This is a quick beginner's guide to OpenToonz, a free 2d animation software that you can use to bring your characters to life. If you want to learn 2d aimation you came to the right YouTube channel. This video is focusing on the technology and what buttons to click in a software, but to get more information about the principles and physics of animation, please also watch the other videos in this playlist. OpenToonz is available for Mac and Windows. Just follow this link here, or click on it in the video description, download the software, and when you open it, it should greet you with this start screen. OpenToonz organizes your animation into different projects. Each project is not just one file, but it's split up into multiple scenes, and all the drawings and color palettes that you create for these scenes are saved under this project. One project is not a single file. It's many files. So this is why at the very top right here, you have to make the choice: "What project does this animation belong to?" And when you're just starting out with OpenToonz, there will only be one project: the sandbox project. If you just want to toy around with OpenToonz, try some things, do your first animation exercises, stuff like this, then you can just work in the sandbox project. But if you're doing a bigger project, like a real short film, you should definitely create a new project. By default OpenToonz only knows one project location to save all your projects to. I show you in another video that is linked up here and in the video description, how you can create your own project location, wherever you want it to be. But for the beginning, let's just use the sandbox project for toying around. That's more than enough for all your test animations and your first steps into OpenToonz. Next up let's give our test scene a fun name. Usually in an animation project, a scene would be a shot - meaning a moment of your film from one cut to the next. And you would create a new scene for every cut that you do in the film. And then later assemble your film in a video editing software. The save location down here, you would usually never change, because that is what the project is for. The project usually manages the save location of your scenes. So unless you know what you're doing, don't change the save path. Here, you can set the resolution of your video that you will get in the end. And usually you would leave this at 1920 x1080 pixels, because this is full HD. There's the standard all over the internet. 24 frames per second is also a very common frame rate for cinema and internet, so let's just keep it like that. And before we create our first scene, make sure down here that you have auto save activated. I like to have set it to auto saving every five minutes. So if worst case OpenToonz crashes, there's a power outage, who knows what, you know that you're only going to lose five minutes of work. And with that being set up, we can create our scene. In OpenToonz 1.5 the timeline is now how it is in most other animation software - it's horizontal, going from left to right. In earlier versions the timeline was going from top to bottom and that's reminiscent of the old animation x-sheet that animators would use during traditional animation. You can still get this if view back, if you prefer that with that switch button here, and there are also other animation workspaces up here for different parts of the animation process, and some of them also have a vertical timeline. But for this tutorial, we're going to stay in the default drawing view with the horizontal timeline that you'll find in most other animation software as well. This section here is called the viewport. You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. And if you want to pen your viewport around, you can use the hand tool by holding the space bar and left clicking. Then you can direct the viewport around, or you click the middle mouse button and drag your viewport around that way. If you want to make sure that you see your entire camera image, then you can right click the viewport and choose "fit to window" or hit "alt+9" as a keyboard shortcut. In the timeline the playback handle is currently at frame 1. If we now activate our brush tool, either by clicking on the brush in the toolbox, or by hitting "B" on your keyboard, you can start a drawing on this frame 1. And by just starting to draw up here, down in the timeline we created our first drawing labeled "A1". And this drawing A1 is a so-called bitmap layer, bitmap layers, a good choice. If you want to play around with special brushes or very soft brushes. Lowering the Hardness value up here in the brush settings, - you can also toy around with the size - we get this very soft brush. Brushes like this only work on bitmap layers. Let's see how the selection tool behaves on bitmap layers. The selection tool you can find in the toolbar up here, or you just press "S" on your keyboard. I like to set my selection tool to a freehand selection, so I get this lasso that I can draw around parts of my drawing. And as you can see, the selection tool cuts into the lines and just takes this whole section, and we can move this whole section. So, this is how the selection tool behaves on bitmap layers - like cutting into a piece of paper. There's another type of layer called a vector layer. And we get it by clicking on this icon down here - we create a new vector layer. As you can see in the timeline, we now have the bitmap layer that we created first on column 1, and we have a new column 2 that holds our vector drawings. The most notable difference between a vector and a bitmap layer is that if you zoom in your drawing, doesn't get pixely. On the bitmap layer it's starting to show every single pixel of the 1920 x 10 80 pixels that we have for the resolution that we set. Vector strokes - they are recalculated on whatever scale you see them on, so they don't get pixely. The selection tool behaves a little bit different on vector layers. You can select individual strokes, not just sections. You can just click on a stroke to select the entire brush stroke. And if you draw a lasso selection around brush strokes, it's not a cut-out like it did for the bitmap layer. It just selects all the brush strokes that are within this selection. As you can see, if we scale up the vector drawings, they don't get pixely or funky looking. But if we scale up the drawing on the bitmap layer, it