Animate Faster Using This Method! | The Open Timeline

[@CakeStation]

For anybody who might have been potentially confused by the "Notice" Folder. The point is to name your shot after what's happening in the shot, then make a folder for it in the "Shots" folder. Since my shot was a goon turning around, I called it "Notice." The Folder you're rendering your shot into and the Project file should both have the same name.

[@Soulessblur]

"Don't name the file Shot 1, because you may decide to add a new shot between 1 and 2" Ah, but you forget about my secret superpower. . .naming it Shot 1.5!

[@ThePuppetMonsterMassacre]

That's exactly how I do it! It's vindicating to know that's the way Monty did it too. It makes more sense to craft individual shots that look good to their respective camera, than to animate a whole scene and shoot it for coverage like it's a sitcom.

[@CakeStation]

Exactly! Films aren't made all in one take with a hundred different cameras and especially not Anime. Monty himself said "Work in 3D, think in 2D" Working on shots individually makes this possible.

[@ThePuppetMonsterMassacre]

@@CakeStation I'm pretty new to making cg animated shorts. I'm no expert, but the weaknesses I see in most fledgling animators are: 1) A lack of traditional animation principles (Antic, overshoot, squash/stretch, etc ). 2) A lack of basic filmmaking knowledge. Knowing your lenses, and shot composition, and how to play to the camera. It's not hard to make cg mannequins move from pose to pose, but it takes real artistry to bring them to life and give them that satisfying rhythm and energy.

[@jerri1918]

i've been trying to get into rwby-style fight animation and i've discovered that you might just be the only channel who analyzes monty's work for the purposes of animation education. Hope to see more tutorial content from you!

[@someotherstranger]

Boost in efficiency aside, this is gonna work wonders for motivation. I have this bad habit of approaching projects like these huge monoliths, making them seem like huge time and energy commitments just to _start_ . This workflow on the other hand breaks things down in a way that seems way more manageable from a psyche perspective. Also thank you very much for saving the meat of the promo towards the end. It's very frustrating when someone puts it in the beginning or the end and I usually skip it, but I think the brief mention worked better to pique my interest so that I stuck around for it at the end.

[@andrewsung3965]

You always provided us with more info on how to improve fight animation choreography.

[@ven166]

i've always tried animating my shots chronologically but i think i'll try to be more fluid with what shot i'm deciding to do to help make my process efficient if this is actually faster

[@poutine8450]

Thank you for the tutorial Cake,Also Congrats on the Sponser 👏👏👏

[@CakeStation]

Thank youuuu

[@mits3313]

Man.... That's so amazing. I'm starting in 3D animation and that workflow is basically what we do in 2D animation. Awesome video. Thanks. Another thing I notice is that if your background doesn't change you can just render it once.

[@A_Random_Trainer]

I would love to see more videos like this explaining different animation pipelines and the pros and cons

[@Shka_maru]

Thank you for sharing this knowledge with us! I was wondering, could you possibly make a tutorial on camera work? Something with a little more substance than a basic pan left/right, etc? A lot of fight animations have some pretty complex camera movement so it'd be great to see how you do the camera animation, especially since you're animating the actual 3d camera and not using a camera rig. Thank you!

[@wahajhaider6313]

this advice is really helpful now I just need to learn how to do it

[@pablogr6960]

finally, i always wanted to know how close i was to monty's workflow

[@FutabaCG]

Yo thank you for sharing this one! I am a new animator and this one basically helped me a lot

[@Sheevo]

Real G listing Maya last

[@kingnekogon]

Huh. Reminds me of my live action workflow.

[@rmbanimator5001]

ITS THE CAKESTATION!

[@DariusYoung]

....Where have you been in my life fam?!!!

[@PandaNinjaAnimations]

How would I manage lighting when doing this method? Having separate files for different shots seems like it would make lighting an even more tedious process, especially if I do the movements first and then the lighting since I’d have to redo my lighting for every shot. Oh and also, if I’m cutting out and adding shots in the timeline like you suggest, wouldn’t that risk messing up music sync/flow?

[@CakeStation]

To avoid rebuilding your scene over and over, I just create my next shot by saving a new version of my previous shot file, that way everything is pretty much the way I left it. To maintain sync, you basically have to just add your music to your timeline, it is a little bit harder to make movements that's sync perfectly but not impossible. Just drop your shot into the timeline, watch it against the music you chose and make the necessary adjustments.

