Creating perspective shadows in Animate 2

Hi,

Does anybody know of any good tutorials for creating shadows for a character in Animate 2 (not Pro). I found some useful ones on YouTube but for Pro.

I’ve done lots of animating with Animate 2 and used shadows on my photo-puppets by duplicating the layer and then transforming it alongside a shadow effect but this means I have to copy the character’s animations to this extra layer, too. I often have 8 or 9 characters on screen at once and it’s proving fairly labour intensive to add shadows in this way.

The Pro videos show people applying an image transformation module to the character and this seems to animate the shadow along with the character but can’t be replicated outside of Pro as far as I’m aware.

Any tips on how I can animate the shadow along with the character without resorting to copying and pasting keyframes everytime? I’ve had a play with cloned and duplicated layers but can’t seem to find the answer.

Hi,

You can do it with Animate using Symbols.

The Animate Take a Tour video happens to show how to do it.
http://www.toonboom.com/products/animate/takeATour/

It is does what you want, I could send you a sample scene so you can look inside and see how it is done.

Marie-Eve

Thanks, all help appreciated :slight_smile:

Hi,

Here are the basic steps to do the Limpa shadow in Animate:

1.Convert the entire Limpa on his skate animation into a Symbol and replace the existing layers in the Timeline with it.

2.Duplicate the Limpa’s layer.

3.Add a Quadmap and attach the duplicated layer to it.

4.Set the Quadmap position to create a drop-down shadow for Limpa.

5.Add a Shadow Effect and hook the quadmap to it.

6.Enter the Limpa’s Symbol and modify the arm position to show that both Limpa and the shadow update at once.

7.Play the scene to see the shadow follow the animation.

8.Add a Colour card to your scene and check the result in the Render view to see the shadow as one single shape.

For the scene, I will send you the link very shortly in your Inbox.

Marie-Eve

Hi,

I seem to have issues sending you the private message.
Let me know if you did not receive it… or if I ended up spamming your inbox! :slight_smile:

Marie-Eve

Thanks, I have 3 messages :slight_smile:

I’ll work through the process this week. I should’ve realised about the symbols but I’d used to so many (needlessly, my own fault) to make the photo-puppets I’d avoided them in case I ended up with lots of nested ones.

Thanks again for the quick assistance.

Good luck!

Marie-Eve

correct me if I’m wrong but I think I remember seeing this tutorial in Toonboom’s how to videos, I think Its chapter 16. I cant check it now cause im on my phone but its worth checking out.

Hi,

Well, chapter 16 shows indeed how to deform a drawing and create a perspective effect, but it is about the Perspective tool which deforms drawing strokes.

For cut-out animation, it is different, you really must use the Quadmap.

Thanks for watching the videos though :slight_smile:

Marie-Eve