Bring your art to animated life

Learn the basics of the fledgling animation flipbook feature in SketchBook Pro 7, courtesy of our seasoned expert

ketchBook Pro 7’s animation Flipbook feature can be considered a bit of an experiment from the program’s developers. It’s best to see the tool as a work-in-progress project, because while the brush tools and userfriendly functions are impressive, this new feature is still limited. But it’s worth spending a little time investigating.

SSet up your project

Select File from the main toolbar and choose New Flipbook. The project panel will appear with a range of properties to choose from. The presets are the pixel dimensions of your project, and you can also input the dimensions to create your own custom size. The next option is the frame rate or how many frames per second your animation will be. The final option is to decide how many frames your scene will consist of.

The animation timeline

You can’t export your animation as a video file and the layers system is very basic, but to be fair, this is the beginning of a feature that could very well lead to the next generation of tradigital animation tools. For this month’s article I’ll guide you through the animation side of SketchBook Pro, reveal how to animate with the Flipbook, and explain how to handle the new layers system.

The Timeline is a series of frames from 0 up to the amount of frames that a scene consists of. The animation is played back frame by frame along the timeline at the frame rate that you selected in the previous step. On the left of the timeline are the keyframe options to add and delete a key. On the right are the playback controls.