Andi Ortega

1. Ah Fai was a chief animator for McDull’s animated features. He’s super cool. Ultimate senpai. 

2. Previous post on breakdowns right here 

Some thoughts on acceleration and force

I presented this in the order of how I slowly understood the trick of delivering force - first an abstract concept of impact taught by Ah Fai, then a more complicated discovery on the acceleration pattern, last back to a more abstract concept of breakdowns. 

Like I’ve previously stressed, 2D animation is everything but one single approach. There’s no one rule that rules them all, but interchangeable ideas with math, or physics, or music, etc. There’s no “perfect” animation either, but what is perceived as organic and dynamic. E.g., using the Fibonacci numbers to animate didn’t bring me a perfect animation! On the other hand, a tiny change in the pattern could already make the feeling of force so much more powerful. 

OpenToonz Download

I decided to jump into the program and figure it out. So, here’s a super quick and dirty guide to all the basic info you might need.

Toolbar / Brushes

The toolbar is automatically hidden. You can get it with Windows > Other Windows > Toolbar

It will open as a pop-up and you can drag it and snap it into place.

Timeline

The timeline is a little different from Flash/Toonboom Harmony in that it reads more like a x-sheet. Layers (”Columns”) go from left to right and Frames go top to bottom.

Right-clicking on a frame will give you options to put the frame on 2′s, etc. (the “step” option).

Onion Skin

This was one of the more confusing ones. You can get to it with Customize > Preferences > Onion Skin

Be sure to check the box next to “Onion Skin ON”.

Getting onion skin to work in the timeline is a little weird at times. Like in Flash and Harmony, there are markers you can drag to expand the onion skin. If you aren’t seeing your previous drawing, try putting your frame on 2′s.

Viewing Your Work

To play your animation you’re going to need to open a new window by going to Windows > ComboViewer

It has play, loop, etc.

if you’re having trouble getting toonz to register your brush strokes like i was having, you need to slowwwww dowwwwwn. let your cursor hang out for a moment where you’re gonna lay your stroke, and start off nice and easy. then toonz can keep up with you. 

in the xsheet, when you have a frame selected, there’s a little grey tab underneath that frame. if you click on the tab and drag, you can stretch that drawing over several frames. 

opentoonz isn’t very good at saving. if you save a project and then close the program (or have it crash on you) then the next time you open it up, the levels you were using will be lit up as if you’d been using them, but there will be nothing in the frames. if anyone can tell me if they’ve found out a way to get those frames back, i’d be pleased as punch to hear.

be very careful about rightclicking. if something goes the slightest bit wrong, toonz will throw a tantrum and throw up loads and loads of specks and lines in random levels and frames. safest way to get around this is ctrl+click for me, but it still messes up pretty often. 

you can have your tools, tool settings, and play/pause/loop bars all tidily set up on your canvas by right clicking on the canvas and going down to the GUI options. however, whenever i have any of these enabled, toonz throws a tantrum and freezes my brush, so i’m getting by on just the keyboard shortcuts, which you can play with in File. 

i have yet to get an animation to getting rendered, as the program always crashes, so i’m taking a break.

The open-source version of Toonz is here! This link includes download options for OpenToonz (Studio Ghibli Edition) and GTS, the scanning tool developed by Ghibli.