- [Evan] Hello everyone,
this is Evan Abrams and in this After Effects tutorial, we're gonna animate a
character's arms and legs using one path in a shape layer. It's a pretty good way to compress stuff just the way this character
here is compressing his spine. Here in After Effects, what we're gonna do is first dive into what is
this thing you saw in the intro and then we'll get into how
the arms and legs actually work and then we'll make a thing for ourselves and then we'll be done, so
that's the order of things today. So if we crack open this thing, we can see that we've
got shoulders, back, gut. These are all just shape
layers and all they're doing is changing their position
and sometimes their scale. There's not much to them. Really for this whole thing,
there's only 15 layers, it's a small number of layers for all the wonder things, wonderful finger
motion, oh it's great stuff, but we're interested in the arms and legs. So if we look at the leg here, you can see, we'll just
isolate it and, oh, those legs are actually
two legs because they're using a repeater to repeat those legs. You can see that, oh yeah, pretty sweet, but within the legs
there's a lot of stuff, but there's only one set of key frames that control the whole thing, so we're gonna go
through how we would make arms and legs with this, how
much detail we can put on them, and now it's time to move on
to phase two like I promised, actually making something. So we're gonna crack
open a new composition and, you know, I've been
working with square things, but we can use regular framing of things, so that'll be great and what I would like to do in here is activate a grid. So if I'm drawing in After Effects, I usually turn on a grid,
and everything I'm gonna do, you can draw it right in After Effects, very simple, very fast. Make sure we are also
snapping to that grid. It's great to look at,
it's better to snap to it. So now we need to actually draw something. So I'm gonna go over here,
I'm gonna grab the old rectangle tool and I'm
gonna choose a fill color. Let's make that kinda torso
t-shirt looking thing out here. So I'm just gonna draw a lovely rectangle. That's a square because
I was hold down shift, and I'm concerned that I
didn't draw it in the middle of the frame so what we can
do is hit uu on any layer you've ever drawn to call
up everything that's ever changed about it and I'm just
gonna adjust its position to be dead center, just for my
own ease of use on this thing and I think we're ready to go. Its size is 160, maybe let's size that up to be an even 200, that'll
work for me for brain math I think, so yeah, we
got this thing out here. This is gonna be our torso,
so I'm gonna hit return and write torso out there, awesome, we made it a shape layer,
it's a square, we're so good. The next thing I want to
do is maybe draw the hips of this person, we're
doing this super simple, real low end stuff here and
just gonna draw a circle, move that layer up to right here, put it below the torso, call this hips, and give it a fill color
that is like a dark red here. That should do it, sweet, good to go. Nice, very harmful to my eyes. What we need now are the arms, and these arms we will
make using the pen tool. You just hit G to call that up, we're gonna use a nice
orangey stroke, that's great, and 40 pixels is perfectly good. I'm just gonna click out
here and then click over here and look at that, you have made an arm. Now that doesn't look
very arm-like to you, well who do you think you are? Anyway, we're gonna
rename this layer arms, that's a good first
step, twirl down inside and have a look at its contents. So in here, we have a shape layer 1. Inside the shape layer 1 we
have a path, a stroke, a fill. This is a group containing stuff, and I'm gonna rename
it skin because this is the group that's dealing
with the person's skin, and inside that group,
I'll go into the stroke and not butt caps, but round caps please. That's what I'm looking for, perfect, and I'm gonna twirl open the path. We're not gonna touch it for now. Just set a key frame for now
and we'll come back to it later but I'm gonna duplicate that
group and I'm gonna call this sleeve because now we're
gonna define the sleeve part of this person, which I will
do by going into its stroke, choosing a totally different color, and then adding a trim
paths so I can trim off a percentage of the path I'm
not interested in seeing, which is 25% maybe, and
I'm gonna change the stroke to have butt caps (chuckles)
butt, and we'll change the width to be, not eight, 8-0, 80. So now that's looking
more sleeve-like, I think, very sleeve-like, and the path,
we need to change that too. Certainly it has the same path, but I don't wanna be setting
key frames individually for this thing, so I'm
