2D Animation With Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Animate

the characters in different poses

Adobe Illustrator is a vector software, which means that it uses Mathematical formulas or algorithms to form vertices to create images or graphics. It does not use pixels as in raster-baseded software and so the images it produced can be scaled-up high without losing details in the images or experiencing anything like pixelation. 

2D refers to a drawing or illustration that has only two dimensions which are height and width but a 2D work is one that has three dimensions in height, width and depth. Every object in the physical world is in three dimensions which in other cases means it has form but 2D digital works too are given some kind of form to make them assume the 3D structure because it adds a realistic effect and feeling to an illustration as will be discussed here. 

Animation is the process of rendering stilled images in a sequence to create the illusion of movement or kinetics. 2D animation becomes captivating when the illustration is done or rendered properly with careful lighting as well.

In 2D animation, there are many ways of creating it but one of them is the frame-by-frame animation where on every frame a different drawing is done to show the sequence of movements. For instance, to animate the movement of a closed eye-opening, the head with the eye closed is done first and then subsequent drawings showing a gradual opening of the eye on different frames. standard number of drawings in a frame-by-frame animation is 24 drawings or frames per second. All these drawings do not have to be different but some are repeated depending on the movement being created. 

For a simple animation of a character walking and eventually turning to the right in Adobe Animate 2022 for 2s, 52 frames were made use of in total. First, thing I did was to do a pencil drawing the character to get the proportions right and in different postures or views as I wanted and after that I opened adobe Illustrator and vectorized the drawings.

Characters in a pencil drawing which was to be used as a reference material for quick job.

How do you vectorize in Adobe Illustrator?

I took a shot of the pencil drawing, transferred it to my laptop and then opened it in Illustrator. 

to open this image, I placed it on the artboard by using Ctrl+shift+P and then selecting my image from its storage location and placing it. Next, thing was to lock it onto the artboard with the shortcut Ctrl+2. With the pen tool, every one of the drawings was traced and colored.

The animation process

The background for the animation was also created in Adobe Illustrator by the creative use of basic shapes and selecting some wonderful colors for fill and stroke. All my illustrations afterwards transferred to Adobe Animate were in Ai format.

Open adobe Animate and select the preset of your choice and a Frame rate of 24.00.  Import background using the import command in the File tab and then copy the same background on all frames of the 2s animation and it should be done with care to ensure it all gets copied to the same positions. 

To keep the proportion of the figures and since the characters were also imported and not directly drawn in Animate, there were some limitations on how to manipulate the characters so, I had to select all my characters at once and copy to Animate. every frame had the characters on but I changed some of the frames to keyframes which entails that they are going to have a changed pose of character on them.

I deleted the characters not needed on a frame making every frame now has only a character and also kind of measured the placement to ensure all of them are placed are same positions for smooth action. so in detail, the first character pose in side view was the same on 7 frames then the 8th was a keyframe with a different pose and subsequent ones also in that order till the last frame was filled. It was actually that the total number of frames was the dividend and the number of my characters the divisor. This gave the idea of the frames to make the keyframes. 

This practice was not a complex one so the animation did not take so many days to complete. Animation is very useful in education, advertising and many other fields which makes it one of the highly needed skills in this era of technology.

video of the animation