How do Character turnaround in After Effects | workflow Part 1

okay so um i've had a lot of requests or questions from people about where they can buy a uh character animation um course a paid course and i've been working on one for a while now but i'm uh i have a predicament that i'm hoping you guys can help me out on so one of the things that i've noticed about taking online courses for animation what or what not um is that a lot of times and let me know if you guys have the same uh experience with the courses you've taken if you've ever taken an online course for after effects or for whatever video editing whatever it is um where you see the course trailer or intro or whatever and you're like oh this looks really cool you take the course and by the end of the course you're kind of like well that wasn't really what i was expecting like you didn't really go too deep into the subject matter and you kind of feel like you finished the course with a little bit more knowledge about the subject but you don't feel like you can go off and like really execute on your ideas i don't know if you guys have ever experienced that but i've take i've had that experience it's one of the reasons why i no longer have a skillshare membership because skillshare does have a lot of good courses oftentimes you know maybe it's just at my current skill levels i take a course a lot of what's in the course is in my opinion surface level i already know it and it it's hard for me to find a course where i really finish the course and go wow like my level of understanding like upgraded significantly and now i feel like i can do this thing that i wasn't able to do before so in designing my character course i've been trying to think about what are those things that you guys really are having trouble finding tutorials for uh what are those things where you um that i those topics i can cover that will really bring like character rigging and animation to the next level and then how do i take all those things package them up into a course that you guys can take and um so i've got some ideas i've um you know put put together my own ideas in terms of kind of what i remember from when i was first starting to learn character rigging okay so i'm well let me just bring it up let me just bring it up browser let's let's go to the browser okay so i have this little landing page here where you can pre-order my course for a discounted price so if you are interested in helping me kind of shape the course by either contributing ideas of lessons that you have a hard time finding on youtube or in other courses this is where you can pre-order the course and you can give those ideas to me and you can get this course for uh a lot cheaper than it will actually go for when it actually comes out so you get the pre-order like discount um and we got some comments here the problem with the character animation course let's put this up on screen problem with the character animation course i took from school of motion and motion design school they are only teaching you walk cycle jump run cycle and nothing deeper than that okay wrote them that is that is the kind of input that i really want because that's exactly what i'm wondering right in terms of what do you expect from a course okay that's exactly what i'm looking for so anyway so here's my pitch to you guys if you're interested you can pre-order the course and get it at a killer discount and i also say this if when the course comes out and it doesn't meet your expectations then obviously i'll give you your money back i'll say hey no questions asked if you're like hey i paid for this course it didn't teach me exactly what i wanted to learn i'll give you your money back no questions asked no big deal because i don't want to sell a course of people that people don't want to take right that's kind of why i'm doing this pre-order is i want to get input to um design this course for people and and teach the the subjects that people actually want to learn people need more courses and tutorials that are specific like this one if it were how to make a killer character rigs it would not get me to click as much as the title you chose that's good that's good input um and that's kind of like the feedback i've been getting in terms of when people message me on instagram they'll be like hey where's your course about this specific thing versus and that's kind of you know these are the kind of inputs that i really like so here's anyway uh there's a link in the description of this video to this webpage where you can pre-order the the course now if you're you you know if you don't want to pre-order the course but you still kind of want to stay updated on when the course comes out there's a little link right here below you just give me your email and your name and i will email you as soon as the full course is out and if it appeals to you then um you know uh you can buy it or if you're if it doesn't appeal to you no hard feelings um so that's that's where i'm at with this so again here's the pre-order um now and here's another pitch if you want an additional discount on top of the pre-order discount i have a survey short survey that you can take that will give you an additional 50 off of this course so this pre-order price by the way is 40 bucks that's the pre-order price and then if you take the survey you can get another 50 off of that which will be 20 bucks so to get to that uh survey there's a link in the description you finish the survey and then at the end of the survey once you hit submit there will be instructions on how to purchase the course uh at a an additional discounted price now if you don't want the course but you are willing to help