Fake 3d Character Animation in After Effects

hey everybody welcome back to another video i know it's been a while since i posted a video but i have something to tell you i've been doing live streams on my channel if you haven't yet checked one out you should definitely keep an eye out for the next live stream because they're a lot of fun and i'm able to answer your questions in real time in these live streams we're breaking animations down we're i'm showing you how i approach certain animations it's a lot of fun and plus i get to go a little bit more in depth than i typically would in a tutorial or a video like today's video speaking of today's video today we're going to break down this little animation that i made for my instagram to celebrate hitting 7 000 followers by the way if you're not yet follow me on instagram you should almost to 10 000 followers i just need 300 more so go check me out and give me a follow i really appreciate it now to break this down we've got a lot to cover so we need to dive right in but one more thing before we jump into the breakdown and that is stay tuned till after the breakdown because i'm going to talk to you guys about my character rigging and animation course that i'm coming out with and how you can get access to that course for a steep steep discount but i'm talking like 80 off of this course so if that interests you and you want to be able to make animations like the one we're gonna break down today or like this one or like this one then make sure you're tuned in after the breakdown okay so without all that out of the way let's get started so the first thing i did was to create this reference to create this reference i took photos in the key poses and then i just traced over those photos to give me a simplified version of the character and then i animated those at three frames per second just to give me a rough sense of timing i'm showing you this reference just to illustrate that your references don't have to be that great they can be really sloppy they just need enough information for you to follow once i had the reference all set up i started with animating the legs for this animation i use limber because it is the only tool that i know of that can do this kind of animation if you want to grab your own copy of limber i've left a link in the description below with limber i have control over the width of the start middle and end of the limb so i can use those to create the illusion of foreshortening which is essential for pulling off an animation like this another aspect of limber that makes this kind of animation possible is that you can keyframe the length of the upper and lower segment of a limb which is also crucial for pulling off an illusion of foreshortening because as the limb moves to be more straight on with the camera each segment of the limb will appear to be shorter so here is my general approach to animating the legs i keyframed each key pose and then just adjusted the motion path of the different controllers to follow my reference i keyframed the top and lower half of the leg to adjust according to the reference as you can probably tell by now this would have been extremely difficult to do without a reference and then i keyframed the taper of the limb to emphasize the shift in perspective and maybe even exaggerated it a little bit from the reference the reference is really just a guide you don't have to follow it exactly the legs kind of serve as the foundation for this entire animation so with that out of the way let's move on to how i animated the shoes now i have to say that the shoes is definitely the part of this animation that i spent the most amount of time on because when i first started i was just trying to work from my own imagination but i probably stopped and started over a few too many times originally i tried to use joysticks and sliders to create the foot because i wanted to be able to uh tilt the foot up and down as well as from side to side but it just never really worked out this was my fifth attempt at creating the shoe and i think it's the closest to being successful but i just wasn't satisfied with the final product so after six failed attempts i decided to go back to the drawing board and create some references so i ripped off my own shoe and took some photos of it from the three different perspectives i knew i needed for the animation i didn't end up copying my shoe exactly as i opted for more of a converse shape in the final animation but having a look at what an actual shoe looks like from these three perspectives rather than just working off of my memory gave me a much better result in my opinion so what i ended up with after sketching out my shoe are three layers one for the bottom of the sole one for the side of the sole and one for the top of the shoe i did the same thing for the left perspective and the middle perspective although for the middle perspective i only created one shape layer as i reused the same shape for all three layers of my shoe once finished in illustrator i push my shapes over to after effects using overlord if you've never used overlord or even heard of overlord then you need to reassess your life decisions right now overlord is so easy to use and saves you so much time all you have to do to push your shapes from illustrator to after effects is select them and then click this little button right here there's no separating into layers no converting into shapes no fixing gradients that didn't translate well no deleting weird paths that showed up and you don't know where they came from none of that overlord takes care of all that so i've left a link in the description if you want to go check out overlord in my opinion this tool pays itself off in just one project by the amount of time it saves you and if you're somebody who uses overlord let the people know in the comments how great this tool is okay so once in after effects i'll set up my foot in its own composition and i'm going to rig it up to a duix slider if you're not familiar with how these sliders work here's a basic rundown for each layer i have three keyframes on the path property that will correspond to positions on the slider and each of these three keyframes on each layer are for each of the three perspectives we created in illustrator so the first keyframe will correspond with the left position the middle with the second keyframe and the right position with the last keyframe the third keyframe and then i'll just use duic to connect these keyframe properties to this slider so that as i move this slider back and forth these shape