Rough Animator

Getting Started

1. Rough Animator is a non-destructive animation software, which is available on all 4 iPad Pros in the Multimedia Lab.
2. To open a new project, click "new project" and fill in a title. You can choose resolution and frame rate in this dialogue box but you can also change it later.
3. Choose your background color by going to Project Options on the top left screen and Change background color
4. Choose brush color, opacity, and size by clicking on Tool options, start drawing your first frame!
5. You can advance to the next frame or go back a frame by clicking the forward/back arrow

Onion Skinning

1. Onion skin allows the animator to see a transparent copy of the last frame and a live copy of the current frame. This makes it easy to track motion and keep objects in registration. Do enable this feature, click Onion skin on the bottom left corner of the screen. There are opacity dials that let you choose how many frames you can see. Experiment with them!

Transferring .RA files with the Finder

Plug the iPad charging cable into the USB port

1. On the iPad if the Trust this Computer dialog opens click Trust.
2. Open a new Finder window.
3. Click the iPad in the left sidebar
4. Click Trust
5. Select Files
6. Find RoughAnimator and click the arrow.
7. Select the file you want to transfer and drag it to the Desktop

Importing .RA files into AfterEffects

1. Open AfterEffects and save a new project
2. Go to File > Scripts > RoughAnimator to AfterEffects_2.0.jsx
3. locate your .RA folder and import the data.txt file
4. There are several layers you can mess with but you'll most likely be using the composition file that is named after your .RA file
5. Drag this into the timeline and get workin!