Complete Cartoon Workflow (Adobe Character Animator Tutorial)

Hey everyone this is Dave from the Adobe character animator team and recently I made a short cartoon called Consoles it's about what if the video game consoles were robots and they're they share an apartment and they have to pay rent and make fun of each other for the different specs and all of that and I think it turned out pretty well and they got a really good reception from you all so thank you for watching and one of the number-one comments I got though was how the heck did you make this people want to make cartoons with multiple characters and a lot of the tutorials I've shown are one character at a time explainer videos that sort of thing so in this video we're gonna go really deep into a multi character cartoon workflow we're gonna start with you know the basics of playing a general overview and script together order then gonna move into Adobe Audition and mixing all the audio and exporting for lip-sync and character animator will talk about the recording process how to do all those quick hand movements and triggers for the different hand positions and eyelids and all of that stuff and then finally we will composite in Adobe After Effects and add motion blur or shadows cameras title screens credits all of that so hopefully by the time you've watched this whole thing you will also be ready to make your own multi character three-minute animated short cartoon to put out there into the world so if that sounds interesting to you let's get started so before I jump into things with a project like this I want to kind of create a Bible for it right I want to I want to create a guiding sense of where everything's going well so in this case what's the premise who are the characters what's the world they're living in who's the intended audience of these videos all of that so I just started up a Google Doc and just start to write down a few things about that and then I started to sketch out the characters and you know I just did this on my iPad on it in Adobe fresco which I'm going to be using quite a lot during this whole process and just start to you know think of some differences how could I visually differentiate all the characters there's a lot there's a lot of different form factors all the mouths are actually different the eyes are different this is just something that you know the ideas were stuck in my head and I didn't really realize what was working and what wasn't working until they got them out there into words or sketches or you know whatever works for you so I just think get those ideas out a good or bad edit them and get them to where you feel really good about them and you feel like you can move forward I also started to write out you know character descriptions and who I wanted to be the voice actors to each one what differentiates each character right so in a you know a classic comedy like Seinfeld or friends or something like that all the characters are very different and have different personalities and that's where a lot of the comedy comes from and so I tried to establish that with these characters so well and it doesn't have to be you know really long it can just be really short character sketches and then that you know as you write scripts and build the characters and the voice actors will bring their own personalities to things you can kind of see how that how that evolves now part of this playing process was thinking about what the actual scene and environment is going to look like so again another quick sketch in Adobe fresco of where the characters were going to be what's the general layout you know so in this scene for example switch is gonna walk in from the left and jump on the couch PC comes in from the right I wanted to just feel like a normal apartment with you know a fridge and a counter and fruit and a plant and all these different elements just kind of getting a sense of what this scene is going to be and if you had multiple scenes you could draw up multiple environments but for me this is a short three-minute cartoon it all takes place in one area and so I just drew that out as a guide as well and then below here I wrote the script and again trying to stay true to each character and having a lot of direction here for each of them about to the voice actors about how they would be saying things I color-coded everything so when I sent this has a link to the different voice actors they would have this and be able to isolate their lines a little bit better but yeah there's a lot of stage direction of you know when switch she's coming in through the left door just trying to give it as many kind of hints and and organization and guidance to the process just to make it easier for everybody easier for me when I'm animating things later on easier for the voice actors to know what frame of mind they're in and all that stuff okay so I send the script to the different voice actors they send me back audio files usually there's you know two or three takes per line so I've got a few different choices and then I opened up here in Adobe Audition and so here I would go through and listen and basically save an edited version so I would open up the audio file and listen to you know let's say these are five takes of the same line and say okay actually this one I'm the press Delete is the best line so I'm just gonna do this and this move on to the next one and listen to these okay this one sounds good so I just keep going through this process of listening and deleting until I've kind of got a perfect mix of these are these are the best takes of each line and I'm going to save this as its own document and once you've done that you can click this little button up here insert into multitrack and that is new multitrack session and that's going to bring it into a multiple track setup so you can mix all your different voices and music and sound effects together and that looks something like this so this is a multitrack setup where every character's voice is its own track so I've got PlayStation Xbox switch PC some background music some sound effects down here but basically all laid out and as their their separate individual tracks and then I can change you know the volume of them I can change some settings equalising you can get as complicated or as simple as you want during this part the basic idea I feel like is you just want the voices to be as clear as possible have the background music add to the atmosphere but not be too overpowering add the sound effects to kind of punctuate certain moments this is where like he's doing the mario jump in the cartoon so I had a little bowing and the coin sound they're just things like that so if I was starting from the beginning I would you know bring in one of those edited two tracks that I did so let's just drag this in something like this and then I would use the razor tool up here you want to make sure it's two selected clips and not razor all Clips tool razor selected clips and then I would zoom in here by pressing plus and I would listen and say okay here is where I want to cut it and cut it and just make these little cuts and you know delete the sections that I don't need and then move them around to get the timing match up with the other tracks so how I'm spending most of my time here is kind of listening to these different tracks and making small adjustments so okay this needs to be a little earlier this needs to be a little later you know just making little little changes so sometimes I'll break a track into half if I feel like there's you know too long of a pause here between you know a moan or a sigh and something else and so I'll bring them closer together so you just have a lot of options here basically I want to keep the pace kind of fast and always having a forward momentum and so I tried to make the lines really line up one right after the other also play around with volume a lot so for example Andrews track came in a little bit quieter than some of these other tracks and so I brought you know there's this master volume control over here so I just bump that up to decibels the sound effects were definitely need to be quieter in the background so I brought that brought those down negative ten and you've got some on you know on track controls here like the music fading in at the beginning if you just click these little things you can make these little lines and dots that will allow you to make the volume rise and fall very easily make sure to do it on the volume and not the pan this will make it go from the left ear to the right ear and that's not what you want to do you want to do it with the volume audition also has these nice little fader controls that you can drag at the beginning and end of a clip to kind of fade it in and out so really easy to you know if there's white space or white noise at the beginning there ends you can kind of fade in and out each clip to make sure I'm you're not going to have that so next I need to take each audio track and export it out by itself to help drive the lip-sync of each animated character that I'm using so let's start with Play Station at the top for example so what I would do is mute all these other tracks so I only want to be hearing the top PlayStation track and then I would export this out I also want to make sure that any processing I've done to it I would take off temporarily so I added in the essential sound panel over here I always add podcast voice or balance male voice or something like that to make it sound a little bit cleaner and more professional but when you're driving lip-sync and character animator I find it works best with just raw audio files so for temporarily I'm going to clear the audio type to get rid of that so I just have the raw audio signal and then I would go to file export multitrack mix down entire session and save that as a a if' file or wav file or whatever somewhere by the way a shortcut to do this at the same time to mute multiple tracks is over the m if you hold down command shift on Mac or ctrl shift on Windows and click the M that's going to make them all mute or unmute at the same time so I would then do the exact same process for each track exporting each individually and then I want to also export out a final mix with everything unmuted everything with whatever processing or EQ you've done to it all of that stuff and just export this out this is going to be your final audio track mixing the music and the sound effects and the vocals together next let's move on to art productions so I've kind of divided into four different sections when I'm thinking of all the art that I need to create for a given cartoon so first I've got my characters in this case we've got four different individual characters that I got to you know create and have all their eye expressions and hand positions and all of that stuff the title and credit screens usually this is what's gonna start and end the whole cartoon and you know give credit to everyone who helps you make this particular production and kind of draw the viewer in background mid-ground and foreground elements so not just the background the world they're living in but different things like foreground elements and plate things you can hide characters behind to give it kind of a sense of depth and we'll talk a little bit more about that in the future and props and special effects so little things that the characters interact with or little smoke bursts or motion lines or things like that that help add a little bit of a dynamic quality to the scene so I've recorded hours and hours of tutorial about the character side of things but for this tutorial I want to shine a spotlight on the other elements of production and what all these other elements that really help bring a full package to life so let's start with the title and credit screens Here I am in Photoshop and I've got my title screen and really basic I just drew this you know very simple building structure down here kind of setting the scene for where these you know consoles live you kind of want to set up an establishing shot of what world you know your going into so there's like all these you know lights and it's pretty rough but you get the general idea and then I did a few other things but I've got these clouds as individual layers that move back and forth I've added a texture over top of everything so this was without the texture it's a very flat basic look but then when I add this texture if you've seen other tutorials you will notice and recognize this same watercolor texture that I used for so many different things and I just did a blend mode over top of it over top of everything to give it this nice watercolor kind of handcrafted look that I think makes it feel a little bit more alive and then I basically redrew the title in an okay samurai cartoon byline um three times a piece all in the same spot so here's number one and then read through it again and number three and then it just cycled through those later on whether in character animate or after-effects are same like that to give it this kind of live kinetic look and I want to use this an opportunity point out with your different video elements you always want something in motion so I'm not just gonna export this as a still