Animating Cut-Out Characters - Part 3

Here is the long awaited part 3 of my series on animating cut-out characters. I apologize for the delay. If you have not read Animating Cut-Out Characters - Part 1 or Animating Cut-Out Characters - Part 2 previously then I suggest that you do so before proceeding here.

We are doing a pose to pose approach of keyframe animating a character walking. By pose to pose we mean that we layout important key boundary poses first, often referred to as extreme poses. Then we go back and fill in between those extreme key poses additional key poses, and then we go back and fill in more in between poses until we are satisfied with our animating of the walk. An alternate approach is to animate straight ahead which is how I did the walk for my Animating a Cut-Out Character in Toon Boom tutorial. Either approach is valid and useful and quite frankly a combination of the two approaches is more natural. Pose to pose sets up the basic animation and straight ahead is great for tweaking and smoothing.

A question that often arises about the work flow of keyframe animation is "why do you not want the segments between keys to automatically be set to non-constant segments as you lay down the keys?" The answer is this is a personal choice and TBS is designed to work either way. I believe that tweening while setting keys interferes with my seeing the work evolve during flipping or onion skinning. Automatic tweens are defined by the keys on each end of the segment. So they don't really exist as a pose, they just reflect other poses which can be confusing. If we were hand animating we wouldn't see those final inbetweens while laying out our main poses so having automatic tweening turned off is just a more natural way to animate.

Most of the instructions and the actual resulting movies are contained in the slide show so take your time, navigate using the Previous and Next arrows provided and backtrack through the slides as needed to follow along. As always, read the tutorial all the way through a couple of times and then do the work on your own as that is the only way to learn. Don't be afraid to experiment and expect to make a mistake or two as you go. We all learn from our mistakes, hopefully.



I hope you enjoyed this tutorial series and learned some new skills. If you have questions or comments be sure to communicate them to me either at the Toon Boom Studio User Forums, The Discussion Area of The Cartooning In Toon Boom WIKI, or directly via e-mail or use the comments section here on the blog.