Clay Animation Onion Skinning. Onion skins are visual tools to help make animation easier. The process of onion skinning enables the animator to view multiple frames at the same time. Use onion skinning to view the contents of frames preceding and following the currently selected frame. Onion skinning helps the animator smoothly animate frames without having to flip back and forth through frames. The term "onion skinning" comes from a traditional animation technique of using thin translucent tracing paper to view animated sequences. When onion skinning is activated, such as in an animation program, objects in frames before or after the current frame are displayed but are dimmed so that you can distinguish them from objects in the current frame. The animation below is a regular animated object. The object consists of a set number of frames and a set rate at which they play. Between each frame the object moves from one location to the next creating the illusion the object is moving. Being able to onion skin the animated object lets the animator see all the frames at the same time revealing the distance the object has moved between each frame and what direction the object is moving. By seeing all the frames allows the animator to create the smoothest possible animation by moving the object the same distance between each frame. Different software programs have various methods of onion skinning. transparent onion skin. If the stop motion animation process being used for a project does not support onion skinning there is still a way to manually onion skin that can be implemented. This manual process can be done by using a video screen to view the subject that is being animated and then drawing reference points directly onto the screen. By drawing reference points on the video screen it makes it possible to check the movement of the subject between frames to create a smooth animation. Make sure to use a dry eraser marker so the points can easily be erased and updated. full image onion skin. transparent onion skin. wire frame onion skin. Try using the free clay animator stop animation program. The program supports onion skinning. http://www.clayanimator.com