[@PandaNinjaAnimations]

@@CakeStation Hmm… I think maybe this style of animation process isn’t for me personally. Definitely an interesting video though. Thanks for replying as well.

[@CakeStation]

@@PandaNinjaAnimations Nothing wrong with that. Monty himself used poser when he could have used a more common program and thrived in it. If you're happy and fast in your workflow there's no reason to change it.

[@YoBoyNeptune]

Best I can do is animate in front of blue screen in sfm and adjust the speed and add the background in my video editor (shotcut). Although I just animated something where I used a separate camera and model for each individual shot. Doesn't this open you up to continuity errors?

[@CakeStation]

If you're using sfm, it basically has the open timeline built into the program, so the tutorial doesn't really apply on that front. In terms of the benefits of rendering on different layers, I know it's possible, I just never figured out how to do it. I explained in a different answer, perfect continuity is actually bad for replicating Monty's style, he would never leave everything perfectly as it was. Every single frame was crafted to accommodate his frame. Shifting the position of characters and objects around slightly to look better in the shot. Sometimes even changing the scale of things. His mindset was to work in 3D but think in 2D, in 2D animation there is no perfect continuity when everything must be redrawn every new shot.

[@YoBoyNeptune]

@@CakeStation yeah someone just pointed out the last supper painting to me as an example because an entire side of the table is unused but it wouldn't look nearly as good if half the people were facing away from you

[@CakeStation]

@@YoBoyNeptune Yup, exactly the same theory.

[@CodeTetsu]

I’m fairly new at this, but why have separate files for each cut? Couldn’t you also just render the specific frames of the cut so you don’t have to worry about what’s ahead or behind? Everything in the same file would also help with continuity too right?

[@CakeStation]

The point of having seperate files for each cut is to get you into the mindset of a filmmaker. Movies aren't filmed with 17 different cameras all capturing one single action. Every shot should be custom tailored to enhance to sequence and it allows you to easily make major narrative changes by being able to work completely out of order. Something that I didn't mention was that perfect continuity is actually bad for Monty style animation. If every shot is a new project file, it gives you the ability to re-arrange the placement of objects or characters in the scene to better accommodate the framing. Monty always said "Work in 3D, Think in 2D" and If you're perfectly adhering to 3D spatial continuity you're not enhancing the frame.

[@CodeTetsu]

@@CakeStation Oh okay. So you would create the basic scenery, make a cut of animation and such, then for another cut you would save it as a different file with perhaps other elements tampered with? I also heard of rendering out as an exr file format. How different is it from a png format?

[@CakeStation]

@@CodeTetsu Yes. Every shot gets its own project file and folder in which the png sequence is rendered. Then you just progressively improve and overwrite your shots until you're done. I don't know much about EXR to really say.

[@iamawatcher9201]

There's a few good pieces of advice in here but I don't agree with having multiple files for each "cut" if you're working in 3D. Unless you get the models, aesthetics, rigging, lighting etc. right on the first try you're gonna have to repeat any changes made down the road to all 20+ files individually, or not make them at all. It's a headache to sync all your assets between multiple files, and it defeats the purpose of this workflow if you can't easily iterate on top of each render pass. It's better just to have everything in one file and enable/disable any assets you aren't working on until the final render (which also makes the program run better). It takes some management skills but you save yourself the trouble from having to worry of asset syncing while still being able to freely improve the current project.

[@CakeStation]

That's the reason you use things like linked collections, you start out with your proxies and gradually update them. The problem with doing everything in one file is that it will never afford you the freedom that a real cut gets you, not being able to change the entire scene to accommodate the frame which is important when replicating Monty's style because he said himself "Work in 3D, think in 2D". I'm sure that there are some snags here and there about this workflow but I never claimed to say this is the fastest workflow in the world, this is simply what Monty Oum used and it personally improved my work speed.

[@ninetailedsamurai3536]

how hard is it to create anime heads, bodies and faces in blender or do you like download the rwby models

[@CakeStation]

I just downloaded the RWBY models.

[@joshuaisaac1598]

Do you render out the background and characters separately and then mix them together in the editor?