me by just um filling out that short survey i'd much appreciate it and then again if you don't want to pre-order the course you just want to stay informed get updates on when the course is available you know there's always this little link right here so anyways that's my pitch uh you do um i know it shows paypal here if you don't have a paypal account you can still purchase there's just a link below the paypal sign in that just says pay with debit or credit card so anyway so the address here is keyframeacademy.com character dash pre-order or you can follow the link in the description this is also helping me gauge if there's just um there's interest here so anyway that's my pitch and i've already i mean without selling anything i've already uh gotten some really good insights from you guys so i appreciate that let's get on to the actual tutorial eh so um it sounds like most people are joining are kind of outside of the united states because it's night time for you guys huh am i am i correct in assuming that it seems like most of you that have commented are from outside the united states which makes me think i gotta find some more time in maybe the evenings to catch some of the uh united states viewers too i'm wondering if like evening here where i am verse and then if i do it late enough where people in the united states are off work and then uh people in asia india um that part of the world south africa can join in the mornings i don't know we'll see it is also possible that there's just no perfect time for everybody i'll just have to like alternate between two times and again i'm i am going to leave these live streams up in a playlist on my channel so that you can view them later if you you know were dead asleep when i did this yeah peru marx works in the us but works for home so do i i kind of miss working in an office though i do i do sergey please tell me when your script takes shape will be released um i've said this on previous live streams but um i'll say it again if you contact me on instagram which let me go to the main window you can see my instagram handle right here you send me a message on instagram and i'll get you a copy of that script maximus you may wish to redo the back legs on those dogs on your ig tell me why enlighten me i'd love to to hear why all right let's get started i'm going to start off with a new composition i'm just going to do a square composition here mark yeah i mean i i like working from home i do i like being able to see my family but sometimes it's it's uh i think when you've been working home for so long you kind of forget the uh at least i kind of forget how fun it is to be around other creative people uh which which uh animation are you talking about maximus i have two uh dog animations and if i think you're talking about the one i think you're talking about i agree actually i actually do agree unless you're talking about both but all right so we're going to start with the torso and um i'm actually going to draw everything in after effects because i don't feel like switching back and forth between um illustrator and we're gonna so by the way i'm gonna just make a really simple character that is just blocked out in different colors no outlines no like character detail or anything because i just want to show you guys really quickly how to do this character turn so uh when i'm doing a character turn most of the time i like to start with the um i start i start drawing out the character by uh drawing out the front on view first unless well unless i'm not really sure how to do the like side angle sometimes if i'm like my my biggest question is like how do i do the side angle i'll start with that first just to figure it out make sure i can actually do it and then move on to the front angle and then the other side because i have done this before i know i can i can do it all right let's get started thanks for your feedback uh max magnus i appreciate that i really really do all right so we're gonna just start with like a basic torso shape and obviously you can see that that is a terrible shape now okay here's a good teaching moment of why i might start with the side view rather than the straight on view and i'm using my hand as an illustration for the angle of the body so if you start with this you you may not be able to transform that to look good from this angle so sometimes i might actually start with this side angle and you'll see this kind of form as i do it but i might go okay i know i want the spine to kind of you know and i know i need to add this so when you're doing transforms when you're transforming shapes like this which is what we're going to do we're going to transform this shape to go like this and then you know all the way to do 180 turn you really want your shape the the vertex points that make up your shape to be symmetrical so even though like i don't need three points to make this curve because i do need three points to make the curve of the spine i'm going to make sure that i have three points on the other side of the shape so that when this side becomes the spine i have the right amount of shapes you want you want the same amount of vertex in all your keyframes so now you may be looking at this and go how does that look like a torso believe me it'll come together just be patient and if you know like i'm not an expert on anatomy but your spine kind of like your spine doesn't just go straight down although if that's your art style that's fine but i like to do the the curve of the uh spine because it just shows kind of the rotation of the artwork okay so that is our our first um that's our character facing this way i have to look at my camera that's our character facing this