image and put this at the first three seconds of my video instead I want to have a lot of movement so that's why I have the type moving you kind of feel like you're zooming in to the city the clouds are moving all these different things that keep momentum in the video you always want a sense of momentum you always want motion and to move the the viewer forward because if this is just static in the world of video that gets boring really really quickly so you always want at least something moving something catching the users eye and for you know it can be subtle in the case of this all the movement is very slow very methodical but that's okay it's kind of setting the pace and setting the tone and drawing the viewer in for the credits I took the exact same scene and just move the clouds over to the side for YouTube this is where I'm putting you know suggested videos and a subscription you know call to action and all that stuff so I wanted to make room for that you could also you know people add little videos of themselves talking hey thanks for watching my video like and subscribe you know whatever you want you could put in this element this area over here but I do think it kind of adds a nice professional quality to add some credits at the at the end give credit for the music give credit for the people who helped you with voice acting and all of that stuff it just kind of feels like it ties everything together next up let's move on to environmental art so this is the world that the characters live in so I drew this in Adobe fresco and I tried to give it a lot of nice little details so if you know your way around videogames you'll recognize a lot of these little pictures that they have on the wall at the Triforce Atari logo pac-man Mario Master Chief waving and Kratos there and then there's you know some some different little small things here their Cheerios and rice grains and they've even got a grocery list on here and you know a sketch of them on the refrigerator so just small little details like that that help give the environment a little bit of life and character now two main things I want to point out here number one the whole background has kind of a muted quality to it so I brought down the opacity on the stroke on the lineart that's around everything I added an overlay that kind of D saturated the colors a little bit and the reason for doing this is you don't want the background to compete with your characters too much you really want the characters to stand out so take a look at a scene like this from Netflix's Bojack horseman you notice the characters very strong you know line art and the drink even also in this bag they're all in the foreground the phone the chair all these have a great level of detail but the background all of the you know you can see a few little details there but you notice it feels much more muted and this really helps bring the characters out to the forefront a little bit better so it's a bit of a balancing act it's a bit of a trial and error you can try different techniques with the colors with overlays with transparency and see what works best for you a lot of times what I'll do is bring in these placeholder characters something like this so I can have a general idea of the sizing and relationship between the characters and then I can also see how how strong you know pronounce the characters versus the background are and make adjustments based off of that the next thing I wanted to point out is that the background is not just a flat piece of artwork that the characters are just slapped on top of when you're thinking of your background in the world the characters are living in you want to create a sense depth and that's why you know I've got this counter for example was a separate element that I drew and it's something that I was able to put the playstation character behind so you know when his arm and his body and all that stuff moved behind here you see he doesn't even have any legs I didn't need to draw them because he was going to be hidden behind this the whole time it just creates this nice sense of depth and the same is true of these other elements so I've got these foreground elements this plant over here in this little table with flowers on top of it and I used these a few different times in the project too for the initial establishing shot that zooming in to the whole thing and then when switch walks in the plant kind of moves to the side to again it's a very subtle thing but it creates a sense of depth and makes the room feel like it has a certain amount a certain size to it a certain quality to it and it's not just this flat piece of artwork and finally for props and special effects and things like that you can you know these can come from a variety of sources either your hand drawing them find them online you know buying resources from different stock sites that sort of thing you might notice there are a few instances where there are these little subtle effects like this smoke poof wind switch jumps up to hit the block and when PC comes in and out there's a little smoke poof as well so for example here's the tin frame sequence of smoke that I found of the smoke kind of rising in the air and then slowly dissipating and it's just a nice little effect that you could overlay on top of your animations to make it feel slightly nicer so when you're searching for this stuff online look for you know ping sequence or sprite sheet or terms like that of these animated sequences that you should be able to bring into your project and they'll come in a variety of formats but for me I find it best to put them into a Photoshop file kind of line them up layer by layer so you can integrate them later either cycle layers animations and character animator or just compositing them frame by frame in after-effects and we'll talk a little bit more about that later so this is my workflow I did my artwork in fresco and Photoshop primarily but of course you can use illustrator any combination of these tools or just one of these tools is totally fine I did my mixing in Adobe Audition and all my exported all my individual vocal tracks and the final mix then character animator is specifically for individual character animations so not worrying about backgrounds or title screens or anything like that just worrying about each character as its own individual scene so with each of these I you know switch got his own scene xbox has his own scene and then after effects is the final step where I bring everything together and I put the characters into a background switch between different camera systems add shadows and motion blur and title sequences and all of that stuff now I did want to mention there is a way to completely skip that After Effects step so if After Effects just scares you to no end and you want to kind of see what you can do all inside character animator it's totally possible you could composite everything into a scene and character animator all your characters and background elements and foreground elements or whatnot and then use character animators built-in camera system to keyframe different hold shots and close-ups and pans and zooms and all of that and you know what I would say for simple projects this is totally fine if you don't want to go overboard and you just maybe have you know two characters in a single static scene talking to each other I think this is a perfectly fine route to take but at the end of the day character animator is not really a compositing tool yet right it is not the almost 30-year behemoth that an industry standard that After Effects is so I feel like you just get a lot more bells and whistles and professional quality stuff if you add in the After Effects step I also think it simplifies the workflow so you can really focus on just your character animation in character animator which is what it's really been streamlined and optimized to do and then focus on the compositing and motion graphics and bringing everything together in After Effects which is what that's been optimized to do so that's the way I do things other people will bring in a Premiere Pro into the mix which dynamic links with character animator and After Effects as well so that's just another thing you could do if you want to add some editing components to it but for me and the way that I did this this three-minute piece this was my workflow all right so let's go jump into character animator now and I just want to preface this with not gonna dig into the rigging process that deep in this particular tutorial because I've covered that really extensively in a lot of other tutorials specifically about each of the possible tools that you can use to bring characters to life so if you have no idea what you're doing with rigging and you want to start getting an instruction on creating your own characters I would highly recommend checking out one of these videos either the Adobe fresco Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator videos each one of those is going to go into excruciating detail about how to put a basic character model together but if you're interested how I put my characters together guess what they're all free so all of these characters all the robots I'll forward the robots as well as the background and the title and credit screen images are all available for a free download at the okay samurai puppets page so at the time of this recording there in the very first slot up here just click download and you can use them however you want no credit necessary feel free to take them apart make your own you know fanfiction unauthorized episodes I don't care just have fun with them and learn from them so let's say you've created you know three or four puppets and you bring them into character animator and you start putting them into individual scenes so each character is gonna be a little bit different you know the way that they work this guy has some physics on his antennas up there his mouth is a nutcracker jaw he's got a bunch of different triggers I can add to him but it really doesn't matter you know how simple or complicated your puppet is it could just be published from the example screen right you could just make a cartoon with any of these characters and that's totally fine it's all up to you and your comfort level and you know what what you've created but for each character this is what I'm going to do I'm gonna add it into its own scene so I had my Xbox character here and with it selected I would click Add to new scene to make sure it's in its own scene by itself now because I know I'm gonna bring this to After Effects later I want this to be as high resolution as possible I don't want this to be scaled down at all so while I was going through the rigging process and just testing things out I've scaled this guy down to 50% I don't want that I want him to always be a hundred percent now he's way too big for the scene now but that's okay I'm going to select my scene and it just make the height a bit bigger so nothing is getting cut off you want to give yourself a little bit of extra buffer room here so you know the head and the arms and the antennas nothing's gonna get cut off the edges I have a full resolution character now that I can do a performance with and know that when I bring it to after-effects later there won't be any distortion or pixelation or anything like that now sometimes you may have a character that has multiple states I think there's a desire sometimes to just cram everything into one puppet file add the blocking add the sitting standing all these different variations into one puppet and personally I think that just makes your character exponentially more complicated and sometimes behaviors compete with each other so for example in the walk behavior with a walking character you know the arms are moving with walking but then you may also want to drag them and move them with a standing or sitting character so to me it makes more sense to split your character into multiple puppets for different instances and that's exactly what I did with the switch character for him he has a he has three different states he has a standing a sitting and a walking state now the standing and sitting are pretty similar it's just really that what the legs are doing so I just made a leg trigger swap set to change that so notice he's in a sitting position where he is for most of the cartoon but when I pressed the z key he's in his standing position so all I did was change leg artwork put that into a swap set and so I can very easily switch between those two states now for the walking scene I really want that to have enough space in the scene so he can walk all the way across from one side of the apartment to around the couch area and just give him a little bit of a runway to do that on so for this scene I've got I think it's 7500 pixels wide something like that depend on how much your character's walking you may have to make it even bigger but this type of thing works well for the walking character so I would highly recommend to resist the urge to throw everything into one puppet if your puppet you know has a frontal view a side view a standing sitting walking all these different things consider making life a little bit easier on yourself and