Introduction

Clip Studio Paint offers lots of incredible tools for illustration, comics and animation. The newly implemented keyframes in Clip Studio Paint’s animation functions makes your workflow much easier and faster. I will be covering how to use them as well as the use of the Camera in basic examples, a popped out character and animated background along with camera movement.

YouTube Video Tutorial

The video explains the technical process better in detail. If you're stuck on something in the process, the video might clear it out in a visual matter.

[1] Timeline and Canvas Setup

Take note that the Canvas’ scale ratio will be the same as the Camera.

Your timeline setup can be anything, but the more frames and faster frame rate, the smoother the animation will be.

[2] Objects and Backgrounds in Camera

Your characters can be inanimate or animated.

Since the scene taken by the camera will require it to move, you will need to resize your objects if they take up most of the canvas’ space so that the camera can capture most of the elements.

When creating the Camera Folder, make sure all the visible the elements taken by the Camera are in the Camera folder.

For camera movement, Smooth interpolation is suitable for panning. Make sure you are on the frame you planning to have the animation start before adding keyframe. Once the 1st keyframe is placed, you may choose the next frame and decide where the camera goes and it’d automatically create a keyframe that way.

Consider using both Display modes to look at everything in overall view and camera’s view to see how it turns out.

When the background is ready, you can start with adding sparkles in new layers inside the Camera folder. Place 2 layers for sparkles in front and behind the characters to give some feel of depth to it. Front sparks will have to look big and closer and back sparkles have to look small and farther. It’s optional but you can make the sparkles look glowy.

Same as the camera movement step, place keyframes on the beginning and end of the timeline for both sparkles and assign the movement to them. Sparkles closer to the viewer move faster than the sparkles from far.

[3] Character Popping Out

As for popping out a character or an object can be done using through the Animation Editing Properties when selecting the object.

Look for “Layer Opacity” and decide at which frame your character starts to hide or reveal and set the proper opacity. Make sure a keyframe has been created, then depending on the duration or length of the hide or reveal, you select the next frame where you place a keyframe to end the operation with a number that’s the opposite value of the previous frame.

To make it look more dramatic, you can place a silhouette behind your character and have it appear before your character shows up.

You can even execute color gradation animation using “Layer Opacity” in keyframes by having overlapping colors appear one after the other.

Final Result

There is so much more you can do with keyframes in animation. The limit is your imagination.

That’s all for the tutorial. I hope I did explain well on how keyframes and the Camera folder work.