Easy Explainer Video Character Animations in After Effects | Tutorial

being able to create vector explainer character videos is one of the more marketable skills to have when it comes to motion design and after effects and it may seem that doing character animation and explainer videos are incredibly difficult to do but they are actually very easy and i'm going to show you how to do character animation for explainer videos in just a few easy steps so if you currently know nothing about this type of animation you're going to be ready to go and produce professional work after watching this video hey what's going on internet this is josh noel from sunduck film welcome to our channel if you're new here be sure to hit that subscribe button and if you are confident with character explainer video animation after watching this video be sure to destroy that like button because it helps us out tremendously and we'll be able to teach these techniques to more people so let's jump into the tutorial and let's create some very awesome and easy animation so i'm not a designer by any means i wouldn't know how to create a character from scratch but don't worry you don't need to know how to design anything because we can grab all these elements for free from a website called freepix.com and you can type in say character and you can scroll through plenty of vector characters that you can click on and download for free and we can also search up a very specific scene so i want living room scene and i can find a vector object that will fit my scene so go ahead and search whatever you're looking for i will link all these in the description so you can follow along with our tutorial and if you're busy in the world of motion graphics be sure to take a look at our template packs for after effects that all come with this extension for instant preview and import you'll be able to take your work to the next level in a matter of seconds with hundreds of our titles and enhance your work with accent motion graphics and many of our other graphics i'll link our 500 motion graphics starter pack below and if you do pick up anything on our website you will be supporting our channel and saving your own time once we have this downloaded for example what we can do is in our folder it will have an eps file or a ai file what you want to do is right click this and go to open with and you'll want to open it up with adobe illustrator so yes you will need adobe illustrator to do this but if you have creative cloud you already have this software so i've downloaded a pack with multiple character face expressions here and this will allow us to be able to change the facial expression so we won't have closed eyes different mouth expression all that's going to be very helpful if you download a pack with multiple facial expressions you're going to be able to do slight animation so you can see here her eyes are closing her mouth is moving we're going to be able to do that very easily what we want to do is come here to the layers icon and see what layers we have you'll see that we have all the elements here and a background for layer one we'll just delete this and what we want to do here is create a bunch of new layers here just so we can put each face into its own layer so we'll come here to layer two and we'll open it up and what we can do is see each group here you might have to go up to object ungroup depending on which file that you're using but for the most part you can be able to drag each facial expression into a new layer so in after effects this will be a lot easier to work with so now what you can do is you can take any of the faces and overlap it onto your character and easily take that form now what i like to do for this layer specifically is hold down control my keyboard drag across and just delete the bottom parts of our heads here this way it'll match a little bit better then we're done and we can start animating this so what we need to do is go to file save as and we'll make sure to save this as a ai file and click on save and i also have our scene background downloaded as well and i'll make sure to save that as an ai file as well so when you have both your files ready to go you can jump over to after effects and i have our two illustrator files that we saved and i'm going to bring one in at a time into our project window and it'll ask you how do you want to import this make sure you select as composition and you click ok and i'll import my other scene as well and just for the sake of this tutorial we can just keep it as footage because we're not going to animate the background so first we'll go ahead and bring in our background scene and we'll bring it into our project so this is the living room and i'm going to scale this up by hitting s on my keyboard to fit the actual comp size i can also hit p on my keyboard for position to resize everything now one thing you'll notice as you scale vectors up is that it'll start to become pixelated what we need to do is click on this vector icon here that will keep all the fidelity so you can scale it up to infinity then we'll go ahead and bring our main character comp into our project down here and boom there's our character so what we'll do is we'll go into that composition by double clicking and we'll grab all the face layers here and we'll turn them off so we just have our character right here we'll go back into the other composition and now we can hit asteroid keyboard for scale scale up this vector and reposition it make sure you select that vector icon and we reposition wherever we need our character to be and then we'll go to layer pre-compose and we'll call this character size and click on move all attributes a new composition click ok ok awesome then we'll go back into the previous composition go into the main character composition and we'll make sure we turn on the vector icon for every layer as well that way