it's separating into multiple puppets I think it will talk about how I do it here and I just think it'll make your life a lot easier so let's get into recording and editing now I'm gonna take every character you know one step at a time and kind of walk through them until I've got all my performances all set up and ready to bring in and composite and after-effects so I always start with the audio that's the first step everything else in the animation is driven from what the character is saying I don't know what emotions or how the character will be acting if I don't know what they're going to be saying at any given time so you want to import those isolated audio tracks that we did before and I would just you know file import to bring them in here and I would find my xbox lip-sync and I'm just gonna click and drag it over top of my scene to add it to this character in this scene now this robot character is a little bit different right his mouth is not the traditional swapping lip-sync mouth it's the Nutcracker jaw behavior and that's a different way to do a mouth it's totally fine but the lip-sync and analysis will work the exact same as if you were doing traditional lip-sync so if I have him selected I'm just going to go to timeline compute and up Nutcracker jaw take from scene audio and that's going to go through the analysis process and really analyze the amplitude the volume of the audio and determine when the jaw is moving up and down based off of that data and so once that's complete you'll see now I have a nutcracker jaw audio input take down here and if I play back you'll notice the mouth is moving now if it's moving a little bit too much I can always change the audio flap enos parameter one of my favorite parameters down to something like 75% and see how that goes because you don't want it to go too far because you can see if the jaw goes beyond a certain threshold it's gonna go you know off the face so you don't want to do that so three out of the four robots actually do have this Nutcracker jaw style setup but the more traditional route to go is what switch has which is a mouth with a lot of different shapes that it's going to swap between automatically as I'm talking and so if I did that exact same process of selecting my character going to timeline compute lip-sync tape from scene audio it's going to give me all these little mouth shapes down here these are called vis Eames and so if I play this back I can see each of little mouth shapes appear down here and if I wanted to edit them I can disarm my puppet so I'm not seeing any new life data coming in in fact at this point I should probably turn off my microphone because I don't need it anymore there's no reason to bring in any new audio it's all pre-recorded so I've been at fair price plus a few times I can really dig in here and say oh you know that M doesn't need to be in here that's kind of leading the whole thing or this e sound if I right-click this I need this to be an uh sound instead or you know I can drag the different parameters back and forth so or I want this s to show up a little bit later so let's drag that around see a full control over how the lip-sync is looking so if you're doing this type of lip-sync which I would say 95% of projects usually do you would want to now go through the lip-sync and just do a pass and make sure the mouth shapes are more or less looking correct so I would just play it back and then stop it and make small edits here and there so let's just try this little scene for example so I noticed when he said PlayStation did you see that his mouth really didn't move that much it just kind of it was stuck in one position so that really stands out as a problem right I'm I'm by no means a lip-sync expert on there are people who are much more skilled in this than I am what I'm looking for at this stage are the big mistakes things where a mouth is being held when there are multiple syllables multiple thousand said and I want to make sure that at least there's a little bit of a you know rise and fall of the mouth to at least give the illusion that the mouth is moving during those parts I might not always a hundred percent the time line up the you know the exact right mouth at the exact right time but at least I have the option of making it look a little bit more in line with what's being said as certain words and syllables are going so if I play kind of scrub through this so station so what I would do here is select this area go to edit split and that's gonna give me a new place to make a new vism so I no station so that's probably an a sound and a sound let's try that at least place top station place stage tion so over here so I'm probably gonna do more of a you sound again I'm really trying to just hit the main valves the main syllables and by the way I just short cutted the edit split it's a shift command D on Mac or shift ctrl D on Windows it's just I'm you know you'll if you're doing this a lot you know it'll help a lot to learn that shortcut and then I'll right-click it and let's say that's the UH for play station and then maybe I wanted to stop right here so let's split it there and then I don't need these extra visions that look like they got picked up so let's actually right click and go to silence which is going to leave a gap here for these ones and finish this a little bit more so let's see if this looks any better so that looks a little bit better I could of course finesse and and move the the lip-sync around but I just wanted to give the general idea of that's the type of thing that I'm looking for extra visi UM's that you don't want delete them or change them just silence and where there are you know when there's a long vision that's being held and you want to split it up into multiple parts and make sure that you're hitting each of those different sounds that the character is saying so now that we've got the lip-sync out of the way and we've got kind of an audio track to work against let's start focusing on other individual elements what we're gonna do is kind of record one piece at a time and slowly build up a performance by combining all these different elements together so I'm just gonna start today with the arm motions so I'm going to disarm everything else and the way I do that is hold down command on Mac or ctrl on Windows and click one of these red dots and now everything is turned off everything is disarmed so no new live data is coming in now I want to only arm dragger and then that means the only thing that's going to be active right now or not the eyes or the eyebrows in the mouth or anything it is just going to be dragging the arms around so we're going to start by setting a default position for our character we probably don't want our character to look in this traditional a-frame position with their arms out like this we want them to have them to their side or hands hips or same like that what do you think is going to be the rest position so go all the way back to the beginning of your project and then drag the arms wherever you want them to be let's say something like this I think I want his arms down on this side maybe a little bit bent something like that and that's looking pretty good and when that's done I'm going to go to timeline record to frame take now I could also press the record button and just wait a couple of seconds but record to frame take is just an easier process there's no countdown although you can't turn the countdown off before recording it's just a quicker method to allow you to quickly get something recorded when you know there's not going to be a lot of changes like if this character was waving or saying like that yes I would want to want to press the record button but if they're just holding a single pose the record to frame taken particularly this shortcut command to on Mac or control 2 on Windows is going to be a lot quicker so let's go ahead and do that record to frame take and if i zoom in really closely by pressing plus here I will see that I've record recorded two frames of animation where the hands are by the sides of the character now right now I'm not seeing it because the characters still armed live for recording so when I turn a disarm that character I'm going to only see what's in the timeline so if you only want to see what's in the timeline not be looking for new live data just turn the red dot off of the character in the timeline and you will only see recorded stuff so now I just need to drag this all the way across the the whole timeline this is kind of my foundational layer this is the you know my safe default view that I know I can always go back to if the character is is not doing anything else with his hands and now I'm just gonna listen to the audio track and make gestures based off of what the character is saying right now I'm only worried about the arm movements I'm not really worried about the hand positions and things like that I only want to focus on where the arms are going and I want my arm movements in general to be pretty quick one of the telltale cases of kind of amateur animation is when things happen really slowly and you know hi I'm this character and then the arm goes back down slowly in more traditional animation a 2d animation you see quicker gestures the arms move a lot faster and that is also gonna allow you to hide things like hand swaps and other things and just make the character feel a little bit more alive so I'm gonna arm my character one more time dragger is the only thing that's armed here and then let's listen to this part and see what this character says at this scene okay so look guys there's no reason for us to argue in that case I feel like my arms would be out like this maybe they would then drop down a little bit so something like that so what I'm gonna do is instead of pressing record and you know trying to drag in time with all this stuff I'm going to just set certain poses and record them like that so let's say you know look guys I'm going to start back drag back to the beginning and then he says look guys something like that and then I'll do my two frame take command two on Mac or ctrl two on Windows and now I've got that nice little two frame take so I mean I'll drag it out to the end here and then I can use the little blend handles on the edge I just do you know two or three frames really quickly to have those arm transitions to move pretty pretty quickly let's see how this looks so we think no reason for us to our look guys there's no reason for us to argue I think about the arms to then move down so I can actually record a second take of the arms down like this and I do have to drag them even a little bit even if I want them to look like this it's not gonna record if I don't touch them so I need to drag them just a little bit so I know that they're gonna get recorded so let's press record actually command two to do the two frame take and I will drag these out something like that okay and then I'll do the same thing blend to the beginning and the end in fact I think I wanted to end here so I'm going to take this bottom take that I did previously and make that end a little bit earlier so if we just look really closely here what's happening is it's started with my foundational take of let me disarm the character see this easier my foundation take of the arms on the side then it's going to blend and transition into the arms being in their Upstate and then it's gonna blend and transition into the downstate and then it's gonna blend back to the rest position like that so I have three different takes here and I'm just blending from one take to the next between these different poses and when it's all put together it should look okay let's try it out now this next part he's talking to xbox so he probably wants to point to xbox I'm going to do a pose where let's me arm him again and he's pointing so I might bring the arm up like this do a two frame take drag it out and then maybe it goes down again so let's uh you know have the arm outstretched like this command two again it may be it then it'll drop down to the side so I'll blend there it's just something like this forgot to do the blend here you could see it looks choppy it looks very clearly choppy when you don't have the blends in there and of course you can finesse it with you know how short or long you want the plains whatever works for you if you want to be a little bit longer go for it so this is exactly what I'm doing I'm just patching in these little arm motions and gestures for the character to do and actually if I like a certain gesture like if I want to reuse these two over and over again I can just you know copy them and then down here press command-v to paste them maybe if we're here paste them and you can just keep using the same ones over and over again or retime them so this happens a little bit you know this starts a little bit later this happens a little bit earlier you know if you get those few motions over and over again a point arm arms out that sort of stuff you can just keep adding them over and over again and it's a nice way to save some time now as you keep doing this you'll probably see your timeline start to look like a staircase right with a bunch of different parts each track each state gets its own