Onion skinning (known also as ‘Ghosting’) is a technique used in creating animated cartoons and editing movies to see multiple frames at once. In this way, the animator or editor can make decisions on how to create or change an image based on the previous or next images in the sequence.

What is Onion Skinning (Ghosting)?

In traditional 2D animation, the individual frames of a movie were drawn on thin onionskin paper over a light source. The animators would put the previous and next images exactly beneath the working drawing, so that they could draw the ‘in between’ frames to give a smooth motion. (source: wikipedia.com).

Using Onion Skinning

The onion skinning feature can be used to align objects in your animation from frame to frame. Onion skinning also gives you greater control over the action you want to create as the shadow frames lets you see exactly how far everything has moved in-between frames, as well as which elements have no action. Animation ghosting or onion-skinning lets you display a series of snapshots of animated objects at frames or keyframes behind and/or ahead of the current frame. This lets you easily visualize the motion of an object and helps you improve its timing and flow.

Here is a short video on how to use Onion Skinning feature with Marionette Studio.

Enable / Disable Onion Skinning

This feature can be enabled / disabled just by clicking on the  button in the top bar menu. Once enabled it will allow you to configure the available parameters.

Parameters