Yesterday, kalli posted about AnimeEffects, and it looked neat! So naturally I decided to join him in playing experimenting with it.
It's Live2D Super Lite and meant for animations (keyframing, etc.), and free!
The learning curve isn't too high - I've played with animations and keyframes in the past before (mostly in Blender and CSP), but AnimeEffects was definitely the easiest to figure out.
The products of my labour
I say 'labour' but it was pretty much like <30 minutes for each of these I think? (Art time is included in that number.)
Attempt #1 consisted of 4 layers:
Head
Body
Mouth (closed)
Mouth (open)
I figured I should start really simple - so just normal transformations: scaling, positioning, and opacity changes.
Aaand attempt #2 was this one, which also consisted of 4 layers:
Head
Body
Left arm
Right arm
For this one, I wanted to play with bones a bit and figure out how they worked here. In hindsight, a chibi isn't really the best to play with bones, but it's the learning process that matters.
Installation and set-up notes
The installation is pretty easy - I just downloaded from the GitHub repository (I use the Stable version) and unzipped it.
Buuuut you should make sure to Run as Administrator - otherwise, when exporting, if you don't have FFMPEG installed already... it might start behaving weirdly and not install it properly.
(This is also just fixed by closing it, reopening as administrator, and trying again.)
Then again, my PC is also just stupid, so you might not run into that.
Process
This is mostly me writing notes for future me so I don't forget things... but essentially a collection of the important/useful parts of my experimenting.
Roughly, the important parts were:
Setting up the PSD
Moving centroids (center points of each part)
Setting keyframes
Setting animation curves
Playing with bones and meshes
1. Setting up the PSD
AnimeEffect works by loading in a PSD and building things from that, and from my fiddling, adjusting the structure within AnimeEffect itself feels sort of weird.
Namely, my takeaways were to:
Use folders to group things that should be animated together!
You can have folders within folders!
Merge layers as needed (e.g. I merged all the lines and colours together since I wouldn't animate any of those separately.)
Name layers. It helps a lot lmao. You can rename this in AnimeEffects too, but... might as well do it in the PSD?
(I think you can use clipping layers as well. I saw it in the UI, but I never tried it myself - I assume it'll work as expected.)
The layers for my 2nd attempt looked like this:
I had a folder for the head alone because I considered having the mouth separate... but then I decided not to bother with that. But in my first attempt, the mouths were separate and in the same folder as the head.
Essentially: you can animate entire folders, so you sort of want to arrange things to make use of that.
2. Defining centroids
Initially, the "centroid" of each folder/layer/etc. is just going to be the center of the non-transparent areas: that means all rotations, scaling, etc. are going to be based around that center point.
This isn't correct if you're like, trying to rotate a head around a neck or something. Fortunately, changing this point is pretty easy, and you can just adjust the position wherever.
For my 2nd attempt, I just put the centroids at the bottom of the pieces since I mostly wanted to just scale thing downwards to squish them and didn't want them to move too much otherwise.
In my 1st attempt... I didn't move the centroid for the head, so I had to adjust the squishing and movement to account for that. (´。＿。｀)
it sorta sucks. learned by fucking up tho.
3. Setting keyframes
Keyframes are... pretty much "this is what things should look like at this frame" and then everything between is interpolated.
And they're pretty straightforward here - both to make and to set! Most of my keyframes were just move/scale keyframes, and so I just made 3 frames for each of those:
Initial keyframe (at rest position)
Keyframe for when they're squished down
Final keyframe (returning to rest position - I just copy and pasted the initial keyframe! copy/pasting keyframes is easy and nice.)
Making the keyframe is pretty much just "go to the corresponding frame and then set things as you want it to look at that moment".
(If you don't want to make any changes, then the "Create [blah] key" works for making the keyframe.)
4. Setting animation curves
This is something I really like about AnimeEffects: it has a bunch of animation curve ("easing") presets!
I just used Elastic because I like how those look more, but tl;dr it just controls how the interpolation works.
Aaaand you can also define your own curves. I am fortunately a simple and lazy creature.
(It's best to just play around with them to see what they're like, I think. Maybe I'll compile what each of them look like one day... but doubt lol.)
5. Playing with bones and meshes
This one I won't actually write much about because I didn't end up using them much, nor properly.
... But essentially you can just add bones and connect them to different parts, and then move those bones around and keyframe the poses.
As for meshes: meshes are automatically generated by default, but you can also define your own mesh. And then you can sort of just deform those - it's like a liquify tool that you can keyframe!
I'll probably experiment with these more later, and maybe I'll make notes for those... but I think these are mostly just something that you learn by experimenting with.
Final thoughts
I think a lot of it is just "you mess around and figure it out", but fortunately it was pretty easy to figure things out? Exporting the files is also really nice and easy - they let you export to GIF! And the GIFs turn out nice!!
There's a lot of other things too - you can add multiple PSDs and images as resources! But I'm simple and starting simple. nodnod.
ヽ(✿ﾟ▽ﾟ)ノ
I'm probably going to play with this more in my spare time, just for fun.
... because i want to make at least 1 animation to part of a song, just to play with that features and do something a bit more serious.
... ... ...
and also because i want to animate chibi verti getting railed.
More useful notes and resources
Kalli posted his own notes for a proper illustration - and he actually properly used bones, weight-painted them, and deformed stuff. respect. couldn't be me.
There's also this Intro To AnimeEffects Tutorial video - I actually only used it once to find out how they did opacity because my brain just did not register "Rate" as what I should be setting.
... and that's all!!
(can you tell i have an occupational disease which causes me to write longer notes than necessary? i like writing stuff like this a lot. but also whenever someone asks me to explain something there's an 80% chance it ends up like this o(￣┰￣*)ゞ)