way so this is the back and this is the chest uh so to animate the turning we're going to rig everything up to a duix slider and if you know how dewix sliders work you know that you make you have the slider well i'll show you out but you have left middle right and you have first second and third keyframe that correspond to the left middle and right it'll make sense as i set it up but right now i have this and i want to make sure it's set as my first keyframe so i'm going to hit this little button on my take shape script and i want to create a keyframe on the path so i'll hit this um you can also select the path and hit ss and it'll bring up the path here on the timeline but i like to use my script that um sergio was asking about sergey was asking about earlier so now i have this keyframe i'm going to put this as the third frame i'm going to put this keyframe as a third frame because it represents when the body is looking this way and therefore when i drag the slider all the way to this side i want the body looking this way sorry it's gonna make sense i should stop trying to uh point all right now let's do the middle this is going to be the shoulder shoulder sometimes i like to just now if you guys want to learn how to do like how to make a turnaround look good in terms of like how to make the shapes or how to visualize a character and what it should look like when they turn there's lots of like how to do a character turn around videos in more traditional applications um like toon boom harmony or adobe animate where they show you like they'll draw lines across the paper and show you how like the shoulder should line up and stuff like that i'm not going to go over all that because i'm not an expert in that so i don't want to speak on stuff i'm not an expert on all right so that's our front view of the torso it looks like trash right now and honestly if i were doing this for a client i spent a lot more time on like figuring out what the shape of my character is but you guys will get the idea with this all right so for the um body facing the other way i'm going to actually just grab this first keyframe i made and paste it on the first frame and then because my first uh vertex point which is something i went over in my first live stream you always want to make sure that your first vertex point is in the same position on all your keyframes so if you need to switch it you go to oh you guys can't see the menus well you can right click there will be a menu mask and shape path set verse vertex or i like to just use my little script here boom but with that first vertex selected you can see as i go through each keyframe it remains in the roughly the same spot on the torso yes the duix slider is like joysticks and sliders the slider portion but i think in my opinion it's better than joy 6 and sliders slider however i will say that the joystick from joysticks and sliders is better than the duik joystick if that makes sense um there's just a few reasons why but uh i i constantly find myself using the um duix slider rather than the uh joysticks and sliders and i can explain why here in a second but okay so actually i know i just said that duix slider is better than joysticks and sliders but i'm actually gonna use path is flipped the other way and i don't have to redo that frame i literally just copied this guy pasted him here to flip this guy but outside of that i'm going to close up joysticks and sliders and i'm not going to use it for this um particular thing although when i did this the first time i did the joysticks and sliders but the thing is like i said i don't like the slider in joysticks and sliders i don't like how it works um i use the joystick for the character body turn but then i realize i don't need the up and down of the joystick i just need side to side so i just use dewix sliders okay so let's name our layer to torso okay now let's open up duik and on do it we're gonna go over and we're gonna open torso layer selected we are going that is named after the selected layer that we had so now we got this little slider here and you can see it right here the first thing i always like to do with the sliders is change the outline so i can actually see it i don't know what that error was but hopefully it wasn't important i'm gonna make the slider a little bit bigger just so it's easier for you guys to see so let me just explain how this works this slider can go left to right and actually can go beyond this but it will only um work from this point to this point so this point when this when we link everything up when this little circle is over on this point in fact let me do something real quick so it's easier to see this all right so when this this point right here this circle is all the way to the left my torso will be facing left and as i bring this over to the middle my torso will be right here and then obviously this so basically we're taking these three key frames and we're linking the animation between these three keyframes to the x position of this little circle so these keyframes are no longer active keyframes meaning when we play the playhead they'll no longer animate like this they will only animate as we animate the exposition of this thing so to link these keyframes to the torso we go over to duich so this one will be the minimum value and then the maximum value this keyframe right here okay so and then the actual numbers to the position property of this guy right here so this is negative 100 this is 100 and then this is zero okay you guys can hear me mike's turning off okay let me try one more thing we're gonna make sure that can you hear me now can you hear me now it was when i was going over to here that you guys