Quick Start: Part 1 of 3
In chapter one of Quick Start, you'll familiarize yourself with early workflow steps.
Learn how to create your own color palettes, make shapes, orient your layers, link properties, use shortcuts, apply effects, mask layers, and more.
Want to learn more about the effects/behaviors in this chapter?
Check out Wave Warp.
*If your interface looks a bit different throughout this series, don’t worry. We’re constantly improving the platform and deploying new features. If the changes make this tutorial difficult reach out, we're happy to help.
Hey everybody. Welcome back to our Fable Quick Start. This is chapter one of three. Let's get you up and running in Fable as quickly as possible. Let's take a look at what we'll be making today.
The idea here is that at the end of each Quick Start you'll take what you ended on and use that as your starting point for the next chapter. Once again, this is chapter one of three. Without further ado, let's just dive right in. The first thing you'll see when you dive into Fable is your workspace.
The first thing you want to do is create a new project. For good practice let's name our project Quick Start. Then we will define the properties of our project. So let's go ahead and set our frame rate at 30 frames per second. And our duration for this case will be three seconds and one frame.
Next, we're going to define our color palette that we'll be using throughout the Quick Start. Let's create a new palette, we'll name it Quick Start, and let's start adding some colors. You simply choose your color or choose the value and hit the plus button here. We're going to use a white, we're going to use our yellow.
We're also going to have a few shades of blue. So we'll start with our principal blue followed by a lighter tone of blue,
And lastly, our dark blue, which we'll be using for the color of our waves. Now let's set our main canvas to our primary blue. Let's go to the top left here, choose your circle ellipse tool, draw a circle anywhere on the canvas and use the controls in the top right, to align it to the center. Let's set that to yellow.
This is going to be our main background. So we will name the layer yellow circle. Keep it simple. Next let's work on this little satellite. So control D to duplicate, let's call this one white circle. We're going to link the height and width properties so that we can scale them uniformly. Let's reduce it down to 20%.
And now let's make it white. Finally, let's push it north a little bit so that it's touching the outer edge of our yellow circle. For our next step let's make a controller and we're going to link our white circle to the controller. Let's set a key frame at the beginning and a key frame at the end of exactly one full circle, one full turn around the circle, to make this easier to loop, select both of our key frames and let's set our curves to quartz. Preview it, looking good.
So let's jump into our next stage of this particular project. Let's go back up to our shape. You're going to choose a rectangle. Draw a large rectangle on the bottom half of the circle, make sure it extends past the edges. And you can use the central controller here as a guide to line up towards the center.
Let's make this one, a dark blue
Let's name this waves, blue waves, I guess is better. Now we go to the top right in our effects panel. There's a dropdown. Click and drag the wave warp onto our blue waves layer. Let's rotate it to 90 degrees. Let's make the width 300. Now we're going to animate the movement so that these waves feel like they're moving. On the first frame, we'll set it to zero.
And on the last frame we'll set it to negative 6.26. You can play with the values here, but that's the one that worked for me. Lastly, let's choose our key frames and set it to linear so that there's no easing.
Now let's get the alternate direction waves. So again, control D to duplicate our layer. Let's make this one white.
We're going to twirl down our key frames and now let's just invert the direction. So we'll slide the one on the right to the left and the one on the left all the way to the right. Then we're going to slip our layer a little bit to the left here. Just so it's a little bit offset. And there we go. We've got opposing directions of waves.
Now our next step, let's group the two waves with control G or command G. If you're on a Mac. We'll change the color of our layer here. So it's a little bit easier to see. Now let's duplicate our yellow layer in the back. We'll call this our matte or our mask, and by dragging from little icon of the mask layer onto the waves, we'll mask out the waves.
And there you have it. This brings us to the end of Quick Start part one.
Create and export your first animation in Fable in under 30 minutes