Welcome back to another video. Today's
video is all about character rigs. Now I made this little character rig here with
Duik, which is the de-facto character rigging tool for After Effects. However
there's actually a lot of different tools out there for character rigs, and with so many different tools to choose from, it can be hard to know which one is
the best. So in this video we're gonna compare all
the most popular tools available for character rigging and After Effects. So that you can make an informed choice. So let's roll that intro Okay so the first thing that most everybody's probably familiar with is the puppet
tool. I'm gonna just go out on a limb and say that the puppet tool is not the best
tool for character animation. We've all had that experience where we put in a
couple of the puppet pins in it in a layer and then we've watched it been
with amazement. The reason why I think the puppet tool can't compete with these
other tools is because it lacks the IK functionality that these other tools
give you. What is IK? Well I'm glad you asked. IK refers to inverse kinematics
and it is the way that our limbs should move and bend. With the puppet pin tool
you have no movement like that in the elbow when you move the wrist. So while to the untrained eye the puppet pin tool seems pretty cool, it's not actually as
good as the other tools on our list. Okay, so now that we've talked about the
public pin we can get into the real meat of this video, and we're gonna start by
talking about Duik Bassel, because Duik Bassel is the most popular character
rigging and animation tool. it comes with everything you need to rig your
character and then animate it. It also comes chock-full of other tools that
help make life easier in After Effects and it is completely free, no strings
attached. So with that all in mind the question then becomes why would we ever
consider any of these other character rigging tools. Well that is the question
we're going to attempt to answer today. By comparing each tools workflow, what's
unique about each tool, and where I think each tool kind of falls short. So with
all that being said we have a lot to cover so let's get into it. Okay to get started we have to select what kind of limb we want to do, in our case it's the
arm, we're gonna select the arm it's gonna create some structure layers that
will then line up with the joints of our artwork. Then I'll go down and rename the
layers of my artwork to match the structure layers that I'm going to be
parenting them to, then I'll parent them to the corresponding structure layers,
select my structure layers and go to auto rig. What this does is now I have
this new control layer here that will drive the motion of my limb. Then I will move my limb into place by selecting the structure layers and the control layer
and then I will parent my top structure layer to the body so that it sticks to
the body and then I'll also parent my controller to the body because usually
your hand moves up and down with your body. Okay so in general that's how Duik
works, you can rig up the spine and you can rig up legs and there are some
differences in the process of doing those two things, but generally it's the
same. This isn't a tutorial so I'm not gonna go over how to do those things, I
just wanted to give you a general idea of how Duik works . So let's move on
to what I like about Duik. Okay, so why is Duik so great? Well if we go over the
Duik panel here if I just give you a look at this there are so many different
tools here for character rigging, for animation, for refining your keyframes,
and many more. You can just tell that Duik is chock-full of features and
tools and it really has no business being free. But it is! Now the other
thing I love about working with Duik is the control it gives you over your
control layers. Not only does it give you icons that kind of give you an idea of
which kind of controller it is, it also gives you control over the
appearance of these icons. So a lot of times people will move these off to the
side so that makes them easier to select. You can increase the size and you can
change the color in case you have like a red background or something. One other
thing I love about Duik is that if you come over here to the IK you can
actually turn it off. If I hit 'U' on my keyboard you'll see that I have three
keyframes here with a loopOut() expression but if I open the FK menu
here all I did was I keyframed this one property and I have this follow-through
and overlap if I play this back you can see that there's a overlap and follow
through in the swinging of the arm that's all done automatically. I didn't
have to keyframe all three joints it's just done automatically, which is a huge
time-saver. And Duik has a lot of these little
tools. Now if I wanted to have control over the individual joints I also have
control over those. Another example of the kind of control that Duik gives you
is in this foot controller. Now if I drag this foot controller around you can see
that it moves the foot up and down. What's great about the foot controller
though is that you also have these four additional properties that you can use
to animate the foot, which just gives you so much more control over your rigs. Okay so there's a brief overview of how Duik works, and some of the things that I
really like about Duik and by the way that's by no means an exhaustive list of
all the things I think really make Duik stand out. Duik is so feature-rich that