line in the timeline and that can make your timeline get vertical and really big and hard to figure out and kind of parse really quickly so what I tend to do is twirl open a twirl up I should say my drag drag er behavior so everything is in one line and then I can still select individual parts and move them around as if I was in the you know the the more extended view but this is just a nice more compact view and way to see things and then if I'm not sure about something I can always troll this back open and go into it and and understand kind of the relationship between the takes a little bit better so now that we're done with all our arm movements let's move on to triggers specifically two hand triggers but while I'm at it I'm just gonna do all the triggers at once so I'm going to disarm my dragger behavior and move on to triggers and make sure I'm at the beginning of my timeline here so this character if I look in the triggers panel and you can kind of expand this panel a little bit if you want to see it a little bit more if your character has a lot of triggers um he's got quite a few triggers and they're all set up as swap sets meaning only one of them is going to show up at a time in that given set so this makes sense for Sam like the hands for example this right hand over here I either want this hand or when it press five it does a point or six it does the hand flipped around with the thumb facing the other way so I only want one of those to show up at a time so that's how I'm setting up all my triggers and if you need a refresher on that go check out the triggers tutorial the very first lesson talks about swap sets and how they're set up and how you can do something like this all right so to record a trigger triggers are actually going to work in a swap set very similar to the mouth shapes the vidiians so remember how I could like move those around and then right-click them and swap them in and out you can do the exact same thing with triggers so what I'm going to do is go through all of my triggers that I want to record with and I'm going to activate one of them in each swap set if I just pressed record right now nothing would show up in the timeline because all the defaults are just active by you know by default there's nothing no new data being recorded so I have to actually activate a different trigger for them to be activated so let's go to my lids so this guy just to show you what he's capable of he's got a two for a squint one for a kind of a half look three four more of a worried look for for a blink animation and there you go and then open this the default state there for the hand the right hand I've got five and six for a point and a flip for the left hand I've got seven and eight for point and a flip a default nine is gonna do a sad mouth set change the mouth to being upside down this guy actually has a bunch of different eyebrow triggers this is same different I tried usually the eyebrows you tagged them and they'll move with your own your own eyebrows and the webcam for this one though I added a new transform behavior to each eyebrow and keyframed and created replays out of each one to do a few things so T was the default queue is gonna move them up W II in our so I have a lot of different eyebrows states that I can move between don't have to do that that's a more advanced thing if you know what you're doing with keyframes replays try it out it's pretty fun and then finally I've got a two different leg states for this character so I don't know if you remember at a certain point the switch character is standing on the ground and then he jumps up on the couch and he's in this more seated position so I actually have a trigger for his legs to go from a standing to a seated position so again what I'm gonna do is just make sure at least one of these in each group is active so let's do squint I'm going to press two for that let's do the point for this arm let's do the point for the other one the nine for the mouth to be upside down and Z to get that down and Q for the worried eyes okay so now every trigger is doing something a little bit different there's some new trigger that's not the default that's been activated and so I'm just going to go to timeline record to frame take so there we go so now if I look at my timeline in my triggers area I've got each of the names of my swap set showing up here and the active trigger within each swap set showing up down at the bottom so let's select all of these and expand it for the rest of the timeline I'll press minus a few times to zoom out and just make it so it goes all the way across so great so now I've set up all my triggers I have a foundation and the nice thing about this is now it's going to be really easy to add swap between these different triggers in the timeline so let's disarm my character down here and let's drag to that scene I was working on previously with the arms where he was saying talking to the other characters alright so remember here he's raising his hands and they're gonna be in a certain position so let's see so right now they're still doing the default of the the points right that's that's kind of what I had set this up what I want to do is hide the swaps the art swaps between transitions of the arms moving so if I select you know I've got my two dragger areas twirled up here but if I select these I can see where that blend is happening where I blended it take to go from the default position to the raised position and when I go right in the middle here right between this take you know right somewhere in the middle here that's where I want to do a transition for the arms for the hand swaps so I'm going to go down to my right hand and click on the dark blue that's the bottom version where the trigger actually lives and at the left hand I'm gonna hold down command and select those both at the same time and then I'm going to go to edit split just like I was doing with the the VIS Eames and now you'll see I have a new area where I can change the trigger to whatever I want so in this case let's change the right hand to default actually that looks like flip would be better so you can just try this out really easily and then the other one I do think I want to be default so that looks better that looks like the thumbs are you know facing the correct way they're they're in the right orientation there and then he moves his hands down in a second here I'm just kind of scrubbing through making sure I get it right and then they're eventually gonna go back down to his hips and when that happens let's see this looks like the transition where that happened so again I'm going to go to around the middle of that frame I'm going to find the right in the left hand edit split and I'm going to now right-click and change these back to where they make more sense where the thumbs are faced a little more inward so then the second you starts pointing I wanted them to point to Xbox so let's check out where that transition is this is with only one hand with his left hand so let's do the transition here and I will press command shift D as the shortcut to split and that's a control shift D on PC right click point so now he's going to go into a point and then if I scroll down a little bit more he's gonna be more of an out reached and I think in a second when it drops there so let's find where that one is and again at the exact same thing take the left hand split shortcut right and let's do I think it's yep it's default it's always the one that you don't think so I can go and play this back but then check out all the other hands are kind of in their default positions before this so I'm gonna change like the right hand that should probably be default the left hand before here should be flip I think the lids I want to probably have that open so let's change that to open and the mouth I do think I want him to be sad at this point so I'm just going to make sure that's split and then make his mouth happy before this the regular mouth not the Ault mouth and finally the feet I do want those too for the most part be the sitting position so I'm gonna change that so you can see how easy it is to really quickly change a character's expression with all of these different triggers now I tend to do one at a time so I'm just focused on the hands for right now then I'll move on to the eyelids then I'll move on to the mouth then I'll move on to you know feed our eyebrows or you know whatever other things I want to do but it's a pretty easy process to kind of pinpoint exactly when these triggers are happening so let's take a look at how this turned out so the nice thing is those are hand positions those transitions they happen when the arms are moving and so you really don't see that transition between the arm going from one state to the next the hand I should say going from one state to the next because the motion of the arm is kind of hiding at that transition so that is always how I do things with these hands I just find where the blend is happening somewhere in the middle that's where I'm doing my transition it usually works really well so let's say I go through the whole piece and get all my hands looking the way I want then I would move on to other triggers so for this character you know the mouth for example he start kind of starts out kind of unhappy look guys we all make mistakes and then maybe he's a little bit happier about it so I'm going to add a split there command split our command shift D and then I'll right-click and do the happy mouth so he'll transition going from a sad to a happy mouth set really adds a ton of emotion to a character I've shown this in several tutorials before I can't recommend it enough I really think it's important to have that two mouth set thing if you have a lip sync mouth like this and then same thing with the lids so you know I think he would probably be squinting when you first say hey look guys there's no time you know why are we all getting upset at each other so I'm going to change this to squint and then maybe he opens his eyes a little bit more and then another one here and he goes to half I just try things out I don't know what I'm doing most of the time I just think of listen to what's happening and hear the emotion of the scene and what's what like what I think I would be doing with my eyes and just try to change it for the character and you notice it's a lot of changes right like the character changes his expression whether it's the eyes or the mouth of the hands or something like every second or two right there's a lot of different emotion happening here and that helps the character feel a little bit more alive we see a lot of beginner character animator projects where the character is just one happy emotion in their face their wide eyes the entire time and that's the whole thing and I think it just brings your character to life a lot more if you're able to keep throwing in these little things these little surprises these little details these little emotions and when you add you know the eyebrows and the eyes and the eyelids and the mouth and the hands and the gestures and all of that it really comes together and makes for a compelling performance now there's one trigger in this character that I'm only going to do once and that is the feet changing position so I know after he jumps up and hits the question mark block that somewhere in here I'm going to change it to the to the standing set from standing over on this side so that's the first version to the sitting version and I'm gonna have them jump up and do that now I don't know the exact timing yet I'm gonna do the actual movement using keyframes in After Effects a little bit later on of him jumping up and then jumping on the couch so for right now I'm just kind of setting my best expectation for when I think this is going to happen but that's the beauty of dynamic link if I see same in After Effects that doesn't feel like it's working correctly I can come back here in a character animator make a few changes as soon as I go back to After Effects it automatically gets updated and I can make sure everything is lining up correctly all right so we're getting there slowly let's disarm triggers over here and move to I gaze so from my character's eye gaze I almost always use keyboard input instead of the default camera input this just gives me a little more control over where my eyes are going so when I press the right I know my characters gonna look right left up you know two at a time to look diagonally and you have full control over how strong this is and under keyboard strength if I turn this really far up they're gonna go outside of the eyeballs but I can turn this down as well sometimes a lot of times I'll do like 75% like that so they're not going right up to the edge of the the eyeballs so this is one of those where I will press record and just come up with my best performance think about where the character is looking you know look left right up down usually if they're thinking about say my but look up into the left or up into the right to kind of feel like they're more thoughtful about sine more when they're ashamed they might be looking down so I'm just trying my best to you know come up with where the eyes are going but I don't want