This will be the first of an on-going series of Flipbook tutorials
created by animator, Andre Quijano. The tutorials will cover
a variety of exercises and fundamentals that animators, of all
skill levels learn and practice to improve their process and
understanding of motion with traditional, 2D animation.
This lesson will focus on the ‘Bouncing Ball’ exercise.
Feel free to start from scratch or open one of the
accompanying demo files.
Example1 Example2 Example3 Example4
STARTING A NEW FLIPBOOK
To get started, you’ll need to select ‘New FlipBook’ under the ‘File’ menu in SketchBook.
This will open a Settings window where you can choose canvas size, frame rate and
number of frames for your flipbook.
The settings used in this exercise can be seen in the image below.
*Flipbook is a tool only available in the Pro level of autodesk SketchBook.
FLIPBOOK TIMELINE
Here’s a breakdown of the Flipbook timeline once you’ve chosen your settings.
On the left, you have your frame creation controls: Add a keyframe, hold frame,
duplicate frame, and delete frame.
In the middle is the working zone where you choose which frame is active. The slider at
the bottom of the window sets the number of frames visible, and the total length of the
animation.
On the right you’ll find controls for playback and ghosting frames, also known as onion
skinning.
The layer editor will also change a little in Flipbook mode as there are only four layers
per frame. These layers are a solid background color, Background, Midground and
Foreground. Only the Midground and Foreground can be animated on; the Background
layer is a still image, like a table in this case.
STARTING A NEW FLIPBOOK
It’s important to experiment and play around with how you want your workspace layout
to be setup so that you can work comfortably.
For this tutorial, the default pencil tool was used. I’ve set the size to 10.0 by double
clicking on the icon and editing the Brush Properties. Don’t be afraid to be sketchy and
rough with your lines, it’s the motion we are after.
The first step in this animation exercise is to select the background layer and draw a
line across the canvas creating a ‘floor’ that will serve as the ground plane for our ball to
bounce on.
WORKING WITH KEYFRAMES
The major points of motion in an animation are called keyframes. Keyframes are the
base images that you need to describe the story you’re trying to make. For this exercise,
we will start by creating three keyframes. First we set where our ball starts from above
the floor.
Now, select the second frame to sketch where the ball makes contact with the floor.
It can be a little difficult to recall the original position of the ball, and that’s where the
ghosting buttons come in handy.
Turning on ghosting frames allows you to preview the frames behind or ahead of the
current frame.

INBETWEENS AND TIMING
One more ball is placed the ground on a third keyframe.
Now that we have our keyframes drawn, we can add more frames in between the
keyframes. These frames are known as ‘inbetweens.’ It should be noted that we cannot
just add frames in any order, as you need to consider timing of the bounce.
With careful timing you can create a sense of motion more convincingly than just
drawing one object’s place next to another.
When a ball is dropped, you can see how the force of gravity takes affect. The ball will
initially pick up speed and when it hits the ground, the ball will bounce and push itself
back up. Have a look at Example2_Acceleration, or take a look at the .GIF Here and see a
clear difference using timing between two bouncing balls A and B.
KEYFRAME 1
INBETWEENS
KEYFRAME 2
INBETWEENS
KEYFRAME 3
INBETWEENS AND TIMING
Now we can start adding frames inbetween keyframes 1f and 2f. First, click on frame
2f and click the
icon to insert an empty frame. Then add a new frame by clicking the
icon. A good way to start is by using ghosting to sketch in the midpoint between both
of the existing frames.
As the ball drops, it should start out slow and pick up speed as gravity pulls down on it so
we’ll add two more frames; one between 1f and 2f again and another between 3f and 4f.

REVIEW
You can experiment with adding additional frames to get a feel for the motion. There is
another way to draw frames without having to press so many buttons by turning on the
Auto Keyframe feature. Let’s click and drag our third keyframe to the right, leaving
plenty of frames in between and select the next empty frame in the timeline.
With Auto-Keyframe active (highlighted in Red), you can skip the step of adding a
Keyframe after selecting an empty frame. In other words, you can draw inside a blank
frame to reduce the number of clicks, making it easier to animate.

REVIEW
Once you have sketched in a series of frames, press Play in the playback controls (or
press ‘Enter’) to watch the magic unfold as you have created a bouncing ball animation.
Congratulations! Try playing back with loop turned on to see the ball bounce over and
over.
Now you could go back and clean up the frames or add more frames to smooth out the
motion, but that’s up to you. Hopefully you have gained the feeling of creating motion.
You should have something similar to Example 01.gif
*Click on the image below to open the file in a new tab in your browser.
ADDING DIRECTION
A stationary bouncing ball is a great start, but how about with animating with movement? Try creating a Flipbook that shows the ball moving from one side of the canvas to
the other. You could also try making the bounce get lower and slower as it loses momentum, like in the images below.
Challenge yourself and experiment, but if you do get stuck you can check out Example3
and Example4.
Click on the images below to check out the GIFs.
Stay tuned for more Flipbook tutorials by Andre Quijano!
EXPORTING FLIPBOOKS
Flipbook animations can now be exported as a PNG sequence, PSD sequence, MOV,
MP4 and as an animated GIF file.
Once you’ve saved your Flipbook, and are ready to export, click on ‘File’ and ‘Export
Flipbook’. This will open up a window with all the new export options.
PNG Sequence - Creates a folder containing a .PNG file of each frame in the animation.
Empty frames are automatically generated with the previous keyframe
in the timeline. Includes an option to include Background color.
PSD Sequence - Creates a folder containing a layered .PSD file of each frame in the
animation. Empty frames are automatically generated with the
previous keyframe in the timeline.
MOV - Outputs an .MOV movie file of the Flipbook animation.
MP4 - Outputs an .MP4 movie file of the Flipbook animation.
Animated GIF - Creates a . GIF file of the Flipbook animation with options for Looping
Playback and Include Background Color.
All Export options include settings for Range (all frames, or specific range), Size (Image
resolution) and Frame Rate (speed of playback)