starts to look a little bit ugly because it cannot invent pixel. It can only work with the pixel that it had when this drawing was created. And this is starting to show when you scale up lines. For this reason, personally, I like to work in vector a lot because I like to be able to select individual strokes, I like to be able to scale my drawings up and down, if I feel like I need to change things. But of course your animation should have a very clear outline style for this. If you want to have like lots of gradients or you want to work with like charcoal textures on your brushes, then you might want to have a closer look at bitmap layers. We're going to continue with vector layers. Vector brushes have a few unique functions that you can't use on bitmap layers. One very interesting setting is the accuracy setting. If you set the accuracy very low, it's going to smooth out your drawing. If you do a wonky wobbly line like this, it will smooth it out to just one line with not many details. Vice versa, if you switch the accuracy very high, it will keep the line as jittery as you drew it. If the accuracy setting makes your line smoother, what is the smooth setting for? If you set it very low, your line is going to appear right there where you're cursor Is. If you set it very high, your line will lag behind the cursor, and it takes a little bit of time to catch up. You can use this to steer your lines in curves. Play around with both accuracy and smooth until you have something that you like. You will see that if you use them cleverly, you can create lines that look a lot smoother and "flowier" and nicer than you might be able to do just out of your wrist. Another cool option that we have with vector strokes is that we can use the contour point editor tool down here - the keyboard shortcut is "C" - with the contour point editor tool you can click and drag individual points of your line. And you can also click on a point and delete it with the delete key if it gives you like a wobble that you don't want to have in your line. When you have a point selected, those tangent handles will appear that allow you to control how your line flows. So this tool gives You a lot of control over your line, and you can use it to refine your drawing endlessly. As a rule of thumb, you should have a vector point on the top of a curve. If you click on such a point and you move around the tangents, you can see how both sides of the tangents are linked together. If you put one side down, the other side will move up. For very sharp corners you might need tangents like these that are not moving both sides at the same time. And you get that by clicking on a tangent side and holding the "alt" key. Now you can move one tangent site independent from the other. And vice versa, if your tangents are broken in this way, you can hit the "alt" key and once again, they will move together. There's another tool that I wanted to show you real quick. It's hidden under this arrow in the toolbar, there you'll find the pump tool. And with the pump tool, you can make parts of your brush stroke, thicker or thinner. But of course, one drawing does not make an animation. We need to make a second frame. To navigate around on the timeline, you can use the keyboard arrows. Pressing the left and right arrow keys goes forward or backward on the timeline. Let's create our next drawing right next to the first one that we created. So, let's just go one frame forward. And now you can start drawing again, and it will create a new drawing on frame 2. On the timeline you can see that our drawings, they have names. We just created the vector drawings, B1 and B2. You need to think about these drawings as unique files. On the right-hand side here in this level panel - a level is just a stack of drawings - on the right up here, you can see a familiar name. This is the level B that we created by drawing the vector layer. And this level B holds both of our drawings 1 and 2. So what we were calling a layer is technically a level. And you have to think about a level, more like a binder that you can pull your drawings from. You can keep adding to our level B drawing stack by just continuing to the right on the timeline and continuing to draw. If you right, click on the timeline, we can create a new level. It can be a vector level, and the system will automatically give it a name - in this case it's Level C. The drawing stack on the right changes. We know, see the drawings - and there's only this one drawing - four level C. One layer, one column of your animation, can hold a drawings from different levels. So levels are a great way to group your drawings. All the drawings for one character could be in one level. Or maybe just all drawings for that character's mouth can be in one level. And these levels you can use in all scenes of that same project. So even if you create a new scene, you still have access to all the levels that you created, and you can reuse them in different scenes. On the timeline. You can move a cluster of drawings. By clicking up here in this darker area, you will get the entire area of drawings that are next to each other, and you can move them as a chunk in the timeline. If, just for fun, we click on the play button to see our animation, of course, it's just a mess - all those frames go by far too quickly. So we need to extend the time exposure of our drawings, so they are seen for more than just one frame. And a good way to do this is to make a selection - in this case, we click on one of the drawings - and any selection has this gray handle at the top right corner. You can click and drag this to push everything on the timeline. And this is an excellent way to time your animation, to extend the exposure for drawings, to make sure that they're seen for a longer time. Now, let's go back to our level panel here at the top right corner. If we select any of the drawings we've already created, we go in something like a focus mode where we can only see this drawing. We can click and drag a drawing from the layer panel into the timeline. If we drag drawing number 1, you can see that on the timeline we now have drawing number 1 over here. And this drawing is not a duplicate - it is an instance of that same exact drawing. That means, if we alter any of the frames named B1, all instances of this frame, all over the timeline, they will change as well. So if we go to the beginning of our animation, where