Live and learn I suppose.

I've been experimenting in TVPaint for a while now and I only just figured out how to get the gradient tool to work. I had a lot of fun making this. There have been countless times where I have wanted to animate my artworks to express more emotion or atmosphere and with TVPaint I feel that I can. Wonderful to work with and fabulous to paint in.

After years of trying and saving and failing to save enough for TVPaint, I finally was able to buy a copy with some help. Which I plan to pay back in the near future. After spending years using Toon Boom (A great program, don't get me wrong) I am finally comfortable animating. I realised very faster that I am about 95% raster based in everything I do, about 3% 3D, 1% traditional and 1% vector. In TVPaint, not only can I express myself better, but I have found the tools far more intuitive. I do wish there was a clipping layer, but after getting used to using masking and it's quirks, it has a lot of advantages with the way it's setup in TVPaint. One thing that has constantly annoyed and disappointed me in Toon Boom was the lack of ease for cel shading shadows and highlights. You either had to use a lot of nodes and the "Cutter Tool" and the frequently wouldn't overlay together or if you tried to animate it on a separate layer, you couldn't see the on...

My process is simple in OpenToonz. I always do my draft animation in raster. Over time, vector lines build up and eventually cause lag among other issues. After spending years as a raster painter it's also a comfort thing. And as you can see, no I don't use the automatic inbetweening or morphing or whatever OT calls it. Each program has a different name. I only occasionally use rotate and translate/position. Also referred to as motion tweening. I personally prefer frame by frame animation so I don't use the mesh, cut-out or bone animation features. If I do then it's usually for the entire animation or one scene item amongst fbf animation but it's rare. I do however like to play with those tools for fun but not for any serious projects. I made this video because I was starting to get a lot of questions about how I animate and unfortunately this is all there is to it. I don't have any special tricks or shortcuts. I mostly just do it one drawing at a time. ...

I have been working on this for 4 months. I couldn't make up my mind. At first I wanted to fully commit to raster based animation, but there were certain features of vector that I wanted to use or couldn't resist. This is all frame by frame animation at 24fps about 60 frames in total, give or take a few frames. Originally I wanted to add a texture to the hair instead of colour but it just didn't look right. I was also hoping to try a water colour look but it just didn't suit the lineart. Hopefully when I learn a little more I can do some compositing and add a few effects such as lighting, shadow, and a background I like.

So I had quite a hectic time with this. I had a 1yr subscription that I imported for retas studio. I tried making this animation in it since I learned it and I found that no matter the program or pencil and paper I still had the one issue that keeps coming up. Export, loss of quality and video editing. After spending days to make just this which I changed over to toonboom studio to complete, I realised that I am going to have to learn to use adobe after effects. And it's been so hard. It's been very overwhelming. Unfortunately I don't have the PC power to use it effectively which means both my PC and Laptop will need an upgrade =___=  Still I am pretty determined to get 2D animation to work for me. I just WISH I had the money to buy toon boom animate or animate pro. But I don't so I'll just have to stick to using multiple programs. At the moment I am using Clip Studio Paint, Adobe After Effects, Toon Boom Studio and Flash. Just makes me glad that I can afford ad...

Lately I've been working on an animation and it will be my first time animating special effects with the aid of Adobe After Effects. So far it's been quite hard because I don't know how to use the program very well. But fortunately I can do quite a lot of things in Toon Boom Studio before I need to take it to AE. I am hoping in about a week to a month that I may be able to post a preview. I will update more about what I am up to tomorrow.