Now I'm going to go into the animation assist and how to set that up.
It used to be that in Procreate,
in order to export gifts or any animation,
you would have to create all of your separate layers as frames and then
export it like that without being able to really use a timeline or anything.
The great thing about animation assist is that you can actually
use a timeline and see all of your frames together at the bottom.
If you go into settings, that's the wrench icon,
then we go into animation assist and just click that
on and you can see that it's done what used to be the process
where it just takes every layer that I have
here or every layer group like this is just one frame.
We can just scroll through them and see how they would
play through if this was any sort of real animation.
That is the setup that we have for animation assist
and it'll be super helpful for you to be able to scroll through like this.
What I like to do when I'm setting up my animations,
especially for walk cycles,
is I like to have my character design there and make
sure that their feet are lined up with my ground plane.
I create my own ground plane because I'm going to need it for reference
obviously so that her feet aren't just sliding all over the place and look really weird.
It's also just nice to just have
in there with the design so you've already established that.
Now you can see that my ground plane is still a frame rather than a reference layer.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to select it here and then check on background.
Now, if I were to duplicate this and have this as multiple frames,
the ground plane is there the entire time.
When you do try to set a layer as a background layer for animation,
which is super helpful to be able to do.
We're going to use it for reference as well later,
you just have to have it dragged all the way to
the bottom right above the background color.
Otherwise it won't let you click on that background option.
You can also do that at the top if you wanted to add
a reference layer and you can go and drag it to the very top.
Then if you click that in the timeline as well,
it'll give you a foreground layer,
so that will be there for the entire animation as well.
That's super helpful for any reference that you need.
We're actually going to use it later
to hold the design as a reference for you when you're animating.
Now I'm going to explain a little bit about frames per second.
That's going to be very important in your animation and it's going to
save you a lot of headache if you
accidentally have a very high frames per second or you have
to make way more drawings than you would at a lower one.
Let us look into that right now.
You go into Settings on your timeline area and you can see that there are these options.
I always go with loop.
Since we're doing an animation loop,
you won't really have to worry about that.
You can just keep it there. I have the frames per second.
I think the default is set to 15.
I like to slide it down to 12.
Professionally speaking, usually everything that is selling immediate frame by
frame is at 24 frames per second and then you can either have doubles,
which is called animating on 2s.
And then you can occasionally throw in a single frame where it is each frame of the 24.
That's just for extra detail.
You don't really need to worry about that right now
because we're just going to be working at 12.
I'm gonna set my frames per second to 12 and I'm gonna turn
off all of these onion skin frames because we don't need them right now.
What an onion skin frame is is if I have
a drawing of one frame and I have a different one on another frame.
When I'm on one frame and I turn on onion skins,
it shows me a ghosting layer of
what the next frame is going to look like and that's really helpful for when you're
referencing how the flow of your animation
moves so that you can see both the frame before and after or even more.
You can also mess with the opacity of the onion skin frames as well.
But I like to keep it fairly low because I'm
really only going to use it for the line art phase.
You might notice for this design that I already have for this walk cycle,
she's in kind of a mid walking position and that's just so that I can
see what her body position is going to look like at her most extended position.
You don't really have to worry about that as much right now.
But just knowing that you're going to need to know what the inside
of this leg looks like and what each bit of the jacket is going to look like.
You need to have that information there so that when you're drawing
these different poses and you get into filling them and you aren't confused about like,
oh, like I actually don't know what the inside of her jacket looks like.
Some people like to do pose sheets.
I didn't for this one because she's pretty straight on profile the entire time.
This design gives me all of
the information that I'm going to need to draw her different poses.
Now that I've set up this file,
you can go ahead and get started setting up your own and then we'll
jump into roughing in our first animation key frames.