Hello, in this new tutorial I'll talk about how to animate facial expressions in CSP. I'll explain a little about the basics of the animation tools, but if you want to learn and understand the tools better, I'll leave you with official CSP tips.

Now let's begin.

Create file

First, to create an animation file, you'll click on "Animation" at the top, and at the bottom, you'll be able to choose the frame rate. The higher the frame rate, the more frames it will have.

There's also the duration; in this case, I chose 24fps.

You can also choose the size of the animation depending on what you want to do.

Basic tools

I will give a brief explanation to understand a little how the animation tools work.

Cells

Animation cels are where we can draw, they work similarly to layers in drawings, except that the layers are not linked to the cells.

To create or add a cel, click on the button that says [Create animation cel]

As you can see, a [Timeline] is formed that serves to organize the animations and within this are the 24 fps that we gave as duration, with the red line we can select the frames and add cells, the blue lines are to delimit the duration of the animation.

Within the timelines, we can create animation folders to keep the cells more organized with the option next to (add animation cell), which is [Create animation folder]. (In the video, you can see that the animation folder is selected while I add cells.)

The duration of each cell will depend on the distance between one cell and another.

When we add an animation cell, a layer will automatically be created in the folder.

If we want to extend the time in which a cell appears, we must keep the cell selected and drag it to where we want it to be extended.

If we want to edit the frame rate we can go to the [Animation] window, [Timeline] and [Change Frame Rate]

Onion paper

Onion paper helps us to observe the drawing that is before or after where we added a cel, it helps us as a reference to draw on it.

Extend time

To extend the timeline, drag where the frames appear.

Example

(24 fps speed)

Expressions

By understanding the basics, we can get started.

 

 

In order to animate a change of expression we have to take into account that there are steps, in the example below we have the beginning which is (1) and we want it to be like drawing (2) so to get to that we have to draw the development of the expression which is (1a).

We have to think about how we want the character to look when drawing, it is good to look for references on how the eyes, mouth, nose, etc. move.

Example of what it looks like

Eyes

To understand it better, we will do it in parts.

The first animation cel will be this one.

The last one is that he has a change in his eyes

I want you to close your eyes so you can see the change in your eyes.

So I start drawing between cel 1 and 2

It might look something like this

(1b and 1c) have their eyes half closed

We can adjust the cel so that the speed varies and looks how we want.

Here you see a little faster because I made the cell between 1 and 1a smaller.

Boca

The process for the mouth is the same as for the eyes.

We define the important cells and draw the mouth movements.

It is important to have references when drawing expressions so that the movement looks natural.

You can see how I arranged them.

Result

Method

In this case I wanted the character to be smiling so I drew part by part how I wanted it to look.

In the timeline you can see that the drawing is divided into two folders. In the one below I left the hair alone and in the folder above I animated the eyes and mouth.

Result

It can change subtly if we change the frame rate.

Tip

In order not to draw the entire character from scratch we can select it and click on [Copy and paste] creating a new layer with the same drawing, only this layer will not be shown in the timeline since it is not linked to any animation cel so we select the frame where we want to add it and right click and the layers that we can put in that frame will appear and we select the layer that we copied and it will be shown in that frame creating an animation cel.

Example

We can create animations that don't change too much to make it easier to clean up.

(Just copy it and rotate the drawing adjusting details)

Example

In this case I wanted her to be angry but sad at the same time so I put 3 main frames.

1

2

3

And I drew the parts of the movement I wanted to show.

This is what the timeline will look like with the pauses and speed I liked.

Result

Keep

To save it, we can select between:

• Image Sequence

• GIF

• Animated Sticker

• Movie (Video)

Final

I hope you liked it and that it's easy to understand. I think the most important thing when drawing is to see references of how we show our emotions and how we express ourselves so that it's easier for you and you can practice. Thank you very much for reading until the end.