Adobe Fresco Animation for Beginners!

The first 500 people to use my link will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/chrispiascik05241
In this video I'll walk you through animating a character and then placing it into a looping background to create a cool Parallax effect, all within Adobe Fresco on the iPad. I start with a rough sketch, tightening it up and showing you how to keep the parts you'll be animating on separate layers.
Fresco's animation features allow you to create a different animated sequence on each layer-so you can start simple and keep adding movement until you're satisfied.
I'll be utilizing frame by frame animation in which all of the movement is drawn on individual frames (like a flip book). As well as motion paths and some other really cool feature specific to Adobe Fresco.
INTRO 00:00 - 00:30
MONSTER BODY 00:31 - 03:19
SPINNING WHEELS 03:20 - 08:49
LEG PUSH SEQUENCE 08:50 - 16:47
BACKGROUND 16:48 - 15:16
FOREGROUND WHIMSY SWOOSH 25:17 - 27:03
TROUBLESHOOTING 27:04
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[@chris-piascik]

Want to dive even deeper into the world of motion in Adobe Fresco? Check out this playlist: kzbin.info/aero/PLAufnRAvMJPBrAss9bYDG8_XbmMWLm_55&si=85nYmv4MA0-sJozL

[@ahe]

Sorry to be _that_ guy, but the wheels are also spinning backwards. Or are they going so amazingly fast and smotth they appear to be going backwards??? 😱 No, they’re going backwards. Sorry. A fantastic tutorial, nevertheless. I love your vibe in your videos!

[@chris-piascik]

Hah they are, I missed it.... thank you though!

[@JohnScheersDewmuffins]

@@chris-piascik I thought he was going for the wheels when the dramatic music was playing. Glad I checked the comments first. Great Animation Tutorial. Thanks Chris.

[@the-good-chad]

I saw the road lines right away. Your realization made me absolutely cackle. I love that you turned it into a chance to show how easy it is to fix in Fresco. Awesome and easy to follow video!

[@chris-piascik]

hah thanks so much! It was DEFINITELY on purpose, lol.

[@JulianaRumple]

i swear i was screaming the whole time that the yellow thingy was going the other way hahahahahah. such a nice tutorial, thank you!!!

[@chris-piascik]

lol thank you!

[@FL85106]

Love that “butt” effect. Made my day 😂

[@beingsila]

Chris i love you much for making me fall in love with frescoo its a game chagnerrrrrr

[@chris-piascik]

Hah so glad it’s worked well for you!

[@JimmyNuisance]

I'm so glad you flipped that road around.. Not gonna lie, it got on my nerve. lol Good tutorial!

[@chris-piascik]

Haha I don’t know how I missed it. Thanks!

[@Triplemyi]

@@chris-piascik Sorry to ruin it for everyone, but I believe the wheels are turning in the opposite direction too! Note: I thought the edit was hilarious 😂

[@chris-piascik]

@@Triplemyi noooooooo I QUIT! lol

[@JimmyNuisance]

@@Triplemyi I don't have the mental fortitude to deal with this development.

[@guineapig1985]

You are correct​ @@Triplemyi drove me nuts the whole video.

[@Hamiltron_]

Very Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. I love it.

[@chris-piascik]

Oh hmm I'm not that familiar with that, but I can see the similarities! Thanks!

[@EweJinTee]

Great video, Chris! Love how fun video this is to follow. You got my attention 100% I also noticed the road lines AND the wheels are going backwards. The wheels are supposed to rotate anti-clockwise 😂

[@Deerlightful]

The timing, Thank you! My brain was struggling with the fraction-i-ness of it all. Excellent edu-tainer, indeed 🏆

[@chris-piascik]

Glad it was helpful!

[@NateToons]

thanks for the free month of skillshare! and as always your how tos on here. super helpful

[@chris-piascik]

Glad it was helpful!! Thanks!

[@dillongentry]

The way you handled the road lines goof was exceptional.

[@chris-piascik]

Haha thank you!

[@melsky]

Today is going to be the day I make my first animation!

[@chris-piascik]

Yesssss you got this!

[@BloodyAngel88]

I've definitely never been that smooth with moving backwards (like your monster here). Kudos. lol

[@chris-piascik]

lol thanks

[@PEWpewVida]

Chris, thank you so so much for these Golden nuggets of knowledge regarding animation, truly appreciate your videos, & sacrifice to make these. We only get to see the end result, but I know is much more than that, thanks! 🙏🏽

[@barbdesigns]

Looks great Chris, love the expression on the little guy! Nice animation, I always worry about different things moving at different times and getting the frames right, but it is simpler than I thought...I learned a lot, again! Thank you 😊

[@chris-piascik]

Thanks! Glad this was helpful!

