Clip Studio is well known for the illustration and comic capabilities and for some people, for the traditional 2D animation resources, but do you know that since the introduction of the “Enable keyframes” back in version 1.8.4 is possible to do puppet animation. For those who do not know what puppet animation is, this is a description of its function.

 

Puppet animation is a way of creating 2D animation using a 2D digital puppet, (called character rig) to position the character, and then use a system of motion paths (or splines) to define the movement of the character between those poses.

 

The way of “Rig” a character in clip studio is using folders, this way Clip creates a hierarchy, so everting in the first or main folder, controls the layers or folder inside. In the next animated gift, you can see what happened when you place the layers in the folder. After that I create another folder to group hand and arm together, the hierarchy is: /Folder 1/controls everything, /Folder 2/ controls R-Arm, and R-Hand…

 

Is really important to set up the center of rotation for the layer in frame 1, if not the folders or layer will move from the center of the canvas, look at the next animated gift showing what happened if you don't set up the center of rotation.

The folder structure for a full-body digital puppet is shown next, the names are not important you can choose the ones that mean something to you, a thing I did was to place a symbol (Rhombus) in front of the names of the folders or layers that I wanted to animate, in this way, I avoided making mistakes in the selection of the parts I wanted to move.

The difference between 2D rigged characters and hand-drawn characters can get a bit blurry, because you can mix it together, creating animation folders for frame by frame animation and mixed with the digital puppet. Next, there is an example of this technique in which the chest of the character was made using frame by frame animation, but the rest is done with the option “Enable keyframes in the layer”

If you want to check out the process in detail, please visit my video on YouTube. The video is long (About 35 minutes) but the process is made from beginning to end with an example of a walk cycle. I hope you find it interesting.

Thank you, I hope this tutorial is easy to follow if there is any doubt please let me know.