I am new to animation and have been exploring Pencil2D as my tool of choice. I am excited about its simplicity and potential; but I am facing some challenges with my workflow. Specifically; I am struggling to streamline the process from sketching to final animation.
What workflow do you find most efficient when using Pencil2D? Do you have any tips or tricks for organizing layers; managing keyframes; or handling complex scenes?
How do you optimize Pencil2D for smoother performance; especially when working on larger projects or with detailed animations?
What are your recommendations for exporting animations from Pencil2D? Are there specific formats or settings that work best for different platforms or purposes?
Besides the official documentation; are there any external tutorials; blogs; or resources you found particularly helpful for mastering Pencil2D?
Are there any ongoing community projects or collaborations where beginners can participate to learn and contribute?
Also; I have gone through this post: [URL HAS BEEN REMOVED] which definitely helped me out a lot.
I am excited to hear your experiences and learn from your expertise. Any advice; personal anecdotes; or recommended; resources would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your help and assistance.
I want to give the benefit of the doubt but why are you including a link to a power bi course in your post? Having something like that in your post kinda gives the impression that it was written by an AI spam bot.
If you try to obfuscate links to external sites by masquerading them as forum threads you’ll get banned by our system, so be careful. This is your first and last warning.
To answer the question, for the benefit of actual users, Pencil2D workflow has its roots in Classical hand-drawn animation. looking into this kind of animation pipeline will help to understand what can and should be done.
The Pencil2D app itself is layer-based so using the same approach to any layer-based raster drawing software will help, but basically:
Animation is the illusion of motion that happens when a sequence of images is played at a constant speed rate
Layers can be as building blocks of an image to create a complete drawing by parts or each layer can hold a single complete image on its own (e.g for a single character animation one layer can be an arm, a leg, head and body VS for a full animation one layer can belong to a character, prop, background, etc)
Frames are individual images that are registered depending on the projection speed. i.e at 24 frames per second, you will have 24 possible drawings that can be shown in a single second.
It is not necessary to draw 24 images per second, you can draw multiples of the base speed rate, and the multiplier number represents how long a single drawing will be “held” or shown as part of a single second of animation. So:
Animating on “ones” means you draw the 24 individual drawings.
Animating on “twos” means you draw one drawing every 2 frames (total of 12).
Animating on “threes” means one drawing every 3 frames (total of 8; a usual standard in Japanese animation) and so on.
Generic 2D Animation Pipeline
There are a million variations to pipelines from every studio or indie animator but overall it’s roughly like this:
Pre-Production
Idea > Script > Design (Character /Background / Props) > Storyboarding > Voice Recording (parallel task; recorded from script over storyboard) > Send to Production
Post-production
Image-based Compositing & VFX > Color Grading > Video Editing > Audio Editing + SFX (Foley) & Film Scoring > Publishing Final Movie for Broadcast
If you want a graphical approach check-out toonboom workflow charts:
Anyway each step is quite detailed on its own, so I recommend looking into youtube tutorials for each step. Good luck.
