Brand New, Completely Inept, How do I animate Images?

Hi there, i’m starting up a youtube account and i wanted to make a little 5 second intro, it’s very basic but essentially 2 parts of my logo fly towards eachother, the middle drops down and my name appears when it does, superbasic.

Now, I literally just installed this like, today, and the way I thought it would work (place it in frame, keyframe, shift, keyframe, shift, etc) hasn’t worked.

Can i get some basic explanations on How i’d be able to have these three pngs move and fall into place?

Cheers!

Zan

@zanoscar Hmm, the thing is Pencil2D is mostly geared towards hand drawn animation, what you are describing seems more like what you should try to do in motion graphics with say, for example, after effects.

Though you can in effect do this in Pencil but it will require patience.

Basically what I would do is import each logo part in it’s own layer and arrange it as if it was the final frame (the logo is formed) then duplicate the frame, grab it and extend the time of your animation to reflect how long does the logo take to move. Lets say for example you want your logo to “build” in 1 second, that is 24 frames at 24FPS. So you’d have a compound drawing at frame 1 and another drawing at frame 24. Then animate backwards towards frame one, that means de-constructing the logo.

To move each part individually you have to use the marquee tool first then use the selection tool (black arrow) to move it. If you want to rotate the parts you’d have to use one of the latest Nightly Builds and press CTRL + Click inside the marquee with the arrow tool.

I’ll be honest, this could take a lot of time if you’re new with the software, since Pencil is not thought out to be used like a motion-o-grapher tool, however you can do it, just have patience since to get a smooth motion you’ll have to make a lot of inbetweens.

Now for the sake of not spoiling your initiative and fun I’d suggest you try using a free software geared for this specific type of animation like SYNFIG (http://www.synfig.org/cms/en/download/), which has inbetween interpolation and where you could easly tweak the trajectory of your object, and it works with both raster and vector images (like SVG)

Ok yeah thanks!

I actually had what you said when i started, each part on its own layer and arranged into the thing, and i figured out how to move the parts as well. I actually had a hidden layer of the non-split original image so i could correct it, but when i tried to move the individual parts for animating i got very confused as they didn’t seem to work

The main reason i tried out Peicil first was because it said it had vector and bitmap compatibility, although with a name like ‘Pencil’, i should’ve realised.

So yea, i’ll go try out synfig and see if it will be easier to replicate the effect i have in my head.

Cheers!

-Zan