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Hello everyone.

Havtza here.

And today we're going to continue with the production pipeline

and move from the rough animation to the actual clean animation

and coloring stages.

After these stages,

you can complete most simple or abstract animation

which don't require compositing.

So with this lesson, we're just before the ending.

Now, the thing about clean-up and coloring, though,

is that although the theory behind these stages is very simple,

the actual work that they require

is some of the most time consuming

and repetitive parts of the animation pipeline,

especially when we're using the softwares

of FlipaClip or Procreate

that are relevant to some other softwares.

But before you get jealous of automatic features,

you know that they require

some very specific animation and clean-up styles,

otherwise they can't work,

which greatly limits the type of production

and products that you're going to make.

So if you want to be completely free with your style and artistic choices,

using the methods that I'm going to teach you is applicable

to any type of software.

Again,

these work stages are very repetitive and time consuming,

and in fact,

this part is usually given to the beginners and interns in animation studios

because it's very technical,

but it also gives a lot of very good fundamentals,

while not requiring a lot of experience to start.

Basically,

if you want to improve your overall quality of animation in line art,

this is the right stage to do it

because you get to improve your line art

and your understanding of shapes and volumes quite a lot.

I might have scared you a little bit with this intro,

but don't worry.

There are many ways to do clean-up in coloring

and in independent animation specifically,

the high degree of creative freedom lets you take shortcuts

and interesting approaches to the tasks,

which makes it much quicker and much more fun.

In this lesson, I'll be teaching you

how to make a classic clean-up,

which is the most common type of clean-up

that you're going to see in regular TV shows and movie productions,

as well as some other approaches and technique

which give you several different types of clean-up styles,

as well as talk about the overall purpose of clean-up

and how to ready your production for coloring and compositing

as an independent animator.

Up until now, we've used somewhat standard techniques

which are very common in every studio and commercial setting,

as well as employed by most independent animators with standard software.

From this point on,

I will be discussing my specialized techniques that I use to create fast productions

while using unconventional software like Procreate and FlipaClip

and how to create the complete product on the iPad.

First, let's talk about clean-up.

The clean-up is the final line art stage

that requires tidying up the sketchy line of rough animation into one thin line,

which can convey clear volumes

while keeping the character on model

and enclosing each part of the line art to make the coloring stage easier.

The clean-up process is extremely important in any production

because it allows for the coloring and compositing teams

to later work on the final version effectively

and create the complete product quickly.

Depending on the industry of the production,

the clean-up will be done either on paper

and later be scanned into the computer,

which is very common in anime production.

Or it will be done directly in the coloring software,

which will automatically color any enclosed space using AI

as long as it's done correctly

and as long as the character movement itself is pretty stationary.

Sometimes you will find production with specialized line art,

which uses unique brushes or line weight and thicknesses.

In these cases,

the coloring stage might need to be done by hand as well

to fit with the overall textures of the characters.

Traditionally, the clean-up has to be very clean

with no gaps between the lines for the ease of the coloring.

You can't even have one pixel out of place

because it'll be very noticeable and will make it

so that the coloring software will not be able to color

the specific area that you want

and we'll just go over the lines and fill the entire screen.

But I find

that having different styles of line art

will give different impressions to your animation,

and can vastly affect the time that it takes to complete the entire production.

For example,

part of the reason why I can produce

so many animation in such a short time

is that I often use the animation without any clean-up.

I will just add coloring directly to the rough animation stage.

The sketchy lines give livelier impression to the animation

and makes them look more unique.

And similarly, you might see lineless animation

or added details to the animation without any lines to them,

in which case you have to block each part of your character design

with the correct color line art.

This version of line art actually takes extra time to complete

because we need to switch each color

and be very precise with the connections between them.

Because again,

if one pixel is out of place, it's going to be very noticeable.

Once a color is blocked in,

FlipaClip doesn't show the difference in color in the onion skin,

it's going to show one blocked shape.

If you don't feel confident in your ability to keep your details consistent,

it's better to first sketch them and then color them.

And you can later fill in the pixel gaps

by duplicating the entire frame.

Basically, when you create your clean-up,

you need to consider the entire look of your scene and animation in advance.

And you need to make sure

that your final line art will convey the volume of the characters

and every detail on it correctly.

You have to make sure to clearly express

overlapping objects and part of the characters design

and give definition to each one of them.

So going back to our second character design lesson,

you need to have clear volumes

and use the overlapping details

of your character's clothing, hair and expression

to correctly convey the types of materials, their depth

and fit them to the volume of the characters.

We're going to do this

by using curves and straight lines as necessary.

You need to keep in mind

how the curves and straight lines

are going to be affected by the volumes of the character

and the volumes of the materials themselves.

Another important thing to remember,

especially when animating hairs or furs or any other small details,

is to make sure that you have randomization

between the different parts of these objects.

