Rough Animator: Beginners Course

Explore the main tools in rough animator, including brush, eraser, paintbrush fill, and lasso with rotation, skew, and scale, plus zoom, pan, and undo controls.

Open a project from the file menu, import a walk cycle into Rough Animator, and preview the timeline by playing, with the animation looping automatically until you press stop.

Navigate the animation timeline using back and forward frame buttons and the scrub wheel, moving frame by frame and scrubbing by dragging.

Turn onion skinning on or off and adjust opacity and the number of drawings with sliders to view red and blue reference frames for clear onion skin references.

Explore six tools in the rough animator beginner course and see the tool options box change with brush, eraser, paint bucket, lasso, magnifying glass, and hand.

Explore how to modify layers and add drawings in rough animator, including adding empty layers, duplicating layers and timings, moving drawings, deleting layers, merging down, and frame-based options.

Adjust the settings panel to control preview resolution, playback options, and frame navigation while exploring onion skin, brush settings, left-handed layout, zoom, rotation, and end-of-timeline drawing creation.

Adjust each drawing's duration in frames on the timeline, extend or delete frames as needed, and avoid creating blank drawings that clutter the timeline.

Keep the setting on independent by default to avoid multiple layers moving at once; later you can try sync layers or maintain overall duration as your workflow requires.

Learn how to name individual drawings using the drawing label feature, assign names like first, second, or third drawing, and reposition frames with the on-screen buttons.

Move drawing buttons to swap their positions, then use backward button to reverse them. Loop the sequence by duplicating the drawing and looping back onto itself from the first frame.

Learn how to duplicate a drawing to create a new frame, navigate the timeline with buttons, use onion skin for tracing the final frame, name frames, and remove unused drawings.

Learn how to remove a drawing with the delete drawing button in Rough Animator: Beginners Course; click the delete button to remove the drawing and make it disappear.

Learn to create and apply a ten-frame walk cycle using the cycle button to reuse animation across the timeline.

Select a cycle, remove it, and delete the 270 frames of empty timeline space to shrink the timeline back to ten drawings, then follow steps to create a new cycle.

Explore cycle options, including forward or back motion, x and y axis offsets, and scale offset to make cycles shift and grow, with edits updating every cycle.

Convert a cycle to drawings to transform clones into individual drawings, increasing the file size as each drawing becomes its own, then apply changes to finalize the update.

Use edit multiple to select a range of frames, move the selected drawings with the lasso tool, and apply changes by clicking the timeline to edit multiple drawings at once.

Use the camera button to adjust the canvas camera, add a keyframe on the timeline, and zoom the character by scaling up to 135% with camera tools.

Explore how the canvas scale button zooms to reveal layers and adjust drawing space on the timeline, and use the side handle with the mouse wheel to navigate layers.

Show how the frame counter reveals your current frame out of 30 total frames and how clicking advances from frame 1 to frame 11, illustrating frame navigation.

Switch between Rough Animator projects with the drop-down triangle, review file names, and understand the 30 fps frame rate and canvas size, then proceed to importing an image.

Explore drawing tools and the brush, and set the playback range—from 1 to 1, 1 to 3, or 1 to 2—in the tool options to cycle within selected frames.

Learn how to use Apple color palette options to manage swatches: input rgb values, save colors by long-pressing to replace a slot, and use the eyedropper to capture skin tone.

Drag the layer visibility left to lower it, add an empty layer named sketch, then draw on the original with brush tools.

Explore three drawer modes—front, behind, and inside—to control drawing order and color in animation: draw on top, behind existing lines, or modify line pixels.

Explore shape options in rough animator for beginners, including drawing line, straight line, box, rectangle, circle and oval; adjust spacing for dotted lines and experiment with brush tool options.

Explore the rough animator user guide to adjust tolerance, the color range used for fill, and how higher tolerance can encroach into line work and fill the entire page.

Switch fills from front to behind to fill behind the linework, achieving clean edges and easier coloring of characters. Adjust the fill blur and fill expand to refine edges.

Import audio into a new Rough Animator project, convert formats if needed, and drag a sound effect into the timeline.

Explore export options in rough animator: beginners course, including QuickTime, GIF, and PNG image sequence, with H.264 or HEVC and an optional transparent background for easy compositing.

Create a student project in rough animator to animate a ball looping in a figure eight, using onion skin, layers, roughs, colors, and export a transparent quicktime video.

Complete Rough Animator's beginners course and gain the knowledge to use Rough Animator for creating your own 2D animations. Rewatch the course or review notes anytime, and keep on animating.