The ULTIMATE Adobe Fresco Tutorial Animation, Lettering, Watercolor & More

Hello everyone it is Malachi with Essence Cartoon and today we're going to be talking about Adobe Fresco. We're going to go through here and basically just explain like why you should use it, what it's useful for, things like that. I would keep in mind like Procreate, Procreate Dream and see how that works compared to this and see maybe Fresco is a better choice. This is also good for like people that love to animate in Photoshop. This is a, I would say this is a better tool than Photoshop's animation tool. So as you can see you have your brush tools. You can choose from three different brush tools. So you have pixel brush, live brush, and vector brush. Now with the pixel brush it's more raster based. With live brush it's more like watercolors and with the vector brush it's basically a vector brush. You can see the raster version of the pixel brushes. You can even import your pixel brushes like from Photoshop. So if you have brushes that you use in Photoshop you can basically just import those ABRs and TPL, brush files I should say. You just add them here. You can even find new brushes. So they do have some. They keep adding them so it auto updates. Really cool brush styles that they have if you don't have any. But you can also use your brush styles from Photoshop just like you could with Procreate. You can also, yeah basically yeah that's to show you how to add them. If you go to the live brush this is more like pixel based oil painting and watercolor painting. You can control like how much the watercolors bleed or spread. You can even mix the colors together which is pretty cool. But there are a few brushes for oil painting and watercolor which is really cool. You can manage the live brushes as well. So you can hide them, show them, all that good stuff. Now vector brushes is more like Flash or Toon Boom. That way no matter how much you scale the brushes up there's no pixelation which is great. I really love vector brushes. You can play with the jitter to give it a bit of style. It even has a manga section where you can use a g-pen and you have outlines which I hate. I don't. It looks like bacon at the bottom. But yeah you can favorite the brushes as well. Now when you go in to manage them you can hide brushes you don't need. I would always hide the outline brushes personally. This is your brush tool so you can change the color, size, ink flow. It's really really useful even the opacity of the brush. Very cool stuff. There you can change the size and smoothing is really important if you're using an iPad or if you're using a digital tablet smoothing comes in helpful. And you can change the roundness of the brush. That setting that I was just on that was more for like painting within strokes which is really helpful too. The stylus pressure is really key especially if you're using a digital tablet or Cintiq. Now these icons you see here those will tell you if it's a vector brush, raster brush, or a live painting brush. You can combine or group layers. That's how you group the layers. You can add layers and these are all the settings. You can delete layers, hide layers as well. You can even clip layers. That will create a clipping mask just like in Photoshop. You have adjustment layers and these are all the layer actions that you can do. You can create mask which is pretty cool. This is really helpful if you are on a iPad so you can create shortcut, touch shortcuts which come in handy. And this is how you save your document. You can do a quick export and you can do an export as and then you can do a time lapse export if you want to show yourself drawing on like YouTube and stuff like that. Great for tutorials like this one. And it saves as a jpeg which is pretty cool and then it auto saves as well. Alright so the next thing we'll talk about is making a selection. So in this part of the tutorial we are selecting using this tool. Selecting the cat's head. So this is basically the lasso tool. Now you can use a magic wand. There's other tools on here but right now we're just going to use the lasso tool. And then what we'll do next we can either paint inside the lasso tool. We can erase inside the lasso tool. We can even fill the area with paint using the paint bucket. You can do that as well. You can even invert the selection so we paint outside of the lasso selection. You can even scale up what's been selected. And then you have and that's how you invert. And you can see I'm drawing with the inverted selection and it's not drawing inside of the selection. You can use the transform tool to move rotate and resize the selection. So you just basically select it and you can scale it however you want. Then also you can deselect once you're done with whatever you're doing. And the deselection button is right here. You can long tap or long press on the selection tool to get the magic wand paint selection in the shape selections. Magic wand is really helpful because it'll use the pixels to select automatically what should be selected. It's a pretty quick way of selecting stuff. And you can control the settings for this too. Okay so let's talk about rulers and drawing guides. You have the ruler, circle, square, and polygon. And with the ruler you can it helps you draw like straight lines. So you can barely see this. Maybe I should increase the size of the stroke. Let me do that now. All right so you can see here that's how you draw the lines. And then you can turn the ruler and draw in different angles. Okay let's talk about animation in Fresco. So you can see the fireflies animated on a path. And you see the button you have to click to get to the motion path animation. So you see it's playing. The kid is running with his net to capture the fireflies. This is on one but it's just two frames. So these fireflies are just animated on two frames in place. And then they go across a motion path. And the motion timeline is what you see on the screen. And each of these layers have their own motion timeline. So you just select the motion timeline that you want. And then you can create a motion path. You just tap on path and then you'll be able to create this dotted line where this animation will move. Which should usually be a linear path. But you can change how it moves, how it rotates, does it go, you know, is it aligned to the path, things like that. There's a lot of settings that you can use for the path action. You can even pause the fireflies if you don't want them to play. Or you can delete the path if you need it. But this will be the frame by frame portion of Adobe Fresco. It's pretty easy to use honestly. Now let's look at the boy's frame by frame. Now he's being animated in place. But you can see like all the frames that were drawn. And you can see if we hide the color layer and we delete one of the layers, the line art layer. Or actually I think I deleted the color layer. You'll see how it was not lined up now. So each layer has its own timeline or motion path. And then you just hit play all. You can adjust the settings, blend mode, layer opacity, loop. It even has onion skin, can you believe it? So the onion skin definitely comes in handy for this. And here you can see the onion skin when it's paused of course. Alright last but not least we're going to go over the perspective grid. This thing is powerful within itself. You can use the graph or perspective grid. It has one point, two point, and three point perspectives. With the vanishing point being able to be moved. I'm sorry for using a thick stroke. I don't know why I did that. But yeah you can change this around. So that way you can then start drawing these perspectives pretty easily. I honestly think this is better than Photoshop perspective. I don't even think Photoshop has a perspective grid honestly. But this thing does. So I mean if you need one and you're not using say Clip Studio Paint, Procreate or anything like that. Then this is going to be something you I would highly recommend looking into using for your backgrounds. Especially if you need to animate backgrounds. This is going to be very helpful for that. Something I would say trying to use this software in conjunction to Toon Boom or Flash is could be a bit of a nightmare. Because you can't import video into the software. I think you could do a PNG sequence but that's about it. But so this has to be the first step of whatever you plan to do. So like if you're going to do rough animation you have to start with the software to do the roughs. And then export it as a MOV or something like that. That the cleanup artist would have to trace. Another thing that you could do with the software is do like individual animations. So like if there's bird that needs to be animated. Or if there's like water that needs to be animated like VFX. You can do the VFX here. There are some new features that's coming out as of May 18th 2024 that this video is made. It's probably if you're watching this in the future it's probably already there now. But yeah you can set a loop count for mp4 files. You can do spin and sway motion effects like you see here. They're adding some winter and spring brushes. And I think that's pretty much it. But this thing does have a lot. The only downside I would say if I compare this to Procreate Dreams is the timeline on Procreate Dreams or even Premiere or After Effects is a thousand times better. Even Toon Boom. Two things. Importing MOV files and SWF files for animators and having a true timeline for animation. If they could add those two features this software would be unstoppable. It would be the answer to Procreate Dream and Procreate.