7 Free Tutorials to Improve Your Animation Skills

Learn practical tips to use different types of software, learn new tricks, and improve your animation style

With the refinement and advances in animation technology, you have more software options at your disposal to create your own animation style, regardless of whether you want to do a modest but high-impact project for social media, or if you want to venture into something more complex.

Here are 7 free animation tutorials to take your skills to the next level.

Just click on each video, and if you want to read the full instructions, click on the red title of each tutorial. Enjoy!

Cinema 4D Tutorial: Cloning Methods in MoGraph

Mograph is one of the most important tools that the Cinema 4D animation program has for animating objects and creating special effects. With it you can make objects explode, control them with other objects, deform them or create infinite movements. Animation expert Zigor Samaniego (@zigor) explains the different cloning modes and the cloning tools found within this tool.

Animation Tutorial: How to prepare your portfolio to send to studies

If you are an animator or illustrator, having an online portfolio is important to getting jobs. Despite this, many creatives do not know where to start or what to prioritize when creating their collection of works and creations. In this video, Caio Martins (@caiofrmartins), illustrator, character designer and storyboard artist teaches us how to make and organize a very efficient animation portfolio.

After Effects Tutorial: How to Create a Loop

One of the most interesting possibilities that Adobe After Effects offers is the creation of animated loops; that is, of animations without beginning or end, which are repeated ad infinitum, in a loop. This makes it easy to create GIFs and is therefore a very attractive skill if we want to generate content for social media. Animator Moncho Massé (@moncho_masse) teaches you how to create your own loop in Adobe After Effects. The only thing you will need is to have your character ready to work with this continuous animation.

Pyxel Edit Tutorial: How to Create an Idle Animation

Where does the success of a video game rest? In your narrative? In its design? In a combination of everything? The details will partly depend on whether the gaming experience is satisfactory, and one of the most important is the waiting animation. Learn from art director Daniel Benítez (@dabntz) how to create this basic animation and why it is so important in game design.

Photoshop Tutorial: How to Cut out Images so You Can Animate Them

Learn how to cut photos in Adobe Photoshop with the polygonal lasso and prepare them for animation in After Effects with the help of designer Joseba Elorza (@miraruido). With your cropped photos, you can apply any other background, correct imperfections or combine them with other images to get creative compositions. Here we explain how to do it step by step, even if you have barely used the program.

Cinema 4D Tutorial: How to Animate Letters Simply

Animating typography is a very useful resource for your experimental animation works. The possibilities are infinite and you can create very fun, interesting results. In this tutorial, motion designer Holke 79 (@holke79) teaches us a quick and simple way to animate words or phrases in Cinema 4D, using the gallery of resources found at mixamo.com.

Animation Tutorial: How to Capture and Render Your Project

A digital portfolio, on social media or a personal website, is one of the best tools an animator has for finding work. Knowing how to share your animations online quickly and professionally can be the difference between your work being taken seriously or not. Zach Soares (@voxels) is the creative director of animation studio Bunnyhug s and a professional voxel artist and animator with almost a decade of experience. In this tutorial, he shares a simple way of capturing and rendering an animation project so that it can be published and shared online successfully.

You may also be interested in:

- Low Poly: Polygon Art for Video Games and More.
- 12 Basic Principles of Animation.
- 21 3D Artists You Should Know in 2021.