[@RichardSilvius]

Somehow, you made this half hour video feel like 10 minutes. Impressive! I just recently learned you could animate in Fresco, so I’m looking forward to trying it out. Cheers!

[@chris-piascik]

Haha thanks! Glad you liked it!

[@petrfux]

I was so hard triggered by the road lines an the wheels. Funny how you catch it. Thanks a lot for your work!

[@chris-piascik]

haha sorry about that! I don't know how I didn't notice it.

[@RobertSharmaOfficial]

Chris you are not only an inspiration but also someone super chill. thank you for everything!

[@chris-piascik]

I appreciate that! Thanks so much!

[@SM-pk7pg]

Chris, these tut vids are great, can you explain how to export as gifs etc ?

[@JoeCarterDesigns]

Another great video man, thank you! *Suggestion*: Can you put the circle with your face-cam in the lower left corner so I can see what tools you're using in Fresco? with it in the upper left, I can't see what brush type or specific brush & size you're using.

[@chris-piascik]

Ah yeah sorry about that! For this one, my canvas is 3840x2160 and I’m using the retro supply co class inker brush from their Liner Set at size 20.

[@mariacruse6195]

That’s so funny! I was watching the road and I thought gosh, is it going the right way? I love how you corrected it and had the E = MC squared equations going by, that was funny!

[@lando545]

The wheels also need to be tuning the other direction. there is an option to have them rotate clockwise and counterclockwise.

[@chris-piascik]

Yeah, missed those too…

[@mandyrivers71]

Ahhhh, I made a parallax scene in Fresco. I need to get over my fear of posting on KZbin/Instagram so I can start tagging you for my Fresco art. You can use the ruler and shapes too for any type of precision movement you may want to create using paths. I do all of my particle effects in Fresco as well. I started noticing that almost any type of complicated particle effects that people make in equally as complicated software can be created with “massive easiness” in Fresco. Lmao, I had just started to type to you that your road dashes were going backwards…then you stopped with your flying math equations. 😅 Thanks again for another awesome and fun tutorial!

[@chris-piascik]

Oh cool, yeah I'd love to see your animations! You could always share in the Discord too :)

[@pancholink8]

In the end, I thought you were going to fix the one thing I immediately noticed is going backward as well, your wheels are rotating in the wrong direction. They should be moving counter-clockwise, don't hate me!

[@chris-piascik]

Yeah, I'm a dummy, I realized too late.

[@thehallhive9425]

Ohhh, so glad the backwards road was noticed at the very end. My brain was frizzling a little that whole time. 🤣 Great tutorial! Random question... Could you turn the opacity of the clouds down if you wanted to? So the mountains showed through a bit? I'm guessing that's easily possible with the overall layer opacity?

[@chris-piascik]

Thanks! 😃 yeah that would be as easy as turning down the layer opacity

[@dianaingles3019]

Have you ever had Fresco auto make your file an Adobe Cloud file instead of a plain file? (i.e the symbol at the bottom right of your image in the "MyFiles" window. Thanks for the help.

[@chris-piascik]

Hey sorry I didnt see this sooner! My comments have been bonkers from the new iPad videos. I haven't had that happen. Does it still open ok?

[@MrKlawUK]

is there a way to import a sequence of pngs (converted from a gif)? only way I found so far is to load each png into a layer, convert layer to pixel, copy it and paste into the motion layer which adds a frame, then delete the prviously imported frame. Very slow process to repeat over and over so anything that’ll speed itup would be great

[@chris-piascik]

You can create a sequence and then open the file in photoshop and replace the frames (layers) with the images. This works well, but only works if you have Photoshop…

[@BenChanNYC]

Your videos are great and thanks for getting me into Fresco! One question: from what I've seen, all the animations seem to be looping. What if I want something to enter frame along a path, then stop while another element that was static, then exits frame at a certain time? (and for it to play once rather than loop - I have it set to "1" number of times and "play once" but it keeps looping) Thanks!

[@chris-piascik]

Thank you! There’s not an easy way to do that aside from adding in extra frames. Fresco calls these features motion intentionally (as opposed to animation) because they’re for adding continuous looping movement to an otherwise static image.

[@BenChanNYC]

@@chris-piascik And yet the title of this video says "animation" and several of your videos use the word "animate" in the thumbnail. Perhaps your titles could be clearer - I've been learning the basics of Fresco this week just to hit this wall and now realize I need to start over and look into another program that can better suit my needs. Thank you for the clarification.

[@chris-piascik]

@@BenChanNYC I'm sorry if my titles were misleading-that wasn't the intention. I use animation because it's what people would be searching for-and to be clear-it is animation-it's just not traditional timeline based. I mentioned the "motion" nomenclature just to try to explain how Adobe thinks about animation within Fresco.

