I've been learning 2D animation with Blender's grease pencil setup. I really recommend it for people, because the layout isn't too bad, it's a little hard to understand, but there's a lot of tutorials out there. And once you have a grasp it's a really powerful tool given it's a 3D editor by default with an insane amount of features/addons. Plus it's opensource/free!
You can use the camera in 3D space to really easily get a zooming and movement quickly.
There is one weird thing to get used if you're coming from digital painting software, the pen strokes are almost like vectors and don't look exactly like typical brushstrokes, but they're pretty close.
So it is more geared towards line are and a toonish style which I'm finding is easier in animation to begin with.
I clipped one of my favorite scenes from Evangelion and put it in blender as a background video I could scrub through and trace over, frame by frame. It's super easy to set up:
Select the camera and go to background images and now the video should be viewable on flat views, in the 2D Animation tab of Blender.
I learned so much going through this scene frame by frame. I looked at the with more focus and attention then ever before when trying to draw it and figure out the keyframes. I'm still learning and figuring out how the fps works and how animators use that for efficiency and conveying fast/slow motions. The fun part about doing animation studies is that I can focus on certain parts I want to learn, like the the anime eye movement or framing.
I didn't really know where to start with animation. I have been drawing a while but always struggled with perspective and anatomy. I think animation studies might help force me to do rapid drawing studies in essence. Like drawing an object rotated in 3D but more complex as an exercise. I want to move away from just rotoscoping and slowly move towards making my own stylized little animations.
Would love to hear from any other animators or anyone whose tried animation before. Still so many questions.