Having gaps or patterns which are too consistent

will make them look unnatural.

Even though we have many options for line art

when it comes to clean-up,

we still want to make sure

that the quality of our clean-up is as best as it can be

because in the end of the day,

the quality of the clean-up can make or break the animation.

Basically, if the mistakes in the line art are obvious,

it will lower the quality of the entire animation.

What is considered a mistake and what is intentional

will depend on the style of your clean-up.

If you're going for a rough art style

like we've seen in the previous lesson,

you might be able to get away with minimal things

because of the rough aesthetic.

But if you're going for a classical or lineless look,

there are more mistakes you need to avoid making.

And even if you are going for the rough line art,

there are some overlapping mistakes

that you need to keep in mind and try to avoid.

I'll be comparing our line art from before

and barely drawn line art

to see what kind of mistakes you might be making

that lower your animation quality.

First, the line quality itself.

As you can see on the right example,

we have smooth line in clear art.

I only used one stroke to make it and it looks very stable

on the other hand, we have a squiggly line

which makes the entire art look slightly fuzzy.

This is especially important when using FlipaClip

because it doesn't have built in stabilizer,

so we need to be extra sure that you're making stable lines.

My personal tip is to actually make the clean-up with your finger

because you have more friction,

which helps you combat the smooth surface of your iPad

if you don't have the light screen cover.

This is a mistake that can happen in both rough and classical clean-up.

So even if you are creating rough line art,

you need to make sure

that the lines themselves are in good quality.

Next,

we have connections between different parts of your character design.

When you're creating your clean-up,

you need to make sure that each detail has its own volume.

So if you know that you're having overlapping layers

in your character design,

you need to make sure

that there is a clear separation between those layers.

Don't only draw a single flat line

for both layers and divide it with another detail.

This is an especially common mistake when it comes to hairs and clothing

because a lot of people tend to draw them

directly onto the character body,

which is incorrect in most of the time.

You need to make sure to have at least slight separation

between the clothing and the character itself.

But you also need to pay attention

that the clothing details

don't actually destroy the character body volume.

By this, I mean, that you need to make sure

that your clothing don't get into your character.

Here you can see

that the way that the shoulder, neck and clothing connect

makes it seem like the neck is thinner below the clothing, which is incorrect.

This is a mistake

that can happen in both classical and rough line art,

so pay attention to it.

Next, we have incorrect connections between lines.

This is mostly for classical and lineless art,

but basically you need to make sure

that your lines connect in a very clean way

and don't have a seam between two different lines.

You need to make sure

that they don't go below the actual connection point

otherwise you would not close the shape

and you would not be able to color.

And you need to make sure that they don't go overboard

unless you have an overlapping layer.

In any case, you need to make sure

that the connection point itself looks clean

so there's no extra thickness to the line where they connect.

Next, we have an example of the line art

destroying the volume of the character.

You can see here with the hair

that the way that I cleaned up in the wrong version

makes the hair seem like it's in a straight flat line,

as we've seen multiple times throughout this course,

flat lines basically make it seems like there's no volume.

So when you're creating your clean-up

for different parts and small details such as hair,

you need to make sure that the overall shape of those details

is curved and has volume to it.

Specifically when animating hair

or any other overlapping layers,

you need to make sure

that you are showing the volumes and the overlap

between the details themselves.

You can show this by extending and making variations

in the connection points of the details.

You need to make sure that they are not too uniform

so make variation in the sizes and directions

and you need to make sure

that the overlapping connection points themselves

have enough depth and they follow the curve of the overall object.

This is important for both rough and clean line art.

Next thing to avoid is of course gaps in your line art.

The reason we closed the gaps every time is

that it makes the coloring much easier.

If you have even a single pixel gap,

the coloring software might not be able to color it correctly.

And you will have to search for the gap and close it later on.

This is easily identifiable in the clean line art

because you're not going to see gaps,

but in rough line art, you're going to have many gaps

and you will have to manually search them and close them

when it comes to the coloring stage.

Next, we have mistakes in line thickness variations.

Here we have a line

which does not have inherent ways to it,

we are not using a pressure brush.

But if you are using a pressure brush,

you need to be extra careful to keep the pressure consistent

at the right points.

If you're going to have

different pressure points and line thickness in different frames

it's going to be very obvious

and make your entire animation seem inconsistent.

If you're not using a pressure brush

and only making line thickness by using color blocking,

you need to make sure

that you create the right shape every time

and that the shapes themselves are consistent in the line thickness.

Lastly,

we have the common mistakes of

forgetting or altering different details.

Here you can see that in the wrong line art,

I actually didn't draw part of the hair,

which is important to the animation.

And that I've changed the shape of the clothing.

This is a mistake in the character model and in the animation,

and it can happen in both the rough and clean line art.