them to feel dead right I don't want when we talk our pupils are not just staring blankly into the abyss they're kind of always darting all over the place and looking around and to make our character feel alive that's something that we want to do as well so let's just try this I'm gonna press record so something like that where every few seconds or whatever I'm darting the eyes around I'm trying something have him to look around in different directions you can do it with the camera input you can do with mouse and touch input whatever works best for you and your workflow and then I can you know make changes if I want to patch in here he shouldn't be looking in the upper you know the upper side he should be looking straight on or something like that I can use you just press record I'm gonna hold down right instead something like that and now I've got a new take that's gonna appear above and just like I was doing with the arm motions I can blend that in to the next one so the OP pupil will move smoothly from one position to the next all right now we're ready to move on to the last step which is the face so I'm gonna disarm I gaze and move into face face basically means the head movements um if you do have your eyebrows tagged they would do eyebrow movements as well it's going to incorporate blinks if you have that as a non manual process this characters blinks and eyebrows were both done through triggers and so that's a separate process for him but you know all of that is considered part of the face behavior now this character is a little weird because he's basically one big face right so his face and body are kind of the same so the way that he's rigged his whole body is kind of moving back and forth and pivoting that's kind of different from a character like xbox over here whose head has more pronounced neck and it's gonna pivot basically though all the body movements and everything it's all reliant on your head movements everything is kind of moving together with the head so in the case of switch it's a little weirder because his head and body are combined but with other characters their whole body is going to kind of lean back and forth based on your head movements so with my face movements what I'm gonna do is do a basic take where I go through the whole three-minute piece and I just move my head slightly you know so it's not just stayin still give it a little bit of back and forth sway maybe if I hear something the dialogue that makes me want to lean forward a little bit or lean back recoil in horror sound like that I can do that but in general I'm just trying to give this character a little bit of life and switching from one pose to the next I don't want to be moving all over the place all the time that looks pretty amateurish you want to move more from pose to pose to pose every few seconds so I would go back to the beginning of my piece I tradish I typically will do slow-motion recording I'll do at least 3/4 recording speed if if not half speed now that means for a three-minute piece is gonna take me six minutes to record the whole thing but I find the animation is a little bit smoother in the long run so personally I usually we'll do three quarters or half speed I'm gonna do half speed for now and with switch I know he actually doesn't come in until later so I can actually start a little bit later on in the timeline and do my performance from there and of course before any phase performance you need to calibrate your camera so I'm going to get really nice and close to the camera click set rest pose make sure the tracking dots are on my face and press record so you can see it's a lot of subtle movements is just moving your head slightly from one side to the next giving the character a little bit of lean forward and backward to bring them to life and if you've done it correctly then you should get this whole face take that shows up down here and just like we were doing with the eyes and with the arms and all that if you see places you want to patch other things in just go to where that section is pressed record and do a new face take this or something like that and to make it blend in with the previous performance I'm just gonna move those blend handles to make it look nice in transition from that first state to that state so you're gonna go ahead and apply that exact same process to each of your characters you're gonna do the lip-sync you're going to do the the arm movements the triggers the eye gaze the face all these different elements in any order you want usually you lay down that foundational layer that foundational track and take and then you patch in other little things overtop of it where you feel like it's appropriate now I don't want to scare you but this is what the PlayStation character looks like this was his final version so let's make my timeline a little bit bigger here and a twirl opens some of this stuff so I've got you know all these different drag or takes where he is moving his hands around that's just one one hand one arm the other one over here he doesn't move that one as much we've got some different I gaze takes here so I'll told I'd say this character probably has you know 150 200 tracks something like that here in the timeline if it's world everything open but don't let that scare you honestly it's a as I just showed it's a pretty easy process and you put the level of effort that you want to show up in your final piece so if you just want to press record and just do one take for everything and get through it you can totally do that if you want to kind of fine-tune and patching a lot of stuff like I've shown here you can do that as well there's no right or wrong way to do things we all have our different styles of animation and you know time constraints and all of that so so I could spend five minutes on this or five hours on this and that's kind of the beauty of character animator is it lets you work really rapidly when you want to and at less you really get in and have a lot of control and find detail when you want to as well so yeah I mean if I'm being honest I would say each character probably took me I don't know well the PlayStation and Xbox characters probably took me 45 minutes apiece to put everything together which you know for a three-minute piece to do all of that character animation within 45 minutes that's pretty awesome there's shorter characters like switch and PC who aren't for the whole thing those took even quicker so all told it was a round-trip you know character animation of maybe two and a half hours three hours at most something like that and that's pretty awesome to say and now that I have these characters rigged and and ready to go I can use them in multiple episodes so when I'm ready for episode two three four I've already got the rigging and the triggers and all that setup I just need to go through this process and record new stuff for them and it's gonna be it's gonna be pretty easy moving forward after walking character remember switch at the beginning of the cartoon he comes in from the left hand side of the screen he walks over to the couch and stops and so I know what that timing is going to be so I'm gonna do position based walking in my walking version my walking scene of switch not the sitting version but the walking scene to have him come in so I've already recorded all the details here the different I gaze lip sync all of that stuff and I'm just going to do a position based walk so I'm gonna start a little bit before he starts talking and under walk I'm gonna change this instead to position based that looks pretty good and we are going to now keyframe this by clicking the stopwatch next to position that's going to change a starting position and so I can drag this to wherever I want let's say he's all the way on the left hand side and something like that and then he'll say his line and I want him to instead at the end of the line move over to the other side of the screen so maybe something like this I think is about I'm kind of eyeballing it right now I don't know exactly where the background is I could bring in my background as a temporary kind of placeholder to see where he lines up but overall I just wanted to walk a short distance I can check it out and after-effects see how it's looking and when I come back I can make some adjustments if I need to but this is looking pretty good something like that so let's see how this looks all overall so he's really working these we're moving way too fast there so I'm think I'm gonna slow him down a little bit so let's have this start a little bit later and then let's not have him move as much so I'm going to bring the position back a little bit something like this I'm not gonna have a move this much let's see if this looks better so that feels like a good pace to me so I think I'm going to stick with that and again I can always come back here if I need to fix it later on so that's it for character animator we're done here we have all of our characters in each of their scenes with their own individual audio tracks now it's time to bring everything together and we're gonna do that all in after-effects all right here we are in After Effects and I'm going to do a new project and let's get started by bringing in our apartment background that's kind of the big main background that I'm going to be putting everything else inside so remember I made that a Photoshop file so I'm going to double click in this area over here you can also go to file import file to do this and I'm just gonna bring in the apartment PSD now I don't want this to be footage I actually want this to be a composition a footage is just gonna be like a video clip basically and know this is actually a scene that has a bunch of different parts so I want to be a composition retain layer sizes create composition and let's click open yeah yeah click OK whatever ok so now I've got a composition this little thing with the circle square and triangle and if I double click on that this is a full composition and the composition is basically just a container to put everything else inside so I'm gonna make sure I'm selected to fit here so I can see my whole scene and if I go into my composition settings up here composition composition settings I can see how big this is so my scene 6000 by 2500 I'm feeling pretty good about that that's a good size seen for what Italy be in 1920 by 1080 thing I'll zoom in and out and kind of do some camera movements but that's looking good you start to check your duration here I know mine my piece was about 3 minutes I'm just gonna give myself a little extra buffer room at 4 minutes right here but it's gonna remember the last by default the last timing of whatever the last composition you did was so you may want to check this and make sure you know you give yourself enough time otherwise assets are gonna get cut off after this time and you'll have to just stretch them out later on all right so now I'm ready to bring in my characters into this scene so let's double click on the project panel over here and I'm going to find my chip raj file my character animator project file that has all my information in it I don't need to create a composition for this one that's that's ok I just want these to come in as individual assets and I'm gonna click open this brings up the dynamic link window and this is going to show me all my available scenes that I can bring in to my composition so let's start with the Xbox he's kind of a central stationary character so I'm going to select that scene unfortunately you can only do one at a time but let's start with him click OK and there we go now I have this new little thing that has a timeline icon next to it that shows me that's kind of this piece of footage that I've brought in so I'm gonna drag this over into my scene and it should line up with everything else so all these are starting at the zero zero point I want to make sure that my character doesn't like start later on because that's gonna mess up all the timing so you want to make sure it starts at zero zero and then I'm gonna place him into the scene so to do that I can kind of drag him around with with the mouse with the selection tool up here and then I can also resize him so I can either do that by holding down shift while I drag over here or I can just press s while the layer is selected to change the scale here I can also press P if I want to change the position with these values down here but let's do something like maybe 70% looks pretty good drag him onto the couch down a little bit something like that alright next up is PlayStation so let's double click same process I'm going to bring him in find the character that's the scene I want okay and the same method here drag him into the scene and let's resize him now remember he's gonna show up behind the counter so I need to worry about my layer order here a little bit so luckily because this was a Photoshop file my initial apartment I can see all my different elements the flour table the plant and the counter showing up down here so I'm going to select all of those and drag them in of my characters to kind of sandwich them in between and now you see the counter is in front of my character so it just feels like he's integrated into the environment