[@BenChanNYC]

@@chris-piascik At first I thought the other videos I found were just all covering the basics and I would eventually find a more advanced tutorial (what I'm trying to do isn't even very complicated, which is why I didn't want to dive into something like Adobe Animate) but now I understand. 👍

[@chris-piascik]

@@BenChanNYC When I need to do something with an actual timeline I use Photoshop. I also often use them together a bit, where I'll use Fresco to automate certain types of movements and then bring that sequence into photoshop either as a png sequence or just importing is as a video file and placing it on my Photoshop timeline. I'm hoping that Adobe finds a way to make this more seamless but it seems like it might be a pretty niche workflow.

[@PEWpewVida]

FYI Chris, the skateboard wheels are rotating the wrong way, just wanted to let you know…. Ooops!

[@chris-piascik]

Yeahhhhh I’m a dummy

[@DigitalPaintingWithMark]

Do you export these from Adobe fresco as gifs, movies? I am wondering how to share them on places like instagram. Do you loop it several times so it lasts 30 seconds or something like that?

[@chris-piascik]

It depends what I am doing, but typically MP4’s. Instagram will automatically loop them when they show up in someone’s timeline, but you can choose how many times you want it to loop in the export options.

[@lynx4436]

Hi! i cant seem to export my animation as a png sequence. The zipped file always seems to be invalid and when i hit extract all it says the folder is empty. But the properties of the file say otherwise. someone pls help

[@chris-piascik]

Hmm that is very strange, I’ve never had that happen. Have you tried it on more than one animation? Just to see if there’s something within the file causing the problem?

[@lynx4436]

@@chris-piascik so i haven't yet, but i have a feeling the files are way too big. The zipped file is 2gb and the fresco psd file is more than 4gb. I went overboard and made 616 frames in a 4000x4000 pixel canvas

[@chris-piascik]

@lynx4436 ah yeah that resolution is quite a bit overkill for something that is screen based. You could always resize the document and see if that solves the problem,

[@badmax7319]

I love Fresco, but I wish I can use sound or videos in my project.

[@chris-piascik]

Yeah I could see that being cool, but the issue is that Fresco approaches this stuff as motion for an otherwise static illustration vs full-on animation. As a result there’s not a single full video timeline. All movement is looping and happening all at once.

[@altplusg]

Why are the wheels and the road markings going backwards?

[@JimmyNuisance]

@@altplusg It gets addressed in the video. Just how it is sometimes.

[@altplusg]

I should have waited till the end 😄

[@chris-piascik]

@@altplusg because I'm a dummy.

[@marshalepage5330]

Your wheels were also going backwards.

[@StefansKreativzeug]

Hahaha before the lines , i noticed that also the wheels spin wrong ways, then the lines cames 🙂

[@chris-piascik]

And yet I somehow missed both, lol

[@StefansKreativzeug]

@@chris-piascik :-) but your tutorials are really good, i follow all of them, start to learn Fresco

[@artmanstudios7037]

When it comes to animation adobe is the worst at it there was a time when it was good at it but now it just flopped on his head it's the worst program the most stressful and had it program you're ever going to use when coming to animation you're better off using pencil 2D then this crap it is a nightmare to work with and it doesn't seem like it's getting anything new it's the same old piece of software that doesn't seem to get any advanced features for today's modern world use.

[@chris-piascik]

For the stuff I do, adding motion to an otherwise static illustration and looping stuff it’s hard to beat. The ability to have different timelines on each layer makes it so easy to create this looping parallax effect with just a few taps. The motion paths paired with frame my frame in such a simple way is great. Also, as someone that is first an illustrator, I love being being to do motion stuff in the app I prefer to draw in.

[@artmanstudios7037]

@@chris-piascik umm?! You can do pretty much the same things in blender! There is infinit possibilities and if it doesn't exist you can make it exist!

[@BillsBayou]

Punctuation please. Let me fix that for you, then I can reply. "When it comes to animation, Adobe is the worst at it. There was a time when it was good at it but now it just flopped on his head. It's the worst program, the most stressful, and had it program you're ever going to use when coming to animation. You're better off using Pencil2D then this crap. It is a nightmare to work with and it doesn't seem like it's getting anything new. It's the same old piece of software that doesn't seem to get any advanced features for today's modern world use." Pencil2D may as well be Microsoft Paint when it comes to animation. I find Fresco to be exactly what I need for sketching and animating. The app is continually getting updates. An update in June is going to be adding new features. I'm not a professional artist. I've never used an animation program beyond frame-by-frame in Photoshop. But this is what I created in Fresco within a week of getting the program. It's not much, but I created it much faster than if I had done frame-by-frame animating in something as poor as Paint2D: kzbin.info/www/bejne/ZoeUZn6JgcqjgM0

[@artmanstudios7037]

@@BillsBayou The hell with all that!