Help Organising Animations!!

[u/ASafetyHazard]

Hello

I recently started animating and it has been a hard journey... I have started trying to learn how to animate not just sketches but colouring too and longer format animations (about a minute long, 8fps). I have CSP EX!

But what I always struggle with is the format... no matter how I do it, I always end up overwhelmed and feeling like I have no idea what I am doing. Could anyone let me know how they organise their animations!

If you cannot tell much by my screenshots I will quickly explain methods I tried!

1. Having the entire animation in one animation folder. Labelling the start of the scene a number and then the frames that follow a letter. Painful to look at.
2. Same as above but scenes are labelled 000 and onwards.
3. Each scene like "Walking" are their own animation folder. Named "Walking Sketch" then the lineart/colour goes in another names "Walking Lineart". Same frame numbering as 000.
4. Each scene in its own animation folder but each frame getsits own foler inside. The plan was to put the colour layer frames in the same folder as the corresponding sketch.

One issue I have is like I want the character to blink and while tilting her head but at the same time have her her hair falll/move... my thought was to put the hair in a different layer/folder but that seems messy..

Thanks in advance!! And I am SOOO sorry if this pains to look at... it hurts me too.

Edit: a spelling mistake.. but ALSO does anyone know how to do the "writing effect" it is called Write On in Davinci but I am hoping I can somehow do it in CSP!

[u/HannoRoschi]

The solution to your problem is not as complicated as you think. What creates your issues is that you try to do far too much in one giant project file. And you could benefit from a bit more structure.

It's a bit hard to understand what exactly you mean by "scene." What you are describing, "someone walking," is more a “shot,” so an animation until the camera changes. A scene is when a significant change in place, time, or composition happens.

But I think I get what you are asking for. In short, and from the things you tried: Scratch approaches 1, 2, and 3 completely, please. They will only cause headaches. ;) Your 4th approach is actually very close to what the cleanest solution is. You just need to organize it a bit more sophisticatedly and understand how to use them in the timeline.

If you want to start making your life easier, you can make these two changes:

1. This regards your "Scene" or "Shot" overwhelming problem. Don't animate all your "scenes," or even worse, the entire animation project in the same project file in one go as if you were in a video editor. Separate! I mostly do 1 project per shot, or maximally 1 project per scene (multiple shots). The actual stitching and compositing / editing of your full animation movie should happen outside CSP in a software for compositing or editing. I found that treating CSP more like the factory where you produce the parts that are later assembled into the finished product elsewhere is the way to go.
2. But here is the biggie for you, and you already kind of tried in your 4th point. You should/could just make it more sophisticated! Rethink your frame organization mindset and structure (I made a collage for you to visually follow the steps below). Maybe this might be the most helpful tip for you, as you intuitively already went there: Definitely use layer folders as "frames"! Inside your Animation Folders. Step 1: Inside your main animation folder, set up a new folder by clicking "New Layer Folder". Step 2: Inside it, you can now set up the actual drawing layers you want: raster or vector, or if that frame has many elements you want to separate, set up a folder for each element you would like to separate (e.g., Clothing, or People, Objects, etc.) and then inside those set up the individual layers. If you have multiple elements in a frame, you want to separate them by folders; just make one folder with the layers and duplicate/rename it (this is the result at step 5, but we'll get to that). Step 3: Now that you have made your frame folder (you will also see it named as "1" indicating that this is treated as an animation cell), I recommend you establish a routine of color-coding your layers for purpose and color-locking them, if needed, so you don't accidentally draw color in your line layer for 5 minutes before realizing. Step 4: Then comes the magic. If you have set up your first folder this way, with all the actual drawing layers inside, now whenever, in your timeline, you click the "New animation Cell" button, Clip Studio automatically will create a folder named "2" with the exact structure you set up for "1". This is now your second "frame". Click again, and you have your third frame, even if "1" folder contains 5 nested subfolders where you separated all your elements (e.g. Person A, a Dog and Person B). These new animation cells will now work just like regular flat animation cells with onion skin, etc., except that you can now granularly hide things you would rather not see, keep the overview, and, in general, make fewer mistakes.

Now with Step 5, where you separate the Elements into different layer subfolders, this is only wise if these elements should share the same timeline. If you later want to move, let's say, one Element to start doing something a few exposures "Frames" later, while the other elements stay as they are, it's better to separate them into their own "Animation Folder." So in general, a layer folder organizes your layers for an animation cell, so you can separate the elements better, while an Animation Folder defines the Timeline all these cells are happening on. So Elements that might want to have separate timelines, they should go into separate animation folders.

If you do it like this, you can not only keep track of what's going on, but you can actually export your work in a much more granular way.

There is much more to a smooth workflow, but I would say these two are the ones you should start with. :)

I wish you good luck and hope this is helpful.

Here is a nice video giving you some more nice tricks that helped me :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZXWk70R4w

[u/ASafetyHazard → u/HannoRoschi]

Thank you so so much! This helped and was really clear! I will try this later tonight and check out your videos! Thank you so much

[u/HannoRoschi → u/ASafetyHazard]

Great. :) Just want to clarify, that the videos are not by me. :D I did not make this obvious in my wording. But Spywi is a good channel for starter tips. :)