layers will morph between the three keyframes now here i want to highlight just a few of the key takeaways i gleaned from this whole process to get something that will morph this well you need to understand how shape paths work first make sure your shape paths are as simple as possible that means that they are made up with as little vertex points that's these little guys right here as possible to maintain the shape that you're going for with less points to manage it'll be much easier to work with second every path has a first vertex and that is indicated by this little circle around the vertex point so make sure that this first vertex is in the same place on every keyframe or else you're going to have weird morphs like this in between keyframes third each path has a direction in which it is drawn and while you can reverse the direction with these little buttons it doesn't truly reverse the direction of the path which means when you animate it the shape will flip like this this happens because the direction of the path is different for each keyframe you can fix this with the attributes panel inside of illustrator however sometimes you'll encounter an issue where the reverse path is grayed out to solve this convert your shape to a compound path and then reverse the path when you recopy and paste that shape data to your shape and after effects it will be properly reversed and now your shapes will morph correctly okay with my foot layer properly rigged up to the slider i'll just embed the composition into my original composition and parent it to my ankle controller and then i'll keyframe the slider to sync up with the motion of the leg i'll also keyframe the rotation and scale of the composition to make match the animation of my leg for the right foot i went through all the same process except i split the right foot into two compositions one for this movement and then one for this movement i'm not really sure if i had to split it up but i guess we'll never know with the leg and shoe animation nailed down i worked my way up the body and moved on to the torso and then i added on the arms i approached the arms very similarly to the legs i just kind of followed the reference the next big project was the head i decided to use joysticks and sliders for the head rig and just like with the shoes i created and rigged the head in its own composition then i embedded it into the final composition i then keyframed the head composition to follow the body and then animated with the joysticks to shift the perspective of the head as the camera rotates around the character i did originally have a lot more motion in the head and that's kind of why i chose joysticks and sliders you can see me tinkering with it here but in the end i scrapped most of this and looking back i could probably have saved myself a lot of time by just using a duix slider to animate the head turning this is why it's good to plan out your animations and save yourself some time once all the animation was pretty much locked in i moved on to coloring and styling everything and then placing a background behind my character i ended up with a very plain simple background because i was running out of time if i had more time i probably would have considered what i could do with the background to better help sell the rotation around the character okay so there's the breakdown i hope you enjoyed it i always find it interesting to see how other people problem solve and so i hope you learned something new now without further ado let's talk about the character rigging and animation course that i mentioned at the beginning of this video and how you can get access to that course for just twenty dollars that's eighty percent off of the launch price there is a link in the description below that will take you to a google form which is like a little survey that will help me better understand what people's biggest pain points are when it comes to learning character rigging and animation in after effects and once you fill out that survey as a thank you you'll be provided with a link to a page where you can pre-order the course for just 20 that's 80 off of the launch price which is a killer deal but here's the thing i first announced this on my live stream and the response was so overwhelmingly good that i can only offer at this big of a discount for the next week until april 13 2022 because otherwise i might not make money on this course so if you are interested in being able to create character animations like these then make sure you go fill out that survey and pre-order the course i'm gonna teach you everything that i do all my techniques all the tools i use to create these kind of animations now if you're catching this video after the 13th that's okay you can still pre-order the course at probably around to sixty dollars which in my opinion is still a killer deal still going to be fifty percent off by going to www.keyframeacademy.com character dash pre-order there you can still pre-order the course until it's launched and then that page will no longer be available and if you're somebody who's not yet quite ready to pre-order the course i totally get it no hard feelings there is a link right here on the landing page where you can give me your email and i'll update you when the course is fully out and you can come back and check it out now again if this is something if these kind of animations are something that you are interested in learning how to do go get access to that course all right guys i hope you liked the video make sure you hit that like button that helps me in the algorithm make sure you're subscribed because there's going to be some tutorials about some of the stuff i did in this breakdown and make sure you hit that bell icon so you're notified when those tutorials go live and you're notified when i go live uh on live streaming so that you can jump in and join me and get your questions answered in real time thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Keyframe Academy

Views: 83,458

Keywords: fake 3d character after effects, animation, after effects, after effects animation, character animation after effects tutorial, fake 3d after effects, fake 3d after effects tutorial, fake 3d rotation after effects, Limber, character animation tutorial, 2d character animation, 2d character design, 2d character design illustrator, 2d character rigging, 2d character, 2d character design tutorial, after effects tutorial, After effects tutorial 2022, 2.5d animation after effects

Id: eQWI8buBfHw

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 06 2022