can't hear me okay right now i'm looking at the dueck panel right here can you guys hear me as i talk about this cool all right so let's connect up our our uh path right just real quickly in case i cut out or whatever this little slider corresponds to these three keyframes now the reason why i like um this duix slider versus the joysticks in sliders slider is that when you have three keyframes like this uh the joysticks and sliders will create a slider for the first two keyframes and then it will create a slider for the second two keyframes so you actually end up with two sliders so if i want to animate all the way from the minimum all the way to the maximum i gotta do that with two sliders it just doesn't work well the joysticks and sliders slider is really meant for two keyframes and two k frames only whereas with the duex slider i can i can have as many key frames on this property that i can animate between with the slider as i want i could have a hundred if i really wanted that much detail i don't know why you would but i can i can do that so with this i like to have the left right and then the center because i i want that kind of control so usually i'll do two three keyframes here so again to to rig everything up we're gonna go over to duik and you guys can still hear me and i'm gonna make sure that this slider that i just created the torso slider is loaded i can see it right here that means we've got it loaded up so when i hit connect properties it's going to connect the keyframe properties that i have selected to that slider if my slider is not here if i don't have this the torso slider uh loaded in right here all i have to do is go to my timeline select that slider layer which is the circle layer and come back over to duic and just hit property and that will load it in you can also use this connector to load in any property from any layer and i'm going to have a tutorial on my youtube channel it's not going to be a live stream but it's going to be a tutorial where i go through like five or six seven eight nine ten different uses for the connector i think the connector is duex most valuable tool in fact i don't really even use duke for character rigging anymore something i talked about last time even though we used duik but i use the connector for every character rig so if you're not familiar with how the connector works it is the best uh tool that duik provides in my opinion by far okay so we're going to connect these things i've got this loaded in so now i just need to come over to my timeline grab this path property with my keyframes come back over to duik and hit connect properties now as i drag this i can animate between the three keyframes and you'll notice now that as i drag my playhead past these keyframes they're no longer active right because before if i went to the second or third frame you'd see the keyframe for that frame but now the animation between these keyframes is dictated by this guy okay so are you talking about the the duik right here magnus right here yeah it's it's it's kind of hard to see i mean it's easy for me to see but i'm sure with the youtube compression it's hard to see but um it's there all right so now we have our so this whole this thing is going to control all of our layers okay this is this one slider is going to control the rotation of our characters so now let's do the arms and for that i'm going to actually use limber just because i want to go through the whole process of rigging up an arm with duic with limber to rig up an arm i just hit new there's a little uh window that pops up that has me name it that's right here but you guys can't see it because of the way that the live streaming software captures windows i hit okay now i've got this little limb right here that i can position in place and then i can modify the length until come on there we go i can i'll just quickly make this arm how i want it i want it a little bit longer so we're gonna sorry feels like i'm rushing through the limb creation i don't want to spend too much time on how to use limber because this isn't a tutorial about limber needless to say though that i love limber and it is my character rigging tool of choice because of how easy it is to use okay and then watch this i just grab the wrist layer right here and then i go over to do limber and i hit duplicate which is going to pop up another little window here that says name your thing i'm going to name it the right limb um you guys can't see this little window that i'm dragging around because again i can't capture that but now you'll see that i have another three layers that represent my other limb and i'll just grab these and bring them over and i'll go over the dynamics and i'm gonna have my this limb bend the other way and it actually doesn't matter what i set to the the way that the limp bends because i'm actually gonna probably end up using forward kinematics for the animation of these limbs anyway but uh yeah okay now i'm gonna grab the two shape layers for my limbs and put it behind the torso and now just like with in fact before we even move on i'm just going to turn the fk all the way up for both of my limbs because i'm going to do that anyway and then we can just boom franco asks how do you um change the limber shape controller i wish i could show you because it's really easy but basically you go into the settings here and the reason why i can't show you is because the uh streaming software won't capture the little window that pops up but it's in the settings here right here and then um the first uh option in the settings is the controller shape and you can there's a there's one two three six different shapes you can choose from um this actually