Animation Tips in Photoshop

As I was working on my “tweening” this week I found a neat trick to help my Photoshop animations. Hopefully you can use it to help your animating too!

Using video group layers I started adding some inbetweens on my keys of this bird flapping its wings *1. When turned on the onion skinning it wasn’t obvious which layer was which *2.

In order to clear up the confusion I thought about coloring the inbetweens in different colors, but then I would have to redraw each frame. So, instead I used a hue saturation adjustment layer to only affect the layer before the one I was drawing *3.

Adding the Hue/Saturation turned the before frame red as seen above *3 . This helped me distinguish where to put my inbetweens.

The finished product 

One more cool thing I’ve been using is the Animator’s Toolbar extension. I found it from this website http://www.photoshopanimation.com . It’s been a big help in simplifying my workflow, mainly by allowing me to quickly edit frame length.

 

Be sure to check out the other stuff at http://www.photoshopanimation.com . There are a lot of cool tutorials and resources.

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

Take a look at the pieces that comprise my animation!

The gif’s are made by hand and then key framed within After Effects to build the previously posted video. In order to create it, I spent a lot of time working the characters and animation cycles which you can see below. Some portions are just placeholders and still need in-between frames added, but what I have is a good representation of the final project.

Enjoy These little bits and see how they work together to create the short animation.

You can see Here my use of color. It’s more difficult than I expected. Particularly adding in the animation, because I have to select and color each frame in order to keep it consistent. A bit of a pain, but worth it for the final product.

The Hippo will also have legs animate out along with the head, but for now the moving of the head illustrates my point about adding more in-between frames to make it smoother.

I am very proud of my bird wing fly cycle. The one above is complete and looks really smooth. The one below, however, needs a few more frames in order to become more believable. I really love the flame of this rocket, I also want to make the dog howl. Just something to add a little bit of life to it.

Soon enough I’ll have the completed project. I hope you enjoy it.

Pressing On

An overwhelming amount of drawing is happening. I’m pretty stressed and not sure if all these pieces are going to come together for the final, but I continue to press on! I must stand firm and grow steady as a tree.

Playing with color a bit. I need to beef this tree up a little, but the scenes are coming along.

These guys are going to sit in the background. Some color will take them a long way.

Adding some movement to the backgrounds is bringing out an interesting feeling as well.

I’ve been pulling together a lot of resources to bring this animation to life. Enjoy some of the doodles of where I’ve been and where I’m going.

Side view of Sparrow

Overhead Sparrow

With a little Style

Realistic rendering

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones home world. The Cosmic Hippo

Another space creature that orbits the cosmic hippo.

Animated background for the Hippo and Horse to Live in.

Keep on the lookout for some inspiration and see where these are going.

“When eating an elephant take one bite at a time.” – Creighton Abrams

Like a Reed Blowing in the Wind

Using some standard animation techniques (numbering frames and drawing an ease diagram). I got some interesting motion by simply drawng one reed reversing and staggering it to create the other two reeds.

I would like to get a little more snap out of the reed. By moving the bend in the stem towards the top I believe it will give it a little more realistic effect.

Soon I’ll have some more ellements to post, but until then enjoy this one.

Contrived Little Monsters

I’ve been doodling some quick sketches. Finding out the best ways to use Photoshop to animate. It’s a little clunky, but without having to pay for new software I think Photoshop is my best bet, not to mention direct integration with After Effects, great brushes, and texture options. At least for this project Photoshop is the way to go.

I’ve been following the work of Alex Grigg. He has some excellent hand drawn animation AND he uses Photoshop to draw it! He even got his hand on a project for Cartoon Network. I love his simple style and great use of texture and color. I found an incredibly in depth tutorial Alex made on Photoshop and animation. Watch the tutorial here.

Alex also animated a short called “Phantom Limb”  The whole thing is amazing and even more amazing after reading how he made it. (He even lets you download some of his PSD’s to see how he made it)

Another site I have been hounding is PhotoshopAnimation.com. This site is completely dedicated to animating using photoshop. And the author Patrick Deen even built a photoshop tool bar just for animating in photoshop.

All that to come to these little doodles.

And finally a look at what the opening of my short might look like.

There will be more to come and hopefully more organic looking than these contrived little monsters.