gonna hold down alt, click on that path, which will
let me enter an expression. The expression I will enter
is not gonna involve typing. I'm gonna grab this thing
here, which is a pick whip, which inserts a reference to a target. So I'm gonna say your
target is this other path. So I can take this path here,
I can go ahead to one second, I could use the old convert
vertex and make this thing, you know, like a curvy
line, I can do that. I can do whatever I want,
I'm the king of this castle. I can do all sorts of things out here, you wouldn't even believe,
would melt your mind, the things we could do out here. Now you see that other path
has to follow this one, because it is referencing it,
that's just how that goes, but one thing you'll notice
is that this shoulder zone looks abysmal, so I'm
gonna duplicate that sleeve to make sleeve two and the
stroke on this one is not butt caps but round caps, and
I'm gonna set the trim path to be like 1%, that's gonna
fill in that shoulder zone, so if I call up the
key frames of this arm, by hitting U, you can see
that it goes from straight to floopy, it just floops
down, I think it would make more sense if this point
actually came in closer, like this, how's that? Like that, that's cool I guess. I might be mindful, though, of the points, have these handles here, and these handles are being animated as well,
so you can see the difference in if you extend the
handles at the beginning, what that does to the
rest of the animation. So it's coming in, maybe
he's punching someone, punch, punch, but at
two seconds I'm going to copy and paste and put
the same key frame there, so he's going from here to there to here. You can take those, I'm
gonna hit F9 to ease them, which is wonderful, so now
they are nice and easy, la la, and arms are great but this
person also needs legs. They need a head, too, but
that's a thing for another time. So I'm gonna duplicate those arms, and instead of arms
two, let's call it legs, and I'm gonna twirl into
legs, twirl into the contents of those legs, twirl into
the skin of those legs, twirl into the path, grab that path, remove these key frames
because we don't need them, and I'm just gonna move
that path down here and sort of attach it to
where I think it should go on this creature, I hesitate
to call him a person because they look very
strange, and I'm just gonna set it like this and
maybe we'll start him off with a nice curved leg, kinda like this. So what I might do is, since
this is a leg and not an arm, I might alter this significantly. So these sleeves, I'm
just selecting them both and then I go up to the stroke up here and I go like this, I make them red, now he's got shorts, sweet shorts, and maybe I should have done this before, but I'm gonna duplicate
these and rather than call them sleeves, I'm
gonna call them socks, so this is gonna be socks1 and socks2, and you know, the big
thing that we're gonna change about those is their
paths are gonna be inverted, so we just reverse the
direction of the path, so they're down there,
select both of those, and I should have duplicated
something before I did something else, but whatever,
don't hold that against me. And I'm just gonna click
the body there, sweet, and we're gonna bring the stroke
size down, maybe like a 45 or something so it's
still kinda noticeable, and yeah, that's great, so
while he's punch punching, his legs are gonna do
something, haven't decided yet, but we've got legs, those
legs have socks and shorts. It's pretty adorable, I'm
gonna duplicate the socks one more time, though, just
gotta find which of the socks is my, there we go, duplicate
that and I'm gonna call this one stripe, so if you want
to put stripes on your socks as we did in the original example, I would go to the stroke here,
I would select that color, and then I would go into
its trim paths, give it kind of a thin trim and
then off-set it to be higher up on the ankle, like right
there, boom, just like that. And the same principle
applies that if this thing goes from a straight leg to a bent leg, all we have to go is go
into the skin, twirl down, go to the path, set a key frame here, and I think, how do squats go, I guess? Let's make when the arm is
out, his leg will be bent, and his, her, I don't
know, we don't really know the gender of this person,
otherwise we will make them kind of straight-legged, I
suppose, kinda like this. Sure, and then they kinda
scrunch up like that, neat. So let's kinda play that back, copy this, paste it there, how we looking? Oh, maybe that's something, I don't know, but the next thing to do, I think, is to give this person multiple
arms and multiple legs. It is kind of weird that
they don't have more of them, and what I did in the example