[@CakeStation]

Yup! Just drop one on top of the other.

[@artofduality5046]

For people who are slow like me, so you’re saying take picture of each pose in order to create a certain animation?

[@CakeStation]

Instead of rendering out a video file, I'm rendering out every single frame as an image and then importing it into my video editor as a sequence, which basically turns it into a video.

[@artofduality5046]

@@CakeStation wow that’s kinda like 2D or Stop Motion! I always thought about that mechanism but I never thought it would actually work thank you this made things easier for me now

[@waterandomelets6540]

So we export it in the Playblast mode... then how do we render it in the video editing program? And is the background separated from the characters or do we have to export them separately? Also are there any other kinds of editing that we could do to the characters and background except from giving them a solid color like black and red respectively?

[@CakeStation]

Once you've finished editing together your animation in your video editor you have to render it as something like MOV, MP4 etc, because you can't render audio into an image sequence. As for other benefits besides changing the colors of your layers, you can do shimmering teleportation effects to make characters disappear such as Blake's shadow clone effect. Or you can blur or add glow to your FX layer and such.

[@waterandomelets6540]

@@CakeStation So... if we render it, it will appear as a "normal" animation?

[@CakeStation]

@@waterandomelets6540 If you render your animation when you still have playblasts in your timeline, you're going to render out playblasts. You still have to overwrite your old playblasts at some point. The only point of rendering playblasts is to render faster and work faster, once you're 100% completed your shots, go through each 3d project file and render them out with full color and visuals.

[@waterandomelets6540]

@@CakeStation I think I got it, thank you

[@rixarts14]

I've always been curious, where do you get your rigs from?

[@CakeStation]

The rigs in this video are custom. Their base is a rip from the alpha version of Grimm Eclipse and they've been modified to look more like the show models. Unfortunately they're private models.

[@rixarts14]

@@CakeStation Just curious but thanks.

[@MisteRRYouTuby]

CAKE!

[@MisteRRYouTuby]

Cakestation and Boomslash?

[@jaye6612]

1:50 i see what ya did there...lol

[@riceontopstew]

ho w do you render blender in layers?

[@Excelsior1937]

Interesting… how did you find out about this being what Monty and Shane did?

[@CakeStation]

Shane Newville is a member of my Monty Oum Study group "Project ROSE" He personally informed us of his workflow and how it all worked. Big credits to him for teaching me.

[@wingedpro]

Is this a group we can join?

[@Excelsior1937]

@@CakeStation Oh wow that’s incredible!

[@CakeStation]

@@wingedpro As of right now it's a private group. However if you join my discord server and ask for the "Petals" role, you can join a public group where people can learn from current Project ROSE members.

[@wingedpro]

Awesome, thank you!

[@sapphiras.v.4715]

Hey, so I just got blender and poser pro, and I have no idea where to start with the basics of animation, much less a whole fight scene. Do you have any advice for where to start?

[@CakeStation]

Read "the animators survival kit" by Richard Williams and always use real life video reference when you're learning. Practice as often as possible, you will improve over time. If you're interested, I have a discord server linked in the description for practicing and learning animation with a bunch of other animators who would be willing to help you out with any questions you might have. Good luck!

[@sapphiras.v.4715]

Thank you! I’ll check those out!

[@kingmurder8245]

yoooo package came in the mail from boomslank thank you for the kick ass new phone case 😎

[@TheIntratec9]

@Cake Station I assume PNGs aren't just still images, but video clips as well? I want to know for the export process.

[@CakeStation]

It's an image sequence, every frame is rendered out as a single image and imported into your video editor as a video clip. There are ways to export video files with transparency but that's dependent on your program of choice.

[@TheIntratec9]

@@CakeStation Are you able to release the full animation?

[@CakeStation]

@@TheIntratec9 Which one?

[@TheIntratec9]

@@CakeStation The example used in the video where Yang beats up a goon.

[@CakeStation]

@@TheIntratec9 Oh, that's not a full animation. I created it specifically for the tutorial. Maybe I'll do an animation on that set later though.

[@ZoraVisions]

Let's goo sponsor

[@Blacteddy]

3:11

[@joemama6184]

Kinda wish you were a 2d animator

[@dazaiosamu7184]

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