it would literally take me several videos to go over everything, but I just
want to drive home the point that here's the biggest thing you need to consider
when choosing Duik and I think one of its biggest downfalls is that with that
flexibility, that control it offers, comes complexity and so the biggest
thing you have to consider when choosing Duik versus these other tools is how
time you want to devote to setting up your character rig. Because that time
that you spend setting up your character rig will eat into the time you have to
finesse and perfect your animation So for me, a lot of times, I find myself just
simplifying my Duik rigs down to the very bare minimum because I'd rather
devote the majority of my time to animating my character. So with that being said let's move on to the next tool: Rubberhose. Rubberhose' biggest
advantage over do ik is its simplicity to create a new limb in Rubber hose you
just start by selecting the kind of limb that you want to create. So if I wanted
to create an arm I would just select the shoulder/wrist then I go down here to
new rubber hose. And after a few seconds Rubberhose creates this new working
bendy limb and we have three new layers. We have a wrist controller, a shoulder
controller, and a hose, which is the actual limb layer itself. The shoulder is
what you would parent to the body and the wrist is what you would parent the
hand to, which I have on this arm rig right here. So that's it there you've created a new limb. Now if I look at this limb I've created over here
and over in this panel is where you would adjust the a few of the parameters
of your limb, like the length and how bendy it is. Now Rubberhose also has
some other functions like Rubber Rig and Rubber Pin which are used to rig up
character artwork Rubber Pin you would be using it in
tandem with the puppet pin tool and Rubber Rig is a lot like Duik where you
are aligning your artwork to joints and then rigging them up that way, most
people I've seen use rubber hose, are using this default limb. Once you've
created a limb you can apply different styles to that limb and
you can copy styles from one limb to the next limb and then it has some other
tools to just help speed up your workflow. So that's really a quick
overview of how rubber-hose works. Ok so, rubber hose' biggest differentiating
factor is in the name rubber hose Rubber Hose is the best for these bendy rubber
hose type limbs. You can kind of get this effect in Duik, but not to the same
degree and it doesn't look as good. So if you want this kind of style you've got
to be using rubber hose. Another thing I like about rubber hose is if I go over
to the parameters you'll notice that there's this 'auto rotate end'. What that
means is that when I parent this hand layer to my wrist controller, when I bring my wrist up the hand rotates with the wrist which is really nice for this
kind of setup because that's typically what your hand does when you raise it. Now you might have noticed when I was using Duik and I was raising this
controller the hand remains pointed downwards and Duik I have to rotate it
manually so having this auto rotate feature is awesome and it's something
that Duik does not have Now the fact that this is an option that I can turn
off is also really great, because if I go to this ankle controller you'll notice
that it's turned off. Now what this means is if I were to say animate my character jumping, I would have this hip controller parented to the body and I would animate
the anticipation of the person jumping by bringing the body down and you'll
notice that because I have that auto rotate turned off the foot is not rotating with the rotation of the ankle, and so it's remaining flat on the ground
which is what you would want if you were to animate a character jumping. So the auto rotate feature is really awesome. Another reason why I really like working
with rubber hose if I come over to the parameters and I turn this radius down
to zero. What that does is it eliminates the
bendiness of my limb and now it will bend at an angle like this like we saw
in the Duik rig. Now the reason why like this, is, I want to illustrate by
showing you this Duik rig and you'll notice that this Duik rig doesn't have
a hand icon it's because the way I rigged this one up is I just moved the
anchor points of my artwork layers and then used it to just rig that up. You can
do it that way I skip the whole structuring process and it's just a
little quicker. Now you'll notice the big pitfall of Duik as soon as I move this
limb up. If you don't have your artwork perfectly aligned right in the center of
where that joint is you'll often get this issue right here where it becomes
misaligned and with rubber hose I never have to worry about that, that that joint
will always be aligned now we're talking about rubber hose, rubber hose is really
easy to use you can almost immediately pick it up and start using it but with
that simplicity means that it lacks a lot of the flexibility and capabilities
that Duik offers So let's take a look at some of those things. Okay so one of the things that rubber hose lacks is the controller's for the foot that we looked
at in Duik. There's no way to rig up the foot to bend like you can in Duik,
which means if you're doing a walk cycle it can sometimes look a little weird
when you're rotating the foot because it doesn't bend like a foot normally would.