a little bit more so I'm going to continue going through this process bringing in each of these characters individually and that includes switch in his two different formats the standing and sitting version I'm gonna have them both on the screen currently at the same time and oh that feels a little bit weird but we'll take care of the transition in the next step all right so there we go I've got my whole scene and all my characters in their various states and positions showing up down here now I don't need to hear their individual audio tracks anymore so I'm gonna actually mute all of these by turning toggling off the volume icon and then I'm going to double click and import that final mixed version of the the audio where I had the music and the sound effects and all of that stuff together bring that in drag it into my scene and because everything's starting at the same 0-0 starting point everything should line up exactly as I would expect now word about performance when you have so many of these characters these assets on-screen you know this is a huge six thousand by 2500 pixel scene I've got five characters here and it's only gonna get worse as I add things like motion blur and drop shadows and things like that things are gonna go move pretty slow so for example if I go you know here you see it's taking a second for it to render out the frame and realize exactly where I'm at and that's gonna get really annoying really quickly if you know I have to wait ten seconds every time I move things around so there's a few ways around this what I normally do is bring the resolution down a little bit all over the place so here is kind of your static screen resolution so I might change this to quarter or something like that that's going to move and render a little bit quicker and you'll see that you know the characters close up don't look great but from a further away distance it's actually looking alright so this is enough for me to make these basic choices from maybe later on in the process I might want to be full fidelity so I can see everything as clear as possible but at this early stage I think this is totally fine same thing with the preview panel up here so this is how you know when I press spacebar what's happening I can change every couple frames change the resolution to quarter and that's gonna move a lot quicker now that's not gonna entirely get rid of the slowdown but it's gonna move things a lot faster and you can even make it you know skip every five frames or set a custom resolution you know where it's only every 15 pixels vertically you really make this low revs whatever works for your system and allows you to be speedy with the number of assets you've got I'd say do whatever works for you in this case so now that I have all my characters into the scene I can start blocking them out and doing any additional animations or key frames than I need to do luckily a PlayStation Xbox they're mostly in the same place PC he moves in and out a little bit but switch is where I really have to focus on because he's changing between a walking animation to a stand to a jump and then hops on the couch so let's try to get through this together so I'm gonna press play and see what this looks like right now so then he's walking in the scene and a certain point he's going to transition into a standing position so I'm gonna figure out exactly where that transition is by clicking the previous frame button here in my preview window and it looks like right there is when he's going to change to finish his walk cycle I can see this a little bit better if i zoom in and take a closer look so he's still in this walk and now he's moved out of his walk so I'm gonna use that as my transition point to move between the two states so with that character with that you know character diameter character selected I'm going to hold down option and right bracket and that and on a PC that's gonna be Alton right bracket and now she's gonna trim everything and basically bring the out point so this character's out point is now this is the last frame where it's going to show up at the same time I'm going to do the same thing for his new state showing up and so I'm going to press option left bracket and that's going to bring the end point in so if i zoom in really closely you can see there's one frame here where both of these are showing up at the same time and if I go one frame before it's only going to be the lock and if I go one frame after it's only going to be the standing animation so standing character so let's bring standing character down and try to line him up as best as I can I might need to change the resolution at this stage just to make sure everything lines up correctly but something like that I want to get it in the general area and now with both of them here at the same time I can get rid of the overlap and just trim it back this walk cycle so it's going to go directly into that standing state so let's try looking at this a little bit closer and see how this is looking all right so we pretty successfully hid the transition there I mean there's a little bit of finesse I could bump him around a little bit and add a little bit of you know forward momentum but overall this is looking pretty good now in my final piece actually hid this change behind a camera change right so later on we're gonna switch between some cameras and stuff and I focus on Playstation talking and saying Sam to switch and hide this transition happening off-camera so that's the easiest quickest and dirtiest way to kind of do it but in case you do want to do it in scene this is how I would go about that all right so next up switch is going to jump up and hit an invisible block so let's zoom out a little bit and let's get to that part of the scene and as soon as he does that he's going to start doing a little jump he says here's mine and he jumps up it hits an invisible block so let's take our switch character here and I'm going to press P to do his position so I'm going to click the stopwatch icon I'm gonna say Mamie here he's going to jump up so something like this I'm just gonna click and drag him straight up and then maybe something like this he's gonna come and go back to his original position actually even to keep it more consistent I can copy this keyframe command C command V to paste it and that's ctrl C + V on windows and let's take a look at how this looks okay sounds looking pretty good um typically with the jump though I want to add a little bit of easing to it so I'm going to select all of these right click let's go to keyframe assistant easy ease I use this all the time for keyframes and this will make it look a little bit better let's try this out it gives it a little bit of easing at the beginning and end of each keyframe just to kind of smooth out the motion a little bit more and it looks like it's lining up with the audio pretty well but of course I could move these earlier or later if I wanted to to have it line up and you know make the jump a little bit quicker or move the keyframes in next to each other it's really a trial and error process see what works best for you now when a second switch is going to jump up on to the couch and enter his sitting state where he remains for the rest of the cartoon so let's see where that makes sense to happen so he starts I can see around 53 seconds or 52 and a half he starts to transition and the character I made her filed to his seated state so let's get a jump happening here by again with position I can go to click this little diamond icon here to set a new keyframe and let's have him jump up on the couch so let's move him up like this and now he's on the couch let's see how this looks all right so he's just kind of floating on the couch and that's not gonna work too well so what I'm gonna do is give them a little bit more of a bounce to them and the way I'm going to do that is see this little circle right here this is a handle for the motion this is going to basically determine the quality of the line if you've ever used like the pin tool in Photoshop or after illustrator you know about this but basically something like this where I'm dragging it so there's a little bit more of a rise and I'll do the same at the beginning so I'm just creating a basic jump curve right here so let's see how this looks now all right so that's looking a little bit better I need to probably finesse it a little bit more I'm gonna bring this in a little bit make it a little smoother okay so after playing around with it a little bit just kind of dragging these little handles I've got what I feel is a pretty nice arc so let's see how this is looking looks like a pretty good jump something like that now I noticed even though he should be in this stationary state as you play around with these curves sometimes you're gonna run into things where the character is gonna kind of bob and weave based on your because of what you've done in other areas so to remedy that I'm just going to click the in keyframe here where you're supposed to be standing still and say toggle hold keyframe and let's see if this fixes the problem and now he's standing still for that entire duration so anytime you see your character accidentally moving around like that you can just do a toggle hold keyframe and that should keep them stuck in one place and if you want one nice little finishing touch you could add a little bit about when he lands here on the couch so I could go a few frames later and just add this you know kind of keyframe that makes him move up slightly and I might need to play with the you know of little handles for that but something like this might give him a nice little bounce up that might feel like he's impacting the couch a little bit more so it's a really subtle thing I mean you're probably most people are not even going to notice this but it just helps him feel connected to the environment a little bit more and so little things like that little bounces anticipations reactions to things I think can really help sell an effect well so I actually did this technique a few more times at the beginning of the piece PlayStation feels like he's walking in all I did was just do some quick position up and down keyframes to you sell that effect so something like that just a little rise and fall to make it feel like he's actually entering the scene when in fact it's just him kind of hiding bouncing up and down behind this counter and I did the same thing with the PC coming in at the end here he just kind of swings in and out using very simple position keyframes now I notice in this in-between state that he's kind of in a blurry motion and then when he eventually settles down he's looking a little bit more crisp so when we do things in motion in After Effects a lot of times I add motion blur to the characters to make them feel a little bit more like there's a little bit more motion to them it just feels a little bit more realistic the way you do that is make sure there's a little blue enable motion blur thing is on up here so you can toggle that on and off to turn it on and off and then any layers that you want motion blur to be used on just toggle this little bouncing ball icon on it so a lot of times I will just click and drag down the entire list and make everything motion blur just in case it starts to move I think generally it tends to make things look a little bit nicer Dada motion blur but you know it's an aesthetic choice you can decide if you want it or not I tend to go overboard with it and I think it looks alright now something else you could do to these characters is add shadows to them it's a nice little touch that again is going to add a little bit of extra depth to your scene definitely not necessary if you don't want to do it but it's actually really really easy so let's take a character like Xbox here and I'm just gonna duplicate him by pressing command D on mac or control-d on Windows and that's going to give me two layers and then with the lower layers selected here I'm just gonna kind of press the left and down arrow keys to kind of nudge it so it's a little bit away from the character something like that is looking pretty good and then what I can do is go into effect color correction there's actually five hundred ways to do this in After Effects but I'm just gonna bring the saturation all the way down to negative one hundred and the master lightness down to negative one hundred and that should more or less turn it black then I'm gonna press T with it selected that's gonna bring up my opacity controls and let's bring it down to something like I don't know 15% something like that and I can see you know this really nice little subtle shadow back there I probably also want to add a little bit of blur to it so let's go to effect blur and sharpen fast box blur and I think for this I did a radius of five if I remember correctly and that's just gonna blur the edges and make it a little bit softer a little more integrated into the scene so it's as easy as that to add shadows I can do that to all of my characters add these little shadow effects and I think it's just a nice little finishing touch now once you're doing this things might get really slowed down right as I'm full in our own shadows you know I'm