The Unknown Art of Animation Cleanup (Tutorial, ANY Software)

hello folks I wanted to highlight this fairly unsung area of handron Animation is something that I struggled to find information about up until it was my job on the movie my father's dragging even though I already had quite a bit of experience in TV animation I had some misconceptions about it going in and I was mostly guessing at how to do it in my previous work so I wanted to make a video that would have been useful to me in the past and provided information that's otherwise hard to get it's a

ctually a very major part of the process that takes a lot of work and brain Force it's known for being possibly the biggest and therefore most expensive Department in handdrawn animation it's this huge chunk of the production but there's no books about it there's no famous cleanup artists and I don't think there's even a decent segment of a book about how to do it check this out these are the cleanup credits from Tarzan it's like a Marvel visual effects credits kind of situation so what exactly

are all these people today in short it's redrawing the rough animation but more clearly defined if the rough says it's something kind of like this the cleanup says it's definitely this which is no small task because there's no leeway for getting something wrong so that's what these different rules were for it's like the scene is going through a series of filters to end up in a purified form the effort and expense is one of the reasons that some projects skip this step all together or you know us

e it in a reduced capacity I love that sort of style as well but that's not what we're doing today I'm going to be talking more about what's actually happen happening in the minds and hands of Clean Up Artist as they work unless by software shortcuts and so on we're basically just working with layers brush and timeline but you're not too different from one software to another I'm using crto for this which is free and it's my favorite program to draw in anyway so let's really get into the nitty-g

ritty picky details because in my opinion that's where the most valuable information is with regards to this topic the word to live by here is that we're refining we're going to go through in different stages and we're going to fix problems as early as possible we are removing anything ambiguous and we're working to clarify the rough with art in general if we want to control what we're doing is good to work in stages we know which steps we're going to take before we start and we're going to make

sure each step is working well before proceeding to the next in my older work uh student work I wasted a lot of time like polishing work that was foundationally weak and found the results disappointing compared to the amount of hours that I put into it if you put extra care into those earlier foundational stages it actually makes the following stages become much easier and faster and you can be more confident about the choices you're making any times in the previous rough stages that you said w

hatever is good enough for now we'll fix it later uh this is the time to pay for those things so that you know where we're going let's look ahead and see what steps we'll take we're going to fix up our rough we're going to set up our file analyze our reference establish our layers brushes and all that then we'll draw our first clean key known as the spot key our first major T pole we work through the keys from the most different to the most similar from there we'll take a pass through the scenes

breakdowns then make multiple passes going through the inet until all the drawings are done and then we'll give it one more check okay our starting point here is this little fan animation that I did months ago let's get the rough into better shape before we put any clean lines in this is something of an unseen part of the process that you might not be privy to unless you've done it yourself these drawings are usually only seen by the cleanup artist himself usually get deleted along the way or l

eft behind in an old version of the file as a student I had a big misconception about cleanup after seeing the unfinished version of Beauty and the Beast I didn't know that there was anything between something like this and something like this I thought it was much more direct no actually it's often necessary to rebuild or fix the roughs or at least parts of it some rough animators draw very neatly which makes life much easier for clean up with little reworking required you could skip this whole

middle step for something like this because the animator already did it on my father's dragon we didn't have separate key animators and Inbetweeners the rough animators would do most of the r inets but those of us in clean up would have to add in betweens fill in from twos to ones at times and Flash out partial drawings before the actual clean part another of my beginner mistakes was rushing it on the movie we did about 10 drawings per day and as I understand it other movie productions also go

at around 10 to 15 drawings per day although measuring it that way is not completely Dependable because naturally some drawings are harder than others skipping through the frames we're focusing on different parts of the character and trying to see if any flaws jump out looking for things to fix and improve over time working on the same character you'll get better at sponding model issues at a glance you'll be able to spot things like arm too long eyes too far apart and so on if I were working wi

th someone else we'd be able to cover each other's spots in that regard so I'm sure that I'll notice issues in this very animation after I'm done but constructively critiquing yourself is the important thing here it's pointless to say things like the eyes look weird it has to be followed with how to fix it are they too big too small are they the wrong shape or maybe they're actually fine and it's a connecting part that's making it look off we're we working with structure and Construction in our

drawings in order to confidently plant things in the right place adding the inet that I left out last time I used less charts than most rough anomers would but that's just because I have what I want in mind and it's just me who's in between it this depends on the software but I like to Mark keys and breakdowns along the timeline personally I do red for keys and blue for breakdowns while everything else is just the default color his inner ear fluff was an area that I ended up working on quite a b