When you look at production materials of studios,

you might see that a lot of them

have shading and details in different colors at this clean-up stage.

Each studio has their own set of colors

which represent different type of details,

such as using green for fully black areas,

blues for shadows, and red or yellow for highlights.

This is done as a way to make sure

that the lighting on the character

is consistent and understandable to the compositing team.

Because when using standard animation software

there is a standard effort to the pipeline.

In these productions,

the character will always be colored and shaded

using the key color palette specified in the character sheet.

And later on,

they will have their color and lighting altered digitally

to fit the scene and environment by the compositing team.

This is done to keep the uniformity of the productions.

As in most big productions,

you will tend to have different teams

in different locations working on your project.

But because we are not going to be using standard software on the iPad

and since we don't need to worry

about the inconsistency between the artists in independent production,

we won't to do it with the same process.

My process aims to be as effective as possible

for the capacity of a single animator with this set up.

Because we don't have a compositing software

when we're creating special lighting conditions,

we need to composite each frame individually.

So the idea when working with the iPad

is to have as little compositing layers as possible.

To speed up the independent production,

it's better to know which colors and what lighting situation and effects

you're going to be using in your shots in advance.

Especially since each scene will have different backgrounds and lighting

and will have to be composited frame by frame by hand.

Independent animation focuses on very short production

and is targeted for private clients as opposed to big studios.

But you still want to have clear understanding

for yourself and your client on the final look of the product.

For this purpose,

I always create something that I call a reference frame or a test frame.

You might have seen something similar

been called color script in big productions

where you have to make sure

that every artist understand the look which is being aimed for.

But the reference frames that I use is somewhat more technical

because we will be using it

both as a reference guide for ourselves and our clients

and as actual assets bank to take from.

As we've seen,

to create a reference frame,

you first need to have two things.

One is the background for the scene

and the base color of the character from your character sheet.

As we've seen in the character design and background lessons,

color is relative depending on the environment.

But because we're working with compositing layers,

we just need to have the base color of the character

and then change it to fit according to the lighting

using these compositing layers.

So you don't need to concern yourself with color theory

or manually matching the shades that we want to the values

like we did in the background video.

It's still important to have the actual backgrounds

that you're going to use for the final shot.

Now that we have the new base color for the lighting situations.

The second thing you must have is your character

with the right pose and composition for the scene.

It can either be after clean-up

if you know what clean-up style you're aiming for

or it can be in the rough stage animation.

Since each lighting situation is unique and might change

depending on your character location,

you need to make sure that you understand that in advance.

Once you have your base palette color in separate layers,

you add your lighting layers on top.

I usually start with the base colors,

then add a compositing layer of either the multiply or overlay

depending if I want to lighting or darkening the base color of the character.

The multiply and overlay layer modes are the most useful

when changing the base color

because they keep the general balance of value

between your base color uniform.

So you wouldn't suddenly create saturations

where some colors are being highlighted and brightened

while others will be darkened.

These layer types are also very transparent.

So you don't need to be concerned

about the saturations and obstructions of detail.

Now that we have the new base color for the lighting situations,

we want to understand

how the lighting source is going to affect the character.

For this purpose,

we can either have a bright environment

which cast shadows on the character,

or a dark environment with a focused light source

which will give highlights or key lights to your character.

In both cases I prefer using the overlay layer

because unlike the multiply layer,

you can make both brighter and darker colors

which can save us compositing layers later on.

But because you can have both bright and dark colors,

your color range and shading range are going to be halved.

Also, you need to remember that any colors

that have value close to 50%

are barely going to affect your base colors

so they aren't very effective for the lighting.

Also, the overlay layer has a tendency

to really saturate the colors of the base.

So if you have a saturated color in the overlay as well,

it's really going to show

and maybe even clash with the base color.

So you need to be careful

with which colors you choose for the lighting

and which layer blending mode you're going to use it with.

The brightness aspect is fairly obvious

depending on if you choose a brightening or darkening layer

and a bright or dark color,

you're going to affect the brightness of the bottom color.

It can be brightened and it can be darkened.

But once it comes to hue and saturation, things become more interesting

because you can choose a saturated color

for your blending mode.

The saturation, again, is fairly obvious.

The more saturated your blending mode color is going to be

the more saturated the effect is going to have

in the shading or brightening of your bottom color.

If I have a very saturated color in my blending mode,

the actual lighting is going to be tinted with that color.

And the more saturated it is, the more color is going to be added.

The interesting thing starts once you actually consider

how the blending of the color is going to affect the hue.

As we've talked about before,

each color has a warm and cold version.

And mixing them or contrasting them against each other

is going to give a different result.

The most interesting thing

is that colors that are opposite on the color wheel

or come closer to the opposites

are going to actually cancel each other

when it comes to the blending modes.