However you can do a combo of a Duik and a rubber hose rig if you want to have
that functionality in the foot but yet still want that rubber hose bendy style. So that is possible. Okay so the most important thing you have to keep in mind when considering rubber hose as your go-to tool is: is the simplicity it
offers you worth the money you have to pay for it because unlike Duik rubber
hose is not free. Okay let's move on to our next tool which I think is a little bit of a sleeper which is really unfortunate because it's one of my
favorite and that's Limber. Okay, so I'm not gonna go too in depth on how to use
Limber because it's very similar to Rubberhose you click this new limb
creates a to control layers and a limb layer. So I'm just gonna jump into what I
really like about Limber. If we go over to the properties on the controller,
we'll see that we have all these different properties to control the
appearance of our limb. We can adjust the size of each portion of our limb and we
have full control over the width of the start, middle, and end of our limb makes
it so we can make some really good tapered limbs. Now you can do tapered in
rubber hose but you don't need have nearly as much control as you do with
Limber. And the reason why I really like this full control is for animations like
this. Where we can do some foreshortening and different perspectives and do a walk
cycle like this where the person or character is walking towards the camera
something that's just not possible with any of these other rigging tools. That's why limber is one of my favorite tools out of these tools because it really brings something very unique to the character rigging process the other
thing is if we move down here we have this scale parameter we go to the
dynamics we have the rotate start and just like with rubber hose. What I really
like is that you can turn off the stretching in limber so that it just
remains the same size not something you can do in rubber hose unfortunately. And
limber has this anti-pop thing which is really good for walk cycles when you're
bending your knee. Okay so the last thing I really like about limber is the
ability to switch between IK which is how it is working now to FK so if I just
bring this all the way forward now I have access to the rotation of every
joint of my limb and this is really great for walk cycles
animating the arm-swinging. It is a lot easier to do it with FK rather than
grabbing your controller and trying to animate the path of this and trying to
loop that. So now it doesn't come with the automatic follow through and overlap
like Duik unfortunately, but it is nice to have this FK functionality and that
is something that you don't get with rubber hose. Now limber does come with this rig it comes with a bunch of different styles
of limbs, which we'll get to in a second but I just wanted to quickly show this
example where it comes with this foot and you can animate the rotation of the
foot and the bending of the foot so again that is a little bit of capability
and functionality that rubber hose does not have that limber does have. Another
thing that's really nice about limber is you can tell that limber kind of chugs
because you're using so many shape layers. Well what's great about limber is that you can actually use these bones you
know, I just solo these bones you can do all your animation with these bones and
you can see how much faster it works. So I could do a whole walk cycle with this
and it's just this really simple bone and then once I'm ready to apply my
style I can go back over to my arm here make sure my arm selected copy and then
go back to my bone and paste and boom. Now I can paste that style for my final
render. Okay so now let's move into some of the areas I feel like limber falls
short. First and foremost Limber is not easy to
customize. If I have this arm selected you'll see all these different shapes
and these are all different shapes that it's using to draw the limb and it's
using a combination of merge paths and a bunch of expressions to link everything
up to the control layer so that I can make adjustments. This gets very
complicated and be it's relying on so much scripting in the
background. Knowing how all that works and how to modify it while not
impossible to be honest do something like this is not really that hard, but to
really customize this limb it's not that easy . So you really have to know how it's
working to customize it. Now Limber like I mentioned before does
come with a limb library but is essentially just an After Effects file
that you download and then you have to import it into your project if you want
to extract one of those limbs. I really wish they would implement these
presets like rubber hose, where you can access the presets from within the
rubber hose control panel. It's really too bad that we can't do that with
Limber. The other thing is if we look at the limber panel there is only a tool
for creating a limb and then modifying the controller's. Unlike Duik and rubber