you'll have all fidelity so let's talk about the main animation to the overall character so what we'll do is we'll grab our composition called character size and we'll come here to the top and we're gonna grab the puppet pen tool this is a very quick way to animate things in after effects but it can be very effective if done correctly so for example i want to wiggle her head i want to move her elbow move the hand and we'll see what that can do for us so just some very general overall animation just as some movement to our character so what we're going to do is say we'll click a point like on her chin and we'll lock her down by adding three more points to the rest of her body you might need to add just a few more over here as well so then just to check this this works out we can grab the chin point and kind of move her head and see if it moves the rest of her body and for the most part it looks good so what we're going to do is kind of just move our head over to the left and we'll move forward in our timeline to maybe a second and a half two seconds and we'll move the head over to the other side so what we're going to do is just hit u on our keyboard to bring up the keyframes and you'll see that those two keyframes we created are down here we'll hit f9 on our keyboard to make them easy ease keyframes and then we're gonna alt click the stopwatch so hold down alt and click it and then we're gonna type in loop out capital o just like that do open parenthesis quotations and type in ping pong and just make sure your expression looks exactly like this go ahead and copy that so now just by using two keyframes we can have a looping animation on our character that goes on forever and we don't have to worry about additional keyframes to animate any part of the animation so we're off to a good start but rest of her body is moving and that's not good so we'll continue this animation we'll grab our puppet pin tool and we'll add a point onto the hand here see how that moves the body okay we'll go ahead and add a point maybe on the knees here kind of lock down legs and you know that's that's cool maybe we'll put a point there put a point on her elbow and you know we're kind of getting a feel for how things will be moving and animating as we affect each pin that might put one on the hand and one on the shoulder here so we'll grab our hand point and we know it's puppet pin six because that's what gets selected and you know we'll add a keyframe for the position there and we'll move forward by maybe like a half a second or so and we'll move the hand in and then we'll just copy that previous expression i'll click the stopwatch and paste that in there make sure those keyframes are easy ease keyframes then we'll grab our elbow and we know that's puppet pin 12. we'll go ahead and turn off the stopwatch turn it back on add a keyframe there and we'll just go forward and animate this just by touch and unclick stopwatch put our expression in there and then make it easy ease keyframes so now we have a very nice subtle animation on our character which will look great for the overall explainer video but now i want to talk about facial expressions what we're going to do is go back into our compositions until we get back to the one with all the spatial expressions and we can turn our faces back on to see what we have at our disposal so first of all let's talk about the eyes i want to be able to have our character blank and so i'll grab one the facial expressions for eyes closed and i will move it over our current character's face to kind of match that up perfectly where it should be and we'll do is we'll grab the pen tool here and we'll just mask around the eyes so we only grab the eye expression and just like that perfect and what we'll do is we'll just shorten down the length of this clip just to be like a few frames and we'll move it off set it in time we'll duplicate it by going up to edit duplicate and we'll offset it in time randomly duplicate it again and just start kind of repeating this process for however long we need it and for as random it needs to be so now we'll have our characters eyes blinking and i'll stay with the overall animation because it updates automatically in our main composition so that's really awesome and next thing we need to do is talk about animating our character's mouth maybe you're going to animate this to a voiceover or perhaps you just want a little bit more animation in there so what we can do is find a facial expression that we want so i'll grab this one and once again we'll overlay it onto our character and once again we'll grab the pen tool just mask around the mouth so we're not gonna take any of the other features of the face and same exact principle we'll go ahead and shorten down the clip you know figure out how long we want this to be so mouth closed opens up close down we can duplicate it move it around updates in our main composition the lips are moving and we have overall character animation to our scene now of course i went ahead and animated some of the other objects in the scene i will link a tutorial in the description that will teach you general vector animation that will allow you to do just this it's really easy to do and you probably already know how to do it from watching this tutorial so that's our tutorial on creating this character animation for explainer videos as you see you have a lot of options available to you and it's very easy to do so i hope you enjoyed this video and if you're new here be sure to hit that subscribe button because we post multiple post production tutorials every single week right here on the channel you can also hit me up on my social media networks those links are below and always be creating [Music] you

Channel: SonduckFilm

Views: 406,311

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: JFXVtffqvBY

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020