So for example,

if you have a base color which is the red

and you're going to use a torquoise lighting on it,

the lighting itself is going to be very desaturated

even if both colors are very saturated originally

because of the way that each colors cancel each other.

On the other hand,

you can have both colors which are fairly desaturated,

but because they share the same warm or cold root,

when you combine them, you're going to have very saturated lighting.

The reason that it's important to understand

that every base color has a warm and cold version

is because they're opposites on the color wheel

are not part of the three base colors,

and especially since we are not using the red, yellow, blue color wheel

but the red, blue, green color wheel,

the opposing colors are going to be slightly different

than what you expect.

The opposite of red is turquoise.

The opposite of blue is yellow

and the opposite of green is magenta or purple.

And the closer your color variation comes to each one of these colors,

the higher the probability of you desaturating your lighting

by accidentally mixing opposing colors.

So keep in mind the actual blending of the colors

when choosing the colors that you want to use

for your shading and lighting.

In general, shading tends to work well with colder colors

and lighting tends to work well with warmer colors

since the layer blending modes

are very good at keeping the saturation and brightness values

when used with these combinations.

If you're using colors from the same family,

so for example two blues or two reds,

you might not have as much contrast as you would want.

So it's actually better to use different elements in different color branches

to create more contrast.

You just need to work side by side

instead of one top of the other,

the maximum saturation and contrast.

After you have your base color

and concentrated lighting with your character,

you want to really make it seem like it's part of the environment.

To do this,

we're just going to add some general lighting effects.

I often use another overlay layer with an air blush effect

to add gradients to the character and background

because with an overlay layer,

I can have both darker and lighter areas.

You can either use a clipping mask to make sure

that the gradient is only affecting the character

or you can add a layer which affects the entire background as well.

For glow and ambient lighting,

you can also use the add layer

or any combination of other layer modes

which look good in the final product.

Make sure that your effects

are either universal or can be easily replicated multiple times

so that they apply for each frame.

By this, I mean that

if you know you're going to add them to your character

instead of just adding it on top of the character using selection,

try and replicate the layer as a base asset

and then adjusted to the needs of each individual frame.

Just so you know that you have a constant base

to make adjustments for.

We want to make sure that we have the right assets

when actually compositing multiple numbers of frames.

If you feel like the lighting situation changes within the same shot,

for example,

if a light source suddenly appears or turns off,

create two versions of the reference frame

to make sure that you don't have unexpected surprises

when compositing your entire animation later on.

But you can also fill in the gaps

between the coloring and the line art

simply by duplicating the actual coloring on frame.

Because FlipaClip, copying and pasting feature,

actually makes it so that pixels are duplicated,

which give them more definition if they're half transparent.

In general, it's better to choose a coloring intensity

as high as you can make it without it coloring outside your lines.

If you're looking for a lineless look,

your clean-up itself has to be in the same color

as the base color for each parts.

You can also have a combination of base outline and lineless details.

For this technique,

I tend to take advantage of the pressure pen

which is built in FlipaClip feature.

By controlling the pressure pen correctly,

you can replicate the same detail quickly

and achieve the details faster than you would by having to fill them in

with buckets and uniform lines.

You just duplicate your line art layer

and use this as another straightforward exercise

which is easy to follow along.

Basically, just follow along the video

and create your own test frames and clean-up of the animation.

You can choose either style

but I recommend using the classical clean-up quality line as a start.

This will give you the best line quality

and the best understanding of volumes

and it will also allow you to understand

if you're making a mistake in character design or volume very easily,

because you would be able to see the jittering effects very clearly

if you made something wrong.

In conclusion,

the clean-up and coloring phases

have to be adjusted in independent iPad production

as opposed to the usual method seen in commercial production

where the basic coloring is uniform and later changed on in compositing.

You can overcome a lot of software limitations

by planning the final look of your frames in advance

and working around them in effective way to your production.

So even if you can't use the actual features

like you've seen in FlipaClip,

you can use the same type of methods and thinking skills

to adjust the process to your own setup.

Basically, as independent animators,

you need to just test your software quite a lot

in order to see which method works

and how you can solve different problems to achieve different type of styles

while still keeping your productions effective.

Planning the look of your product in advance

is going to be very useful in giving you the limitations

and possibilities for your product

and will force you to develop different methods

depending on your tools and available software.

So to recap,

today we've learned about the different types of line art

that you can create in FlipaClip

and how they affect the coloring tool in it

as well as take advantage of some of FlipaClip’s features.

We've also talked about how to create good clean-up

as well as creating reference frames

for both you, your client and as asset bank for your future compositing.

Next time

we're going to see how I actually composite my animations

using these assets

as well as go into a little bit more detail

about how I actually find and choose the lighting for each animation.

Thank you for watching and see you next time.

Bye.