Hello everyone, apart from the traditional frame by frame animation, Clip Studio also has keypoint animation, which is very useful for simple animations and you can get good results easily and quickly.

Open the project as animation and its properties

We open normally with File-New but in type of work we select Animation.

 

In the left part we can choose the size of our project and the margin that we need (Remember that the margin is not visible once we export the animation, so we have to be careful not to leave anything important inside it.)

 

On the right side we find the timeline settings.

The most important are:

The speed: How many frames will each second of our animation have.

Duration: Number of frames that our animation will last.

I have it set to 24 here, so my animation will only last a second.

Don't worry if you make a mistake, this setting can be changed later.

 

 

 

How to use key points

An animation folder with a blank layer will be created automatically (You can create more from the timeline menu)

For this example I am going to draw a colored ball and see how we can animate it with the key points.

 

In order to manipulate our image we must use the OBJECT tool

Then we can move it, rotate it, scale it and even play with the opacity.

 

Here, as you can see in the image, I am going to bounce it using only three key points.

Keypoints are created automatically when you move the ball, so what I did here was;

Go to the first frame, move the ball to one side, then select a frame in the middle and move it down, finally select the last frame and move the ball to the other side.

And at the PLAY parle we see the results.

To rotate it is the same, only we must take into account where we place the center of rotation, this will make the ball rotate in different ways.

The opacity is a bit different since by not moving the image we have to create the key ourselves, but it is very simple, for example if I wanted the ball to disappear, I put myself in the first frame and create a key (In the menu of the line of time is the INSERT KEY button) Then I go to the last frame, insert key and lower the opacity to 0 to the layer where I have the ball.

When we give play we will see how it disappears.

 

Note: If the frames are going too fast or slow for your liking, it's as easy as dragging the key points until they're just the way you want them. The further away they are from each other, the slower our animation will go.

 

infinite animation

I also made this infinite animation with only three key points.

First I drew the doll in three separate layers, in one the head, in another the body and finally the feet.

I just used the rotate option, I started at the head where in the first frame I tilted the head to the side, then I selected the key point I just created, copied it and pasted it to the last frame, lastly I selected the center frame of my animation and I tilted my head to the opposite side than I did before and it would just be done (Then

repeat the same with the body)

 

I leave here the video where I explain everything step by step in case I have missed any important detail.

 

Export your GIF

To export it we just have to go to

 

FILE - EXPORT ANIMATION - ANIMATED GIF

Here we can choose the size of our GIF and another very good option is Loops.

If we leave it in "unlimited" it will repeat infinitely, but if we choose "Number of loops" we can decide how many times it will repeat before stopping.

I hope you find the tutorial useful, see you!