the funny story the controller shapes um i didn't come up with these shapes however being able to select different controller shapes is a direct result of some feedback i gave the creator of limber i made a video almost two years ago now that compared all the different character rigging tools you can go watch it on my channel and one of my biggest i love limber but one of my biggest complaints is the teardrop shape that it was using is not in my opinion ideal for character rigging for various reasons i won't get into you can go watch the video to find that out but uh steve kirby the guy who created limber um or at least co-created he hit me up and he was like hey if you have any ideas for great controller shapes let me know i never got to it but then he he came up with some really cool ones and this one is by far my favorite because it shows you the direction in which the um shape is pointed or the joint is pointed and where the exact center of the joint is so anyway all right we've got our um arms now we just need to animate them just like we did with the torso um i'm going to to um disable the torsos uh expressions that link it up to the the slider for now so that we can just position these so i'm going to actually grab the shoulder controllers and we're going to place them where we think they should go and actually i'm going to put them above the torso so that we can see kind of where they should go and because this is going to be same on both sides i'm just going to copy this position go to the left and actually i guess it's not going to be the same because we want them back over here and then in the middle put these where they need to go and you know what i think i actually want these to be the same level we don't want the shoulders to be like going upwards when we rotate okay looks pretty good we're going to put the arm layers back underneath the torso now here's the trick to creating the illusion of a turnaround because we need one arm to be in front of the torso and then as the torso turns it needs to be behind the torso right so how do we do that well there is one little expression that i use i got this expression from a tutorial about joysticks and sliders in joysticks and sliders you can do this with what's called a switch template but i could never get the switch template to work and i think doing this this expression is an alternative to that and it's much easier to set up so the first thing is we need to duplicate the arm layers okay and then we need to put the duplicates above the torso now we need to hit t to bring up the opacity and we're going to add this expression to the opacity of these layers so i'm going to start with the left arm this guy right here so i'm going to go to the opacity property and hit or hold alt or command on a mac if you're on a mac i'm doing alt and i'm going to click that which is going to open the expression i'm sure you guys all know how to add expressions to properties but just in case you don't that's how you do it and i'm going to hit j equals you can use any letter of the the alphabet i just always use j because that's the letter the guy used in the tutorial i wish i knew where that tutorial went what channel was on so i could shout them out but i can't at the moment um j equals and then instead of typing out the expression i'm gonna go up to my torso slider hit p to bring up the position and i'm going to pick whip to the x position not to just the position but to the x position because we don't care what the y values are we just care what the x values are which is going to fill in this expression for us that's showing what we're referencing but we're not done on a new line i go j and this is the left arm that is above the torso so we want to when the torso's facing this way when the torso is facing this way we want this layer the opacity of this layer to be 100 okay so just to make this easy i'm gonna go j greater than zero question mark so we're asking after effects if the x property of the slider layer is greater than zero then 100 colon zero semicolon to end the line if you guys aren't familiar with um expressions that can be complicated but that's what we're doing this is probably one of the simplest expressions once i hit that you immediately can tell that it's working because the x property is at negative 1.7 and our opacity is at zero so if i bring this above zero then the opacity changes to one hundred percent see so even if i'm at one the opacity is gonna be one at 100 now as we'll drag this over you can see that it now is behind now we're not seeing anything happen with the torso because i've disabled the expression linking the torso to this joystick but once we link everything back up and re-enable the expressions then you'll see how this is working let me um let me uh answer some questions no like layers things squares give awesome readability in duik do those exist in limber2 max max magnus you're going to have to elaborate on what you mean because you can't see no layers no like shapes so you're gonna have to expand on what you mean by that camera left arms are not the same as left arm not quite sure why somebody teaching rigging would name this way well i have to ask you why does it matter what you name a rig if you're just um showing it to to an audience it's not like when the audience watches the final video your arm labels are there for them to see i use left arm i i label i know the standard practice is to label the uh the character's left arm as the left arm but i like to label camera left as the left arm because it's easier for me to keep track of my rig so not one correct way to do this you can do it however you want however um however helps you end