hose, you cannot use limber to rig up existing artwork. So it's missing some
functionality in that area. The other thing I don't really like about limber
is these control icons because when I look at these control icons
I want the anchor point to be right at the tip rather than right in the middle
of the icon because when I'm aligning something like this hand I don't want to
have to guess where exactly I'm supposed to be aligning the anchor point of my
layer. It'd be a lot easier if I just knew that it needed to go right at the tip
instead I have to kind of guess where exactly the middle of this icon is if I
want to be correctly lined up to rotate right at that pivot point. So I really
wish they handled their control layer icons a little bit different. Okay so I know I've covered a lot but I just want to finish up real quick with
two additional tools: The character tool and the Puppet Tool. Okay so we're gonna breeze through character tool because this doesn't, there's nothing really new
about character tool it's really great for these bendy limbs the only thing
that's different about character tool is its style palette here. You can use these
tools to apply different styles to your limb and if you look at this limb I have
about five different styles. Okay so that's really it's only differentiating
factor. It does have some other tools like this helps you with looping and
this is some other presets that aren't really directly related to character
rigging. My biggest gripe with Character Tool and why I don't really use it for
my character rigs is because it lacks any kind of auto rotate now I want to
show you another example of why auto rotate is very useful. Here I have this
limb and if I just turn off the visibility bring back each layer you
have your arm, this is the base plane rubber-hose limb, then you have the hand,
and then the forearm, and then the bicep and then the shoulder. And because I have
the auto rotate turned on for both the end and the start, I can parent these
shape layers to this control layer and these shape layers to this control layer
and therefore when I move my arm around they follow it like so so something like
this where i want extra detail is just not possible with Character Tool and I
don't like giving up that level of control. Okay so when considering the
character tool I really think you got to ask yourself if you got 40 bucks to
spend is this really the best tool your money can buy and I don't think it is
rubber-hose offers everything that this tool does and more. So now let's take a
quick look at our last tool the Puppet Tool. Okay so the Puppet Tool is a really
simple tool as you can see there's really only two buttons that you can
press now the way that puppet tool works it works in tandem with the puppet pins.
So with this layer right here you can see I have three puppet pins. Once I've
created my puppet pins I go over to create controllers this will create
three shape layers that these pins will be parented to. Once I have those shape
layers I can now select those shape layers hit create IK, it will create a
new shape layer that is the control layer, and this is the layer that will
drive the animation. Now this doesn't look too bad. Although when you get to an
extreme it does this weird pinching thing and I don't really like that now
you can use puppet tool to just rig up layers just like with Duik. Here I have
these three layers and I've just moved the anchor point to the joints so that's
where it will rotate around selected all my layers hit create IK, creates this
control layer and now this will drive my animation. Now puppet tool suffers from
the exact opposite problem that character tool suffers from. Which is by
default it has the auto rotate on and there is no way to turn it off. The only
setting you get with puppet tool is this lip Bend direction so if I were to want
to animate my character jumping like the example I used earlier, if I bring this
down the foot rotates with the ankle. So now I have to go in and keyframe my foot
just to rotate opposite of my ankle and I'm just gonna tell you right now it's
gonna be way too much work to match it up . So already you know how I feel about
the last tool the puppet tool is not a tool I'm going to be opting for. So there
you go there is my full comparison of the different character rigging tools
out there. If there is a tool that you'd like me to give my thoughts on, that
wasn't included in this video, leave a comment down below. If you have
any other questions about any of these tools, feel free to comment down below
with your question or you can contact me directly on Instagram. If this video was
helpful hit that like button and if you're interested in learning more about
how to use one of these tools I reviewed in this video, let me know which one in
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post a new vide. That about wraps it up, thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video.
