Animating by hand or with a tablet

You might find something to watch on YouTube. I don’t suspect that it will be very informative as most of those demo videos are just sped up screen captures and not real easy to follow if you don’t know specifically what you are doing to begin with.

Here is the “secret” to hand drawing in TBS if you want to call it a “secret”. It is really just a basic approach that many people follow.

The key points are that you want to use multiple elements to act as your layers of paper and you want to use the brush tool not the pencil tool. Also you will set up colors in a palette that have a reduced alpha value so that they are partially transparent. Typically a value of 50% works well. You can set the min and max of your pen definition to the same value because for sketching you aren’t really concerned with “thick and thin” lines.

You select your color swatch for rough sketching, perhaps a transparent blue, and select your sketching pen definition, say 5px Min -Max, and be sure the smoothing is set to 0 or 1 at the most. Then on the element layer that you have designated as rough construction, you start doing your sketching by roughing out basic forms and shapes. I normally have “draw top layer” turned off which makes it easy to undo short line segments if you really mess one up. As you build up your forms, the lines that you like the best will naturally show darker as the overlapping levels of transparent blue strokes increases.

Once you have worked out your rough drawings you switch to your clean up element layer, turn on the auto-light table, and switch to a swatch color like opaque black and using the pen setting you prefer as far as thicks and thins, you do your clean up inking. Typically I set the smoothing up to 3 to 4, and I turn draw top layer on so that the ink lines merge where they overlap.

That’s the basic process. When you finish inking you can uncheck the rough sketch layer in the timeline so that it won’t be rendered in your output and you can hide that layer in your exposure sheet so it isn’t taking up space. -JK

I see, that will be very helpful :slight_smile:

Ahhhh, I see. My computer is wide screen, and i was planning to get a new tablet anyway, a widescreen one. That should make things easier.