Create Detailed Character Animation Cartoons in After Effects

so i watch a lot of youtube videos here on youtube hopefully like you hopefully you're watching a lot of these videos but really i like to watch a lot of history and science type videos and these videos are all like animated they're like explainer graphics or you know cartoon style and it's just really cool stuff so in this video i want to show you how you put together a full detailed scene that looks like you take a very long time to animate but show you how to do it within under 10 minutes worth of time hey what's going on internet this is josh noel from sunductfilm welcome to our channel if you're new here be sure to hit that subscribe button and if you really want to support this channel please be sure to smash that like button the likes you guys been giving on the previous videos have been helping out this channel so thank you very much be sure to share that like button so we're gonna jump into our tutorial and we're gonna get started so first i'm gonna be showing you guys how to set up these templates in after effects when you're working on these type of projects you're going to need the graphic files typically illustrator files which you can download for free or you can have a designer put these together for you if you're not so much in the illustration one place i get my free vectors from is from freepix.com i'm able to type in you know whatever i want and i can download free project files that i can use my project like the one that we're using here um i download this for free and you can find virtually whatever you're looking to find so when you have the files downloaded you'll see a eps file or a ai file you can open up either one of those files that we'll do eps and click on open and that will open up in adobe illustrator like this and the only reason why we're here in adobe illustrator is to organize the file before we move over to after effects so when you're in illustrator you come here to layers and you'll see that we have just one layer and what we can do is select everything and come here to object and click on ungroup and that will just have one layer and we see all these groups and paths here and what we want to do is just select the top layer here click on the hamburger icon or the three lines and click on release to layers sequence and this will create individual layers for every object inside of your scene so for example i can say select an entire person here and hide them so now i'll be able to animate this very easily inside of after effects but what we need to do is grab all of these layers you know shift-click them all and just bring them outside of that first layer you can delete layer one delete and you'll see boom we have all of our layers available to animate one thing i would suggest doing is go through some of the layers and just rename some of them this way when you're inside of after effects you can be a little bit more organized because each of these layers will be a layer inside of after effects so i went ahead and renamed some of these layers and when you're done you go to file save as and you're going to change this to a ai file adobe illustrator and you save your scene click on save and click ok and if you're in a time crunch you don't have to create this work from scratch you can buy animation templates for after effects from videohive.net there's a handful of amazing cartoon and explainer video templates i will link them below you can check them out and if they fit your project needs they'll help you save a tremendous amount of time already when you have after effects loaded up all you do is bring in that ai file that you saved to bring it over it asks you how to import it make sure you click on composition and you click ok and one thing we'll do is come and create a new composition we'll make it 16 by nine and we'll go ahead and bring in that illustrator composition that we just imported and bring into our comp we can stream keyboard for scale we can scale this down because now we have all of this room if you wanted to to animate from left to right so this is how you could expand a scene without having any cuts it can be all completely seamless you know i guess camera movements if you want so i'll position this right here for now and now we can double click on this composition and we'll have all of those layers available to us right here instead of after effects next i'm going to be showing you guys how to do a seamless background transition um a little more seamless than that to make the scene come to life we have to add some overall movement to this and this is going to come through the buildings here in the background so i went through here and i found the building layer right here you'll see boom if i turn that off the buildings are gone we need to move these so it makes it look like the train here has movement so what we're going to do is we'll grab this buildings layer and we're going to layer pre-compose and i'll click ok and i'll go into this composition and all i'm going to do is i'm going to center this in the middle of our work as best as we can our comp here and i'm going to go to composition settings here at the top and i'm going to bring in the width to close in on the sides of our buildings and one thing you'll notice is that there's no space on either side of this and we'll go back into our main composition and i'll come here to effect stylize and grab motion tile i'll increase the output width to maybe 3 400 and i'll add a keyframe for tile center and i'll come here to the end of the animation because we want this to go on forever or at least have that option to and i'll just bring over the x value of the tile center and this will allow this animation to repeat on forever as long as you continue to increase the output with all right one thing you'll notice is that this layering is pretty bad so we'll take this layer we'll pre-compose it again and i'll come here and just grab the pen tool and i'll just mask that back into the window so now we'll have this movement going on for as long as we need it to and it adds overall animation to the scene i'm going to show you guys how to do object and character animations in mass production what i'm just a gnome animating individual objects is super easy to do especially when you want to have a loop animation to it so i'll go through our layers here we want to find someone we want to animate so maybe i will animate this person right here what i'm going to do is double click on that layer and i'm going to come here and grab the puppet pen tool and i'm just going to click a couple of points where i want to kind of animate you really can't go wrong with the amount of points but it's kind of tricky to figure out where to place them so just go ahead and experiment with that and i'll move forward here by one second so after all my pins are placed here and i kind of want to figure out what i want to animate so maybe i'll slightly pull that down and i don't want to distort way too much so this is where you want to keep the animation simple so maybe i'll bring her hand over here a little bit i can maybe move her head back and maybe i'll want to move her leg but you'll see this kind of unnatural movement so maybe i'll put a point down here one underneath there and we can you know maybe kind of adjust that by a touch and maybe i'll bring that foot in there okay so then once all said and done i'll come here and hit you on my keyboard to bring up the keyframes so by moving forward in time you'll see that we have two sets of keyframes so with the keyframes that we have up here twice you know right here we see two keyframes we'll all click stopwatch and we're just going to type in loop out capital o open parenthesis quotations and we'll just select ping pong there quotations close from c just copy the expression and all click and paste that expression into the other parameters that we have two keyframes in and go ahead and select all the keyframes and you can hit f9 to make easy ease keyframes so now this animation will go on forever so back in our main scene we have our animation that will go on forever and now you can start applying this to individual objects in your scene to make it really come to life i'll be honest we really didn't know what to call this so here's some extra tips alright so we have this overall animation here but i want to show you some tips to help you even speed this along so for example if you go back over to illustrator you can quickly grab like an object and change the color of it and it will update inside of after effects so i'll select this bottom here i can probably change this color to maybe like a dark blue or something and when i'm done updating the colors so i'm going to file save and back in after effects it'll take a moment but it will update and now we have our scene completely updated here in after effects so you can quickly change colors to help boost the contrast but in your main composition like i said you can appear on keyboard for position you can add a keyframe for this and we can move forward here and we can create like a you know a pan on our scene and of course be sure to turn on motion blur and was all said and done you could have a scene just like this this is how you can put together a rather large detail scene within just a matter of maybe under 10 20-ish minutes and you can build out a huge cartoon or explainer video project so that's another tutorial done it's not like we're experimenting with content on this channel you know it's just a normal video nothing different about it or weird or whatever you know so be sure to subscribe to our youtube channel if you want more content like this be sure to hit that like button because you know you want to help us out and of course you can hit me up on my instagram we posting tutorials on there every single week i will drop that link in description below and always be creating you

Channel: SonduckFilm

Views: 37,333

Keywords: Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial, After Effects, After Effects Tutorial Character, After Effects Character, After Effects Character Animation, After Effects Tutorial Character Animation, Explainer Video, Explainer Video After Effects, After Effects Tutorial Explainer, After Effects Tutorial Animation, Animation in After Effects, Easy Animation, How To Create Animation, SonduckFilm Tutorial, Cartoon Animation, How To Character Animate, Motion Graphics Tutorial, Motion Graphics

Id: JvqX-y37RC8

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021