In this video, I will be going through my
process of bringing this photoshop illustration to life using after effects I will be splitting this video into 5 parts: From the illustration process,
to getting it ready for animation, hair animation using AFP hair script,
other animations, and then making it extra fun
by adding objects getting sliced up The illustration itself was a continuation
of my LAM artist study video So if you want to know how to draw in this
style, check out that video Since the idea was to animate a sword unsheathing, I started by drawing roughs of the sword's
closed version and the opened version So after I’m happy with the composition,
the next step is to refine the rough I started by redrawing,
Then added base colors, The next step was to block in the shadows And using a clipping mask, add halftone to
those shadows Since this illustration was inspired by LAM’s artworks, I wanted to add tons of bold graphic elements
in the forms of pins and badges These were done using Adobe illustrator using
the shape builder tool I then scattered these elements around the composition, Making sure that they are not too cluttered These are basically the main process of this illustration And the final process is to
add details and refine the illustration And this was the outcome of this stage And only after finishing this illustration, That I’ve realized that I might have made a slight mistake Yeah... my layers were merged :( So in hindsight, splitting them will probably
save a lot of time down the line. Before splitting the layers, let me show you
my epic animation plan I wanted the hair to be moved by the wind,
eyes to blink, sword to be able to open and close, and the sleeves
and keychain to swing around in the wind Once I have a rough idea of how things will move, I then start this boring process of splitting the
parts into its own layers. I ended up having to cut each part out
using the lasso tool And redrawing most of them I also made sure to redraw the
previously hidden parts of the hair, In the end, I had 12 different parts for the hair Here, the sleeves had to be extended slightly for
the swinging animation The toughest part was having to redraw
and redesign previously hidden parts Like the shoulder, the shirt,
and the blade of the katana Overall, this process will be different for each artwork, But it’s quite straightforward Also, if you split the layers at the beginning
then you wouldn’t have to do all of this Once everything is ready,
I then imported the photoshop file into after effects Ever since seeing those League of Legends
loading screen process videos, I’ve always wanted to try animating my own illustrations But I thought that hair was going to be insanely difficult to do So never attempted this... That was until I found out about
AFP hair rig script If you want to animate hair in after effects,
then AFP hair rig script is the way to go, This is my first time using the script, And honestly, I’m super surprised by
how fast and easy it was to do the hair I watched this 30 mins video to learn the script But you really only have to watch 5 mins of
the video, for the fundamentals Here’s what I did for my hair animation:
Put around 5-8 puppet pins into the hair For the base, for the part that you want it
to stay still, remove the keyframe In the effect controls panel, change puppet engine to legacy This is required for the script to work But I have no idea what it does Run the script and yeah.. that’s it I repeated this process for 12 of my hair
layers, and with that, you’ve animated the hair To save time, you can also run the script
once you’ve pinned all the hair However, there were some minor bugs that I encountered Sometimes there’s this issue where not every
pixel is included in the mesh This often happens to thinner parts,
To solve this, all you have to do Is mask out the shape, this was done to make sure
that the mesh will cover every area of the hair Then you can continue with the
usual steps of putting in puppet pins Last thing is to adjust the intensity of the animation, For this, I changed the amplitude of the master control, Also my first time doing all this, this happened I have no idea what I did to create this monstrosity,
I also could not fix this no matter what… And since I didn’t have a backup version,
I had to redo the entire hair, So I would highly recommend to save backups
along the way I’ll briefly go through the other animated
parts in this illustration First is the background Move from here to here Then I used the loopout() expression to create
the endless loop effect Sword unsheathing animation,
Just 2 different layers moving apart I key framed the position and adjusted the (speed) curves The part that I had the most fun with was
the blade highlight The blade highlight was actually animated
frame by frame in Photoshop I wanted to try mixing traditional animation
to after effects animation Which surprisingly worked really well! And after refining and adding colors to the
animation, I imported it into after effects and slapped
it onto the blade The swinging sleeves and keychain were also
animated using AFP hair script The string of the keychain however, was run
with the null as the bone structure instead of pins What this allowed me to do, is to be able to link
the mascot to the lower null of the string And then link the top null of the string to
the sword (sheathe) Now, when the sword moves, the string and
the mascot moves together I then adjusted the amplitude to mimic the
momentum and inertia of a swinging keychain This part is trial and error I Adjusted until I got something somewhat realistic Mouth was quite messy, But I think I was able to get away
with animating using puppet pins For the eyes,
I started by animating the eyelash closing using puppet pints And used scale to flip it upside down. I did the same thing for the eyelid Then pre-comp the eyeball and masked out
parts to match the eye closing Inside of the eye comp are the highlights Which I made them wiggle using wiggle expressions I then added rotation to the star highlight
as the eye opens Then duplicated everything to create the eye
on the other side And here’s the outcome of this process So at this point, I’m really happy with
the outcome and it’s pretty much finished But then I had another idea (streamer noise) I saw a clip of this psychopathic streamer
playing a game called Rhythm Heaven, There's this section where the character slices
monsters in half As I watched this clip, I thought,
what the heck is wrong with this guy But I also thought, oh!
Let's try putting that into my illustration Which I think would fit in nicely
since everything is so playful I started by designing the objects that would
be sliced up I decided to create pixel art characters using
the pencil tool in Photoshop Then converted them into vectors in Adobe Illustrator And made a sliced effect Split them into two In the end, I ended up with 4 parts for each target Then imported everything into after effects, And after some testing, I decided that
The slice effect would show up for 3 frames, Then afterwards, the 2 layers splits
and falls downwards at different speed With the lower part falling faster than the top part Just like the enemies in rhythm heaven Put everything into the main composition Then animated the position of the object, to make
it seem like it’s been tossed, And that’s everything. The end result was a super playful animation, With flowy hair and clothes as supporting secondary animation, Which helps made the whole illustration very organic and lively If you want to see more of these illustration
animation process videos, Subscribe and stay tuned for more videos! Thanks for watching <3