it over each pass it's too thin in this initial rough so we're going to go through and make it thicker there's a little bit of forgiveness for inconsistency because it's a soft and flexible part but due to its color it is an area of high contrast so any morphing or jittering will be noticeable and distracting I I added this little bobbing movement uh instead of a hold in the previous version but that's not something clean up with that okay now it's a step better before we actually make a clean d

rawing let's get everything set up there are some clean model sheets from the L King out there but they're very low image quality you can tell the line quality and the notes are a struggle to read but luckily for us there is a 4K version of the movie so we can get a really good look at it I found one or two clean drawings from the movie too so we can glean some things from those the line actually does have a little texture to it a little life boil and variation you can see it quite clearly in th

e eyes due to the color contrast it's not distracting because the volumes are very good the movement is squashy and expressive the length color is mostly not too different from the fill color and of course they're furry characters so the texture is appropriate I believe they would have done this with just a regular wood pencil or maybe clutch pencil as opposed to the mechanical pencil lines that were often used elsewhere which give a solid and even line so let's take screen caps from similar sho

ts and we'll make a brush to match I took one of the default brushes in Creer which which I also used in the rough and just tweaked it a little bit making this size very sensitive to pan pressure by adjusting the curve like this which helps get the pencil kind of look and making the brush opacity clip so that it's never below a certain percentage this will give us a more solid line hopefully avoiding issues with coloring later and letting thin lines sh let's try it out looks like a good match so

we'll save that and make a note of the brush size brush smoothing is something that isn't actually as useful as you might expect it definitely comes in handy for a long simple Lanes but I'd say only use it selectively because if you get into any detail at all it becomes hard to control and your drawing can become less descriptive or less defined than what's intended in the rough and we'll set up our layers this one's very simple but do plan this out if you have anything that's at all complicate

d one thing that's usually best to avoid is something called match leaning say for example you have a setup like this with the character sitting at a table match laning is when you use only one background layer and one character layer and you match the line around whatever is in front of the character it was more common back in the days of cells when but it was harder to make more layers but maintaining that edge from frame to frame is tricky it can cause issues in compositing and if you have a

soft Edge it's impossible so it's better to break it up into layers and any overlapping part can be its own layer with a color separation line closing the Gap now what's the color separation line or sa it's a line that shares the same color as the fill usually indicated in red or blue and changed later now we're just making sure that we have our reference handy let's actually get into drawing the clean lay this is not really a separate step if you're working alone but on a production this is typ

ically one drawing per scene that's drawn by a supervisor and it's used by the regular cleanup artists to show them what changes need to be made from the rough it's a Dependable drawing that you can compare the other too I'm going to choose this key as the spot key because it's a fairly standard pose and expression while the others are more unique so changes made to this one will be more applicable to the others be sure to keep notes of the changes that you make at this stage one of the major pa

rts of cleanup is tracking the model adjustments for example I've made his nose wider and less tall so from now on each clean frame need this adjustment keeping the squash and stretch proportional to whatever's in the rough later on it'll be important to keep comparing the rough and clean side by side to make sure that the animation isn't being lost cleanup is actually more about making good volumes than it is about the lines themselves the different styles of line are kind of just the coating a

round the volumes it's why you can have a style with Bo Leg lines that doesn't look like it's strong G wrong or animated wrong but if you have nice lines with bad volumes it can look amateurish and overw the rough should get you most of the way there but while we're doing cleanup it's a good chance to solidify it a little more generally I think that you get nicer lines when you do them quickly and confidently with a big stroke and just redo it until it's right but then using a concrete rule you'

ll see me not doing that in a lot of these uh screen recordings once in a while though when you nail a line first try it makes you feel like a genius something I like to do that helps with long lines is to make a little Mark where the lines connect and at the peaks of any curves and then just connect those bits I do this all the time when making changes too I'll often keep the old line there and only erase the old line once the new one's in place if you are zooming in and focusing in on the line

itself just make sure that you never lose track of what the actual thing you're describing is and what is doing when I got into adding the fluff I found that I liked drawing an initial line along the surface as if the fluff wasn't there then drawing the hair which always looked better when I drew it quickly rather than slowly and then after that just erase in the crossover okay now that we have this drawing established we have a clear mission for the rest of it we'll move on to the other Keys n

ow I'm introducing one of the most important takeaways from this whole video the workflow of going in multiple passes through the timeline in smaller divisions with each pass generally we're going to be drawing key positions for the whole scene and with each pass divided segments of the timeline based on the spacing of the animation starting with the widest spacing on the first key pass and ending with the tinest inet you may have run into issues before where the drawings look goodur separately

but the animation is inconsistent once it's all put together using this process we're able to iron that out there's a similar common issue in which the roughness of the animation appears to hide inconsistencies and once you have to really Define it with clean lines the issues become glaring so to choose which keys to do first let's go with the ones that are the most different from there find the next most important keys and as you work on those keep checking it against the spot key remembering c

