Animated Dancing Bear

~ an Animation Shop tutorial ~

Tutorial written by Arizona Kate, © 2001
All tutorials, including images, remain the property of Arizona Kate and may not
be sold or distributed in any format without purchasing a license from Arizona Kate.

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With this tutorial you'll learn a quick and easy way to animate some clip art to look like it's doing a little happy dance. This is a perfect tutorial for beginners! If you've never made an animation...well, it couldn't be much quicker and easier than this one! ;-)

This tutorial is probably suitable for any version of Paint Shop Pro/Animation Shop, however, it was written for Paint Shop Pro version 7 and the version of Animation Shop that is bundled with PSP7.
 

Before we start, let's review a few program notes:

In my tutorials I ask you to right click to select most menu choices....abbreviated like this...RC. In addition to using RC, you can also do many actions using standard menu choices, keyboard shortcuts, or buttons on the Tool Options Palette. In fact, quite often there will be at least 3 different ways you can do the same action in Paint Shop Pro. For example, clicking the Node Edit button has the same effect as right clicking to select 'Node Edit'. Today we'll use RC and the pop up dialog boxes. After a while, you may decide you prefer one of the other methods and you'll settle in to your own way of doing things.

If you are using a pen tablet, you can right click using the clicker on the side of the pen. If this doesn't seem to work, you may have to change the tablet settings.

Tutorial text and images have been moved to a new, printer friendly page. Permission is herein granted for individuals to save or print this tutorial for personal use only...please do not distribute by email or otherwise.

Note: After surveying many tutorial users...it seems the majority prefer tutorials that are on one long page rather than multiple short pages...and I agree! This makes it easier to print out or save for offline use...however, it also means it will take a little longer for my tutorial pages to load...please be patient!

Because of too many illegal links to tuts, I may soon install passwords on all tutorial pages or install some other device to prevent more bandwidth theft....please link to or bookmark THIS start page, not the following page. OK! Let's get started!

First, a quick note about animating...pay attention to those little things that might make your animation look jumpy. Such as frames moving just a little too fast or signatures and shadows misaligned & jumping about!! I've seen many copies of this tutorial on the web (some are blatantly plagiarized!!) and some of them are trying to animate with an image that has a shadow. That shadow jumps and hops around in a very unnatural way. Please, don't let your shadows jump in your animations...it looks silly and amateurish! A correctly done animation will separate the shadow from rest of image so the shadow will stay "on the ground" when the character jumps...as in the dancing bear below. The shadow should move a little...but it won't jump up in the air!! If you can't figure out how to include a shadow in an animation...just delete the shadow from your clip art before starting!!

Another thing I see a lot is a signature on an animated image that hasn't been lined up from frame to frame...and ends up bouncing around. Take the time to make these corrections before saving your animation and you'll have a more professional looking graphic!

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