with an animation that looks cool then you can label you could label your limbs twig twiggly twig twigger for all you want you know the the name of the thing doesn't really matter now if you're gonna hand off a rig to somebody else then yeah maybe you should name it according to the best practices but oftentimes i'm animating my own rigs so i name the rigs however i want and so uh left whatever arm is on the left side of me as i'm looking at the characters than the name that i give this so sorry if that triggers you i mean i'm teaching i'm teaching character rigging because i've rigged a lot of characters and obviously people are interested in how i do it so oops clicked on the wrong comment oh i get what you're saying i get what you're saying so with with limber the controllers so just so everybody else gets it so the control i think what magnus is saying here is that the the controllers that duik uses are really readable um but uh i do like that because you can offset the controllers too with duic like you could do a lot of with the controllers however if you use some of those custom controllers with duke i'll just tell you it will slow down your system um but yes it's very readable duik has like specific shapes for the hand versus the foot controller yada yada um limber doesn't have quite that level control over the uh over the controllers you can increase the size of the controllers like if i go over here and i hit the size i have to have a controller selected i can really pump up or you know make it small um i can hide and show and you can um select the color and the shape but you don't have nearly as much control over the over the uh thing toads understand seems counterintuitive yeah maybe to you it works for me it helps me keep track of my character rig and again that's my whole point right um you do whatever makes sense for your mind for me uh grabbing the left the controller that's on my left as the left arm makes sense not the i don't care what the what the character on screens left or right is i'm i'm working in my world so anyway but again you're right in that the standard is to name things according to the perspective of the character i will acknowledge that and everybody should know that however that's not how i like to do it um so let's let's keep going all right so i've got position properties for my left and right shoulder and where is the right okay so let's connect these these shoulders up to the uh slider so that our arms are moving with our um with our torso instead of going back to do it and hitting the connect properties button i'm actually just going to copy and paste the expression from our torso so if i go to our torso uu to bring up the path i got this big convoluted expression right here i'm just going to hit ctrl c to copy that and then on the position properties of the shoulder that we animated i'm going to paste those and now okay so we have two major expressions happening right now right we have this expression that is connecting everything up to to the um we got this expression connecting everything up to the slider and that's connected to all the keyframes that have three key frames or all the properties that have three keyframes and then we have a opacity expression on this left arm right here that turns the opacity of this to 100 as the slider goes past zero so what i can do now is i can go over to this opacity expression hit ctrl c go to the right arm and we want it to be the opposite so we're going to add the thing and instead of saying if j is greater than 0 we're going to do is j less than zero then we want the uh opacity of that layer to be 100 so now you can see that everything is working now uh you'll see that the the the limbs are kind of set up and okay so now you're seeing one of the issues that i run into whenever i make one of these it's like there's never a point where both limbs are behind so i actually like to go into this expression and i like to modify it a little bit and maybe do like greater than 10 and then yeah this one should be 10 and then on this one i'll do like negative 10. so there's a space of 20 pixels right there where both um limbs will match up so yeah so there's 20 there's a little bit of leeway where both limbs are behind the uh thing and then it pops in front of it now um one thing i can do to make this pop not so obvious like see how it just like also pops is go to this middle frame let's uh we're going to just disable all the keyframes or all the expressions on these for now and i'm going to just put these arms like out a little bit okay and we'll grab all these and re-enable the expressions check our work and maybe 10 is just like too crazy we could do like five let's try five five and five yeah now with the arms like bent like when it's coming over here and the arms bent back this way um that's just something you'll have to animate with the uh you know if i'm animating the character turn then i'm obviously going to animate the arm to go like that you know so let's just animate this let's just do it right now so oops the wrong button okay so i'll create a keyframe here use this puppy [Music] let's preview the animation okay we have everything and we're going to animate the rotation of the arm to go along with the rotation of the body so that his arms aren't unnaturally facing the wrong way his i don't know maybe it's a she i don't know okay and then i'll grab these keyframes and just apply the same easing to it there we go so there you have it there's your little character turn right there let's get this up close and personal and i find that a lot of times like when you're actually animating your character your movements are quick enough that like the