hanges that were made in that drawing now keep going through in passes until all the keys are done don't be afraid to adjust neighboring Keys as you work on another it may be a little tiresome to adjust keys that you'd previously considered complete but we are saving time in the long run from having to fix it later as we in between which would require fixing more drawings be sure to keep in mind the design rules for the character and the overall Style I don't have those available I'm largely gue

ssing at what they did but as I went on I found that there's a lot of this shape in the design so whenever I'm stuck I can usually make things this kind of shape and get away with it okay now before we move on let's check what we have so far now I'm making a new blank layer and flipping through the keys to find things to fix turning off the rough layer for now but we will bring it back as we're actually making the changes to be sure that we're not losing anything from the rough my preferred way

to do this is to flip through and no the problems first then go back through to fix them rather than fixing issues as I spot them it helps me to keep track of what I'm doing on a team you check the keys with the supervisor of this stage and get some guidance before moving along on this first breakdown pass let's go through and do one drawing between each key break dos will usually be marked on the rough and again we're choosing which drawings to clean by which ones have the widest spacing so bet

ween these keys this is the drawing that will clean on this pass mentally we're switching modes a little bit at this point at the spot key and Key Stage the first priority was making those individual drawings nice now we're thinking a little more about movement here watching the arcs drag and so on for each part of the character keeping in mind where we're coming from and where we're going okay now let's go back through it again and do the other breakdowns dividing each segment again it starts t

o look a little bit more like it's moving at this stage so we can spot issues like snags and the movement or B changing size when they're not supposed to something that I didn't really do a lot of here but it is a common technique is to copy and transform parts of the cleanup for Speed it's useful in some ways but it can also cause some issues it can make the animation flatter and stiffer essentially making your handdrawn animation end up looking more like rig animation tends to and it can also

degrade the quality of the lines sometimes beyond what a sharpen tool could solve but it does have some uses in the Simba clip I used it a bit for his eye pupils uh to help keep them steady and you know check it again fix some stuff and let's crack on to the inbetween by this stage we should have a very clear idea of what we're doing using the onion skin becomes more appropriate as the drawings get closer together but make sure to turn it off and check by flipping regularly as you go there's an

issue known as sticking that can arise just from the nature of 2D animation because although we Tred to think dimensionally it is a line drawing with a fill it's a flat shape it's when part of the lane appears to cling to where it was in previous frames it tends to happen all close inet and especially if the movement is smaller than the width of a lane it can become really tricky to work around onion skin is really useful for this we just need to make sure that the lines are separated at least a

little bit some in between such as this one are so close together that it really is just like pting a line between the other two lines if the spacing is super narrow sometimes it is appropriate to do that anything more spaced out than this though I would have roughed out earlier in order to avoid losing this Sol of the character when it comes down to those inet where you're really just putting a line between two others this is how I like to figure out where I'll place it if you just turn on the

onion skin and do it there's all kinds of possibilities within this Gap right so I'll focus on the ends of the line and the peaks of the curves and flipping between them trying to picture the arc that those points will follow I'll place a little segment of the line in place with regards to the yee in or out and then just connect the bits well here we are folks the drawings are all filled in the timeline is full we're finally at the end of our cleanup Journey ready to move it along to coloring w

ait sorry actually we're we're going to have to go through it again one more time from the top everybody let's completely turn off the rough layer for this one we're flipping through the frames looking for errors mostly at this point looking for any little gaps in the lines that would cause issues with coloring looking for anything I might have missed while in between are the steps all there are the whiskers there did I remember the little lines inside the ear on each frame all righty now here w

e are in cleanup 4 and here we are with color and everything you know not a perfect Disney impression but is better than last time which is prob we want to see let's recap the major takeaways from this video to really hammer it in if you're taking notes these are the big things to write out one solve problems as early as possible to minimize the workload of fixing them putting more thought into the earlier stages in order to make it progressively easier as you work through to the inet two workin

g stages cleaning the drawings in order of most different to most similar and three prioritize the volumes over the individual lines and flip the drawings with onion skin off in order to check for inconsistencies if you want to practice cleanup for yourself I think it's a good idea to pick out some rough animation from living Lions library or something like that and try cleaning it up because you'll have a style to aim for and model sheets and so on but I would keep it short and just try to real

ly nail one or two seconds rather than a long scene because I think you'll learn more that way the dite to doing that would be that if you use it in a real it might be unclear what you're saying that you did so you know that would be an argument for cleaning up something that you animate it by yourself either way you will improve just from giving it a tenu and try hopefully you found this useful the next one is just going to be a quicker one about doing the Shadows with Tom boom the forer shapes

um see you later and remember rules just tool just tools [Music] right [Music] n