was, for example with the arms here I can go in here and I
can add a repeater to this. Go add repeater, and with this repeater, I can give this thing two copies,
because you have two arms, go down, transform repeater
one, and rather than having each instance or each
projection of this stuff, we'll take a minute here and
talk about the repeater a bit. The repeater is below the
skin, the sleeve, and sleeve2. That means the repeater
is gonna be repeating, creating instances of
all the stuff above it, so skin, sleeve, this. Because the repeater is
below it all, takes it all, and we're making two copies
and putting them below each other, change that, put
them above each other, thanks. And I could repeat just the
sleeves, we can do that, but if you've got it under everything and repeat everything above it. What it then does is it
changes something about each subsequent iteration, so it could be we want to change the position, we don't, so put that to zero. We could change the scale,
which I used when I change one to negative to make it flip, it kinda flips it on its anchor point, which you can see is right here, so all of this is flipped to over there, and what does that look like? Whee, pretty cool, I
think that's pretty good. Maybe this person's dancing, I
don't totally know what's up, but I can just copy this
repeater, command C, go down to the legs
and ctrl+V, or command, put it down there and there
we go, we got this going on. You don't need to make the
repeater flip stuff, though. You could make it instead translate it, so don't do that, but do
do that voodoo that you do, and maybe this looks correct. Warp, so that they're doing this, sweet. So the next thing to do
is to put some motion to the arms and the legs and all this. I think the legs should
be parented to the hips, the arms should be parented to the torso, the torso should be parented
to the hips as well, and if we go here to the middle time, this is sort of where the ground is. Call up my rulers, command
R, put a ruler here, just so I know, and hips position change with the straight legs,
you're in the right position. With the bent legs, your new
position should be down here, kinda like this, I think so, and then we can copy paste
that key frame like this, and how does that look? Whee, perfect, that's good, that's good. I'm just gonna shorten my
work area to be right there, so if we play this back, who, ha, neat. We can grab everything, hit
U, call up all the key frames, and then we can go to the graph editor, all of them are eased,
so grab all their handles and push them like this
and then, who, ha, who, ha. There are a few things that
you want to look out for. Sometimes if you shorten
the path too much, then that little shoulder
bubble that we made will stick out under the sleeve. Just have to be careful to
sort of work around that by extending the sleeve or
by not animating in ranges that are gonna make that happen. Sometimes the connections
look a little bit funny, like it is kinda funny
to see that this person doesn't own a butt, what
we'll probably want to do is give them one by
simply drawing in a butt, and we'll just move that butt like this. Sweet, that's doing it, looks a little bit more
anatomically correct. They're also missing a head,
I can't believe I missed that. You know, I think it really
tells you what I think is important, and let's go
like this, make the head, sweet, and we'll make that
head like that, awesome, and we put that on the torso
layer so it's in a good zone, and yeah, we've got this person just, I don't know what this
exercise would be called, but it looks kinda funny,
and they don't have shoes because I find drawing shoes
to be incredibly difficult, but the point of this
tutorial was to teach you how to animate arms and
legs using a shape layer and just one set of key frames, and I think we have accomplished that. So if you've had trouble with that, please let me know in the comments. Ask questions, I'll try
to get you through it as best I can, and if
you really enjoy yourself on this channel, please subscribe to it. If motion graphics and
after effects are things you want to learn,
subscribe to this channel, new content going up all the time, and check out the back catalog of stuff, there's a lot of great things on here. This is tutorial 118, so there's at least something else good on
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and if you subscribe, well, see you around the internet.
New tutorial from EC Abrams. This one is really useful for people getting into character animation. I've used the technique plenty of times and it's really quick and easy, but he shows how to cleverly use trim paths and caps to add some extra detail. Check it out!
Coolest thing about it was the finger movement. Sad he didn't touch on that.