basically duplicating everything so I'm gonna have like you know ten different puppets on the scene at any given time so if it helps you from a performance perspective if you are just constantly running into little loading bars and stuff like that just turn all the puppets you don't need off at any time I guess I should keep the counter on but any puppets that you're not working with currently so you can just focus on one element at a time and that's gonna help save a little bit of processing power now there are other little details that we want to add in so for example the jump here when he jumps in and in hits the invisible block that's it's easy as just importing a PSD file or whatever images you have so I made this mario block PSD that has a few different things let's just create this as a composition retain layer sizes and I'm just gonna do everything directly in here so I'm just going to double click on my composition I'm going to select all my pieces copy them bring them out and paste them directly here into this scene I'm just so I have them all as a frame of reference and I'll just drag this over here looks a little bit small so let's drag everything I'm holding down shift to constrain it and make it bigger and then I can just do all my animation right here so let's say you know the exact moment that I wanted to hit this is right around here I believe so let's have this show up for just a second I'm gonna use my same things I did before option left and left bracket or alt and left bracket on PC to bring that up and bring all the end points like that and I only want the question mark to appear for like one frame so let's do a question for one frame and then option right bracket to end that and trim that in and then the hip state should show up after that and then I want the coin popping up so I'll press P on that position and just have it slide up over a few frames something along those lines let's see if that's looking okay so something like that right and then I can make it disappear I actually hide when it goes off when I do a camera change so I could just get rid of these by holding down or bring out the out point so I should say by pressing option and right bracket or Alt + right bracket on PC and then they will disappear so any little elements like that are really easy to bring in and out just import them put them in here trim them keyframe them whatever you need to do I probably do a little bit of an ease there I'm just pressing f9 as a shortcut when you select to add that easy ease to make that slide look a little nicer and that's really it that's all that I'm doing with these different elements so I was also talking about those little smoke things that you can add little you know special effects and things so I have this smoke jump a PSD right here let's change this to a composition say okay that looks great and if I double double click and go into this composition I see that my smoke jump is all my frames together but what I can do is I'm just going to trim this so it's happening one frame at a time so I'm going to select everything hold down option and right bracket or alt and right bracket and I'm just gonna drag these so with a frame-by-frame sequence and there's some other ways to do this you can import in your sequences and other things and after-effects but this is such a short thing that I wanted to show how easy it is to do something like this so now I've got this jump smoke animation that's appearing over the course of you know ten frames and so I can place this wherever I want in my composition so I want to do it as soon as he leaves the ground I want to have this kind of jumping feeling the smoke that's leaving so I'm gonna drag this onto not the scene here because that's gonna bring it that's gonna start it right at the beginning the composition instead I want to drag it into the timeline and that's gonna do it right at the moment where the the current time indicator is so let's move this over here I'm gonna scale it up a little bit something like that so it doesn't look too pixelated and let's drag it under the switch because I don't want it to be overpowering him and let's watch and see how this looks so it's a really subtle effect right you blink and you miss it and I'm already skipping frames here so you're missing some of it but you get the idea it's just little things like this little poof's of smoke little motion lines little effects like that that can really help sell an effect of a jump or a swipe or a leap or whatever sort of things you have in your animation so just think about are there's moments like that that I can add these little effects to my to my scene to help you know cement these these characters doing specific things so at this point I should feel like I have a fin seen everything is lining up correctly I've added on that little effects and props the characters are in the right places it's as if I had a you know really far wide shot and I'm watching the whole scene unfold in front of me but don't worry about stuff like the prop movement and stuff the foreground elements we can deal with that a little bit later but in general the main action that's happening on this stage is looking correct so if you've reached that point now we can move on to cameras now After Effects does have the ability to do cameras you can go in to layer new and create a camera but honestly this gets a little bit too complicated for what we're trying to do we just need to kind of change the scale and position of our composition and that's gonna be more than enough we don't need zoom and angle of view and depth of field and all this stuff if you want to do that in your more advanced user you can certainly do that but I find it's a little bit easier to do it this way so I'm gonna take my appartement composition my huge composition and I'm going to just click and drag it into and create a new comp into this composition icon that's already down here and that's going to create something called apartment 2 so with apartment 2 selected I'm going to press Enter and let's call this final comp of something like that and I double click on this and it's going to be now what I'm seeing in my scene and a tab down here now I can go back to apartment and right now these are looking very much the same but in a second we're gonna change final cop now final comp what I upload to YouTube or Facebook or broadcast TV or whatever is probably not going to be 6,000 by 2500 right it's going to be a more traditional aspect ratio so with this selected I'm going to go to composition composition settings and let's change this to something like 1920 by 1080 and I want to make sure my framerate and resolution all that looks good great okay so now I have a rectangle window into my world that's the apartment and if I press P I can you know to move this around and reframe this into a different way I can also drag on the screen if I have the select tool up here selected and if I press s I can scale it and zoom in and out so with these key you know with these tools it's really easy to just reposition and do a bunch of different shots really easily so let's set some key frames to set up an initial shot here so I'm going to press P and then hold down shift and press s so I see position and scale at the same time and I want to hold with this kind of wide shot to begin with so I'll click the stopwatch icons for each that's making a keyframe here and it's just like I was showing with switch staying in that same position if I want to hold a keyframe I can just select them right click and say toggle hold keyframe that's gonna change the icon to this little symbol down here and that means that I cut that that scene is going to hold until a new keyframe comes into view so let's play and see when we want to change our camera so right around here is where play station is going to start talking so I think I want to zoom in on him so with this selected I can now change and change the zoom drag the position something like this frame it like that so that's looking pretty good and you'll notice you get this little square meaning that is a held shot so now here's how the transitions going to look something like this now I might want to switch to Xbox so I can just drag over here maybe change the scale a little bit something like that and now that's gonna be the new held position so it's gonna look like this and then I might want to go back to a wide shot so now that I've got these kind of different shots established I can just copy and paste existing keyframes so let's select these command C to copy them command V to paste and I can go back to a wide shot and it's as simple as that so all I'm doing is alternating between a bunch of different shot types I want to keep the viewer interested in as long as I don't just hold on one shot at any given time it's going to look okay and it's gonna keep the viewer engaged so you know if you really wanted to cheap and easy way to do this you could just keep copying pasting the same shots over and over again but really what makes the most sense is to watch the cartoon stop it when a character is talking when you think okay this this scene is right for a close-up shot or this scene is better for a wide shot and make your camera choices they're all through just these really simple hold key frames so if you ever want to edit a keyframe value the easiest way to go through them is with these little arrows here so you'll make sure you're on that exact keyframe this just lets you move between the previous and next keyframes so if I say you know this shot I want it to be actually a little bit wider I'm gonna do something like this and that just helps you because sometimes it's really easy if you try to just pinpoint it here you might accidentally create a new keyframe and then it's gonna feel very jumpy so you always want to make sure you're using these buttons to move back and forth between your different positions now sometimes you want might want a moving shot so for example in the final piece here I do a pan from Xbox and talking to Playstation so let's see something like this so right there seems like a good spot to start the pan so I'm going to turn both of these on I'm just gonna click both of these to create a new keyframe I'm gonna change this now to ease easy ease by right-clicking and selecting that and then I want to pretty quickly get over to to the PlayStation so let's do something like this where I just drag and you'll see it's created a new keyframe for me I might as well keep a scale keyframe just I might want to scale them a little bit to scale out so let's see how this looks so something like that looks pretty good I probably I want to add motion blur to this to make sure that I you know am getting that nice blur effect as the cameras moving but you can do this as much as you want and then go right back to you know your different key frames held shots if you want to and I did this in a few other places for the beginning of this piece for example I kind of did a su Ming you kind of want to set an establishing shot get the mood of the place and so I did something like this where it kind of slowly pans in as the character comes in and they talk and then it's going to switch to that other close-up shot so you can do little things like that now to help sell this effect even more I brought some of those foreground objects in so let's go back to apartment here and I'm going to take my plants and my flower table I'm gonna actually cut them out of this scene I pressed command X on Mac or can Rolex on Windows and I'm going to bring them into this scene instead command-v something like this and I'm just going to kind of fake where these things might be so I'm going to you know scale this down over here and the flowers were over here bring them in something like this scale them down and then I'm just gonna have them move out of the way kind of at a faster rate as if they were right next to the camera to just again give the feeling of depth a little bit more so what I can do is let's go around here to where this zoom in starts to begin now this first part can be hidden from the credits so it really doesn't matter what's happening here there's give me a credit screen over top but in general I'm starting my zoom a little bit before the scene is actually revealed to the viewer so let's take both of these here I want to make sure that they have motion blur on and actually I'm gonna add some additional blur to them facts fast box blur unless you sign like maybe three or four or something like that to make them feel like they're in the foreground a little bit they're a little bit more out of focus our main characters are in focus and these aren't and so then I'm just gonna press P for position and s hold down shift and press s for scale and I'm you're gonna set some initial keyframes at the beginning of this let's change those into easy ease right click keyframe assistant easy ease or f9 is the shortcut for that and then have them end something like this I'm just going to click over top of the the diamonds over here to add some more keyframes to them but really I think I probably want them to end a lot quicker they're gonna get out of the scene a lot earlier than this so I'm