If you want to rig like a pro, I also highly recommend checking out the Rigging Academy at School of Motion. This tutorial actually helped me a lot when I started rigging in After Effects:
Character animator tutorials free#
The most popular is Duik, a free tool that can be used to rig and set up After Effects characters of all types.ĭuik can be complicated if you’re new to rigging, so I really recommend watching a few tutorials before you start. As such, you’re not going to be great at it at first, but that’s okay! There are a few tools out there for making the process much easier. Rigging is an entire career field in and of itself. The null objects will be used as guides to adjust your character’s movement. This is usually done through parenting your Photoshop layers to null objects. For example, by moving the foot, you would expect the shin and thigh to move, as well. Rigging is the process of getting your character ready for animation by connecting the body parts together. Once you’re done designing your character, save it into a PSD format. It’s important to properly label each of your layers, as the layer names will be used when you import the character in After Effects. For example, instead of creating a single arm layer, you’ll want to break that arm up into a hand, forearm, and bicep layer. You’ll need to create separate layers for all of your character’s moving parts. You can use your sketch as a reference for designing a colored version of your character. Once you’ve sketched out your character, it’s time to bring it to “life.” Open Photoshop or Affinity and import a scan or picture of your sketch. If you’re designing cartoon characters, keep the arms and legs very basic and avoid creating characters that have extra extremities, like tails or wings. I personally recommend creating very simple characters in the beginning. The more complex your character is, the more time you’ll need to spend animating it in After Effects.
The goal is to simply get a rough idea of what you want your character to look like in key poses. The process of animating a character is different for each project, but the steps below outline a very typical workflow using After Effects.Įven though modern character animation uses a computer, most animation projects should still actually start with a pen-and-paper sketch. In this post, we’ll talk about the process of creating animated characters in After Effects and discuss some tips and tricks for perfecting your character animation skills. In an age of After Effects and 3D modeling software, character animation has come a long way from what it once was, yet many principles established in the 1930s and 40s still very much apply to the work being done today. If you think of your text, shapes, and backgrounds as characters themselves, your projects will feel more intentional and directed. Understanding this framework is actually very important for improving your motion design projects. Characters can very much be cartoon characters, but they can also be a simple square, a lamp, or even a color. The term “character animation” can be used to describe a number of different artistic disciplines, but at its core, it’s simply the act of giving lifelike qualities to inanimate objects. 2.Joey Korenman is a motion designer and owner of online learning platform School of Motion. The tutorial does an excellent job of showing how this process works along with some of the basics of how animation works within the tool, using things like face tracking to quickly animate mouth and eye movements.
With Character Animator, a user can create a 2D “puppet” in Photoshop or Illustrator, then name the layers and the app will do the rest. Rigs are automatically generated just by creating your layers and properly naming them. In fact, the premise behind Character Animator is that you don’t have to rig your characters within it. The team behind the tool has created a 30-minute tutorial outlining how the Character Animator tool works and how you can use it for your animations.įirst off, this tutorial isn’t strictly a character rigging tutorial. It’s bundled with After Effects CC 2015, and it’s designed to make character rigging and animation easier. Character animation is so popular now that Adobe is building their own character animation tool called Character Animator.
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