An overview of Adobe Animate - Adobe Animate Tutorial

- [Voiceover] This course is aimed at a wide variety of people. So if you already know how to use Flash, the program now known as Animate, which I'll call Flash Animate. Or if you haven't used the program at all, then I'm targeting this program at people like you, so you don't have to be familiar with the program to follow along. However, if you are unaware of the limitations and strengths of the program, then you need to know them. So this is an example of a finished scene. So let me play it through. We have a acute Martian invasion, some flying saucers and the cool scene with the building getting zapped. And then our hero has a little freak out. So that's a very typical Flash scene. Let's take a look at some of these characters in a little more detail. So here we have the character and he's on layers, and you can see the different layers and different colors. Let me go in a little closer, cause it can be hard to manipulate him at that level. So how a animation works in the program is you can select the different layers and you can make key frames, and then you can rotate the layer and then you can make a tween. So now we have an animated scene. So it's that simple at the simplest level. Where it gets complicated is if you have the need for a really dramatic action. So if you as a storyboard artist, tackle storyboard and think, I want to do a dramatic down-shot or a dramatic up-shot or some weird angle that's outside the parameters of this pose, then what you're doing is forcing an animator or a designer to re-create this rig. Because this rig, this puppet, can't do that. So what you have to do in a Flash production, if you're being economical and realistic about it, is to favorite this three-quarter angle, or whatever angles you have in the library. So the same thing goes for the robot. The gigantic robot, the Martian, he has his own rig and that rig is also subject to the same limitations. Now some rigs have more capacity built into them. So in this case I've already built a very cool little turn around and a head tilt. And that's going to allow the animation crew to use that to cannibalize that later on. They can cheat and make it look like they've animated this themselves, which is great. I've also created little hand cranks on the claws, so this can be repurposed. But if you again were to do a birds eye down-shot of this, this rig couldn't be pushed to that. That would be a new rig, so be considerate to the crew following. And don't overload your storyboard with strange angles. Because if you do, that could really, really mess things up. You have to check with the director or the money people to see if you have the time and the capacity to do that. So we're back into our main file, which we were picking up from the previous movie. And I made one small change, this layer was called scenes, and I've called it scene info. And I think that's a better way of describing it, because as I create notes, I'll hit F7 to make an empty key, and then if I want to make a note, I can go into the properties panel and type in start camera move. And this is a lovely way to make notes for yourself and also for the people who follow after you, especially if you're storyboarding a big long sequence. It's nice to have plain English, short concise, lower case instructions that tell people who follow, here's what's hppening, or here's what I think should happen, just so they can interpret it. So let's clear that key frame, and I think we're ready to import some reference images. So let's go to File. Import. Import to library. And in here we have three images from Bumpstead the robot, and his size comparison, so let's open that. Nothing's happened, that's because they've gone into the library. So that's our library folder, and here they are. Wonderful. So let's select Bumpstead, and then holding down Shift we can select all three, and right click, and we can go move to new folder. And I'll this one Reference. You can also make a new folder from here, and just drag and drop like you would on your desktop. So here we have our images, cleanly sorted in there. Now it's nice also. You can keep them in the library if you like, but it's kind of hard to see them. We can scale that up a little bit. But it's kind of hard to see them, and they're a little pixely. So let's make a reference layer here, so I'm just going to select in here, make a new layer, drag it to the bottom, call it Reference. I'm also going to guide it out, because I don't want to see this thing appearing as I'm scrubbing through the time line on the main stage, rather rendering out. So let's just hide all these for now, and I'll hit F7, F7, F7. And I'm just going to drag and drop the giant robot size comparison. Let's zoom out a little bit, the Z is the shortcut for the magnifying tool, pretty obvious. So let's click on... I think we'll put Bumpstead in next, and he's kind of Ned Flanders type character who is going to turn into Bruce Willis in Die Hard by the end of the show. So we have then the giant robot model sheet, so there we go. So we have, one, two, three. They're a little big, they're bleeding off the stage, so let's click on this one and we'll go, Modify, Transform, Scale and Rotate. And I think the scale on this one will be, let's make it 17.7%. No, too small, so I'm going to eyeball it. I guessed wrong. Whatever that is, so if I want to find out what that transform was, I can click on the transform tab. Click on this, and its about a 50% reduction, which is nice, that's clean. So let me go into the next one. Modify, Transform, Scale and Rotate, 50. And you want to align these, so open the align tab, just to be clean. You'll probably notice by now that I am picky, and I just find that when I'm not picky, I get punished. I get punished really badly by the program, so it's something that I've been kind of forced into. So in transform two, we can also change the scale individually, so these also give you more controls over making fine tunes to the various objects. And again in the align panel, with align the stage clicked on. We align horizontal, and we align vertically. So you have all kinds of options here. So I see if I drag this off, very easy to line things up. I think of all the programs I've used, I think Flash is the the most friendly. Flash Animate is the most friendly in terms of these align tools. I love these, they're a really strong feature of the program. And you can also modify things like rotation and you can even skew if you want. I wouldn't really use these, but they're there for you. So that's it, we've got our reference layer in, It's guided out. I think we can un-hide these layers now. So if we're ever a little foggy about the designs of the character, you could always have them printed out on a sheet of paper on a different screen. But it's nice to have them travel with the Flash file so that if for example you hand off the Flash file to another artist, the reference layer goes with it.