gonna make sure I'm on those frames and I'm just going to scale them up slightly each of them so they're getting a little bit bigger as the camera comes and then zooming them off the scene like that and off the scene like that let's see how this looks okay so they went a little bit too much to the side I think I want them to go down a little bit more so I'm just gonna nudge them down here on these last keyframes I'm just holding down shift while I press the down arrow key let's see if this looks any better yeah something like that it's a really subtle detail you know like eight out of ten people are probably not even gonna notice it it just is gonna feel like it's part of the scene but those are the little details that are going to help you really establish your world and characters and keep the yuta the viewers attention throughout the whole piece I do this a little bit later on as well when the switch character walks in he kind of comes in behind the plants that's in the foreground so I just have that kind of key framed to show up he's kind of hiding behind it to begin with and then that just goes off the screen at a slightly different rate than the whole scene is moving back and forth again if it's in the foreground it's just going to move a little bit faster than everything in the background so you just have to play around with the keyframes manipulate it and see what looks good to you but little effects like this can really help the add a little bit of depth to the scene and then last but not least you can bring in your title screen and your credits so I'm just gonna double click find both of those so I've got titles and I'm holding down command on Mac or ctrl on Windows and again I want these to be compositions let's create composition for both of these and hit open okay so now I've got my different titles and let's make sure this is the correct aspect ratio it should be composition settings 1920 by 1080 24 frames per second that's looking good same thing with my credits should be because it's almost the exact same file okay so now inside here I can do little animations for each of these to make them look interesting so so for the titles remember I did this little like kinetic art type treatment where I had the type kind of always moving so I'm just gonna zoom in a little bit here I'm going to take my layers and let's do like three frames option right bracket I'll show you what I'm doing in a second here and drag these and stagger these different frames so what's gonna happen is this gonna keep moving between the three drawn states that I have so I did it once for the consul's and once for as I drew three times for consoles and three times for an okay samurai cartoon and it's just gonna keep cycling between those and so I can just take the you know the sequence and just continued to duplicate it command D on Mac control D on Windows duplicated and continue this process select everything command D ring it to the end there and just have it continuing to cycle of course your title sequence may look entirely different totally up to you whatever you want just make sure it all lines up and there's no gaps there and you'll get something though you know looks pretty nice and cool and then in this I also want to make clouds moving around let's add some motion blur to them and then let's keyframe all of these so let's start at the beginning and at a position keyframe have them start there and then maybe 15 seconds later or something like that the credits there's only three seconds so it really isn't going to be this long but I can kind of show the path of where I would want them to end up and give them all a little bit different speed so they'll move pretty nicely and then when we watch it it's gonna look something like this with some nice little cloud movement I always want to have things moving have a little bit of sense of everything zooming in so what I'm gonna do is create a new null layer here layer new null object and I'm just gonna make sure this is yes centered on everything and then I'm just going to shift select everything else in the scene and use the pick whip tool to connect it to this null controller this is just an invisible controller I'm gonna do some really basic key framing on position and scale at the beginning and just do a zoom in like that and maybe bring it up a little bit and if I'd like don't want the title to be zooming for example I want that to be its own thing I could get rid of that so let's not make this connected to the null let's make that not connected to anything and that way the zooming is going to happen but the title is going to stay in its same general place there's a few other things I did I've got some lights here that I want blinking off and on so I can you know take those and change the durations of when they are appearing just little fun little details like that they give a little bit of life to the background or you know little little dynamic elements and then it would do the exact same thing for the credits so I would find you know make this kinetic type sequence make the lights go on and off to a very slow zoom have the clouds moving and there's a little bit longer I think my credits I keep for 20-25 seconds something like that so I would just make sure it goes a little bit long by the way right now my composition is defaulting to like the four-minute mark that I don't really need for this short sequence so I can always shorten my time but going to composition composition settings and let's change this to something like you know 30 seconds and that's gonna be a little bit more manageable a little bit easier to see my keyframes not be so far zoomed out alright so when I'm happy with those I can go back to my main final comp scene here and just drag them into the timeline where I want them to go and so let's have the title start something like that it's gonna do the zoom and then I'm gonna have it really quickly dash away so let's add a motion blur and a position and just drag it out of the way to reveal what's behind it select these right-click keyframe assistant easy ease something like that and now I get a nice little title card that comes in and then gets out of the way and reveals the action behind it something like that and same thing with the ending I've got them saying one last joke at the end don't forget friend codes ugh and then we bring in that the credits here drag that into the timeline same thing it shows up right at the beginning the composition so it's gonna start everything and now I can change the final timing of my piece so let's say I want the credits to end around you know three twenty two something like that let's go to composition composition settings and change this to the very final duration that I want and just to make it look a little bit nicer I could you know fade out if I wanted to I could bring the transparency down start it there bring the opacity down to zero I've got the apartment behind it so let's select that option right bracket to trim that out and then you would get a nice fade to black at the end maybe I add some ease to that I'm showing a bunch of different things I know I went pretty fast here at the end but really you know every composition is gonna be a little bit different and it's really up to you to decide how far you want to go with all these different keyframes elements everything I'm doing is really basic right it's just really simple position keyframes scaling all of that stuff nothing too complicated as long as you kind of know your way around position scale opacity all of that stuff there's just so much you can do and as you learn more and more about After Effects you'll learn there are other you know cool effects and things that you can add into your production and this is an industry standard tool I mean this is saying that major motion pictures are using to do some of their motion graphics and special effects and compositing so you know learning this is a really helpful skill you're using you know professional grade tools to create a cartoon and so that leads us to our very last step which is exporting so I'm going to go to file export ad to Adobe Media encoder cue so Adobe Media encoder is a separate program that basically allows you to render out your video in whatever format you want the one that I normally do is gonna take a couple of seconds but then your comp should show up here I'm just gonna click on the preset here and that's going to bring up a bunch of different options for me so these are the settings that I use h.264 match the source high bitrate and then I can call it you know whatever I want and check that make my final destination so let's just put this on the desktop I'm gonna call it consoles something that I can easily identify save and everything else is looking pretty good this will give you a kind of a preview of what it's looking like so you can move around through here to check it out it might take a while to render each frame but you can kind of get a sense of what your final piece is going to look like and once that's good and that's looking alright hit OK select your composition and hit the play button you're gonna see a little loading thing appear here for a little bit and then you will see a little thumbnail of your your project being rendered out and you'll see an estimated time remaining most of the time this is either wildly inaccurate or it starts to move up and down so I wouldn't worry too much about this but you know rendering a really complicated project can take some time this is not saying that you're just gonna save and a couple minutes later it's gonna be ready to go it may take you know half an hour 45 minutes an hour depending on how long your project is how many complicated assets there are so this is the time to go grab a coffee go to your lunch break whatever you need to do and by the time you get back hopefully the be all rendered and you will love it now if it isn't once you find that finally finish and you look over it and you see some mistakes it's really easy to fix just go back to character animator make any changes you need to the animation go back to After Effects make any changes to the composition the cameras the effects and all of that and render out a new version for consoles I think I've rendered out probably three or four different versions of it before I was totally happy with it I just you know watch the video with notepad took notes of where some of the mistakes that I saw were either maybe a lip sync mouth didn't look correct or maybe there was a little glitch somewhere where a character jumped into place or appeared where they shouldn't appear little things like that and you'll notice new things on every viewing finally I said all right four is enough I'm ready to upload it get it out there to the world and that's it all right that's it somehow you have made it through an hour and a half long YouTube video you are absolutely insane for doing this I don't know why anyone in the right mind would do it but apparently you're that crazy to get through this whole thing so congratulations number one number two I just wanted to end with this I I think the world needs more animation I think animation is one of the best ways to tell a story and up until now the tools to create animation have been kind of locked up right that you need to be an expert at animation and you need to take a really long time to do these things and the tools to become an animator are becoming more and more democratized and it's not just character animator and After Effects and animate in the Adobe tools but it's all across the spectrum there is animation tools on your phone animation tools everywhere that are becoming easier to use and so I would say you know think about the stories that you want to tell and think about animation being maybe the best way to tell them whether it's making fun of stuff like video game consoles or the latest you know superhero movies or Star Wars or whatever talking about current events or issues that matter to you politics politicians you know whatever sort of things are on your mind and either we want to entertain people or inform or inspire I really think animation is one of the best ways to do that so that's my spiel whatever I'm delirious after an hour and a half of YouTube tutorials and then further editing and putting it all together it's a mess I don't recommend it to anybody but anyway the usual thing is say at the end if you are making stuff with character animator we would love to see it so please use hashtag character animator on social media that's where we will see the work that you do and the whole team sees that and we'll feature some of those in our community spotlight videos so we'd love to see that and if you're running into any issues any problems with what I showed here need further clarification or any other character animator issues the best place to get help is the official character animator forums so that's it for today thank you so much for sticking through and watching this whole thing and have fun

Channel: Okay Samurai

Views: 132,677

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Id: VhCKD5vl848

Length: 100min 16sec (6016 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020