there's also an instance of B1 and we draw this wonderful hat into it, it also appears later where we used that same drawing again. So this is the difference between a frame and a drawing. A frame is the unit that you have on the timeline. Frame one, two, three, four, five - that's the time. And the drawing can be reused and drawings with the same name are the exact same drawing - they are linked. And this has a lot of advantages - you only need to color them once - but let's say you want to clone a drawing, you want to duplicate it, and you don't want it to be linked anymore because you maybe just want to alter it a bit to create your next frame. So, one way to do this is to extend the exposure, and then anywhere on this exposure just hit "D" and it's going to create a new drawing - as you can see, this has a new name - but the lines, the content is the same as from B1, but they are no longer linked. If we now add something to this new drawing, you can see that only has the line on the drawing named B6. You can also make a selection of all your lines, copy the lines and paste them on a new frame. This will give you a drawing with a new name, but the lines are the same as from where you copy and pasted them. If you're copy and paste drawings on the timeline, this will copy and paste an instance of these drawings. So if you "ctrl+C" and "ctrl+V" on the timeline, these drawings will be linked. A very important tool for animation is the onion skin. The onion skin allows you to see the previous and the next frames shining through your drawings. In OpenToonz, you can activate them by clicking on bubbles to the left and right of the playhead marker. So these red dots will allow previous frames to shine through in red, and you can set them in any distance you like and how many you want. And future frames to the right of the playhead will show through in green, if you activate them with these green bubbles - those green and red dots - they will follow the play marker around, and they will always expose things from the viewpoint of the play marker, but you can also hit those blue bubbles a little further up to expose a fixed frame that you did previously. For example, if you always want to see your frame 1, because you use that as a reference frame, then this drawing will always show through in red as well, but it will not move around with the play marker. You can quickly toggle onion, skin on and off by double clicking the red and green part of the play marker. And last but not least, I want to show you how you can work with colors on vector layers, because there are some very cool things here that you can only do with vector layers that are extremely useful. First up, we have to create a fill color. We do that by just clicking on the "+" symbol here. We can change the color up here. Don't forget to hit apply to save the color to that color swatch. The color swatches or "styles", as OpenToonz calls them, are saved to the level. So if suddenly all of your colors are vanished, it's because you have selected a different level. Later, if you get a little more advanced with OpenToonz, you can make your pallets global, you can load pallets from one level into another - but that's something for another day. Let's grab the fill tool in the toolbar - you can just click on it, or if you're a pro, use the keyboard shortcut "F". And then with fulfill tool, you can just click into any closed shape to fill it. This shape over here is not quite closed, but with this setting up here, the close gap tool, you can make it so that OpenToonz also closes gaps in your linework. And in this case, this worked pretty well. However, if you work with vector layers, you should make it a habit to make sure that your linework is closed. And you have a couple of options for that: you can use the brush tool and close the line - make sure to select the right color for that - or you can use the contour point editor tool to make sure that the lines meet. One interesting detail here: even if the lines look closed, like they are right here, a vector software can only really "see" the middle lines. So to make sure that it is a really closed, this inner line that you see with the contour point editor, those lines have to meet. And now this shape is 100% for certain closed, and we can fill it with no problem. But you know what's the really cool thing about colors in a vector layer? They are linked to the color swatch. If we color our ghost and we later decide, no, we want it to be a different color. No problem. We can just edit this color swatch to be a different color. And on every frame, in every drawing where we use this color swatch, this color will be changed. This can save you a lot of work if you like to change your mind. So if you want to change the color of your main character's shirt after you've already animated and colored everything, you can do that. Or maybe later on you decide that your animation should play at dusk, when it's already a little darker, you can still change all of your colors by just changing the color swatches. Oh, and if you're getting tired of clicking on "apply" to make a color save to the color swatch, you can also activate this "auto" button to see whatever you change with your colors instantly on your drawings. And this concludes our jump into the basics of OpenToonz. Obviously, there's so much more that the software has to offer. We only scratched the surface, but I think this is everything you need to get started with some basic frame by frame animation exercises. If you're like, "Hey, I like this guy's a videos! I want to support him," then you are in luck! Because now brand new, we have a Patreon. And what I'm really excited about is the group mentoring tier on Patreon. If you join the group mentoring tier, you are invited to a secret special livestream every month where you can bring your animation, your character design, your story, your animatic, your demoreel, whatever you're working on, and I will give you a critique. I will draw over it, give you tips and tricks and advice on how to make it even better. And this is a reoccurring monthly thing. So if you need something to keep you productive, keep you on track so you get your project done, I would be very happy to see you in this workshop. In any case, thank you so very much for watching. I hope to see you again on the channel or in a live stream or on Patreon. Have a nice day and keep on Animating.