popping of the the opacity of the next layer isn't that noticeable so i don't i don't feel like it's like too jarring with this you know so mark asks have you ever had troubles with controllers jumping in scale when parenting to other layers yes mark i have sometimes my controller get huge and i have to adjust but not sure why um so yes i have had this one thing that might solve this for you is for whatever reason uh if you're using limber i'm assuming you're talking about limber but um for whatever reason there's this little expression on the scale of your limber controllers you just delete that um then and then just restore this to 100 by 100 then your controller should maintain their size if you have that 100 100 little expression on the controller for some whatever reason your controller will inherit the scale of whatever you parent it to even though that's not really supposed to be how parenting works i don't know what happened to my little chat box here but so yeah hopefully that answers your questions if you're using duik might be the same issue although i don't have that issue with duke as much as with limber and it i had the same frustration for a while i was like why is my controller like like blowing up every time i try to parent it to something mghale what's up thanks for joining yeah mikhail that's that's what i ended up doing was doing the shoulders a little bit wider so that they they go um out but i you know i don't love the little bump that they create i like my shoulders to be like smooth so obviously if i had more time i would finesse everything you know if i was doing this for a client i would finesse everything zurd this will be on the uh on the channel in a playlist called live streams so just go to my channel hit the playlist it'll be there so here you go guys that's how you do a character turn and obviously i've screwed something up do like that oh you know what i did that's what i did i must have like bumped something while i was boom um maybe i'll i'll move on to the head rig so i build the head out out separately and i always build my head rigs in a separate uh composition so i'll just do like a really basic head rig see if i can like freehand this look at that just kidding it sucks i know it's not done yet i have a question for everybody how many of you guys here all like do your own illustrations for your animations daniel you're an illustrator i wish i didn't have to i would love to work with somebody who just does illustrations that's my ideal hold on to your butts i remember you from last time thanks welcome cadargo says occasionally usually provided artwork yeah that's what those are the kind of projects i like the most i just like to animate man jose i do and i don't like it yeah i'd like to i'd like to spend most of my creativity on the animation portion yeah max magnus i usually draw things in um in illustrator i just didn't feel like jumping in back and forth for today's um tutorial so i'm just drawing everything in uh after effects also a little um pro tip for you guys um if you ever want to make these points bigger i forget that you can do this because i'm just used to these points being so big but there's a setting in preferences under general where you can jack up it's the first setting you can jack these these little points of your mask path and your shape path up to like 15 or something it makes grabbing onto them and seeing them so much better it's a little pro tip for you all right so if any of you have ever used joysticks in sliders that's what i'm going to use for the head um again i'm going to grab the path and create a little keyframe on the path that's my front and then i'll do the right i'm going to do like a little bit of an anime shape head the nose kind of sticks out like this i'm just doing this really quickly copy that go over to joysticks flip that puppy looks pretty good we'll just do origin and we'll just that's for looking up and down that's not perfect and if i were doing this for a client i would have much more i would take much more time to make this uh professional head create my joystick head control sorry you guys can't see what i'm doing but you can see what i'm typing i got this little joystick here and now i can use that joystick to do my head and i'm actually going to add a neck and i will oh you know what i realize i've got to also add a position property to the head and i'm just gonna i don't usually do this all in one layer but since i already just created the um neck on the same layer i'm just going to do it all in one layer so now i'm going to grab the neck create a keyframe guess it didn't work that's by the way why i'm not selling this script because sometimes it doesn't work for unknown reasons if you want it contact me on instagram i'll get you a copy of it how many of you guys have used joysticks and sliders before so if you didn't join me early on in the stream i talked about the character course that i'm developing right now and how you can pre-order it for a heavily discounted price as kind of a thank you and a way to influence what i teach in the course so this is one of the things i'm wondering about when it comes to like a a character course like should i cover everything that comes with a character rig like how to rig up the head and everything that's involved in that or do i just stick to like really one specific topic and leave like rig head rigging for another course or a separate course that's kind of what i'm wondering in terms of the course uh if you guys are interested in checking out that pre-order i don't have like a lesson uh plan posted on the internet yet although i do have one in a google doc but if you if you're interested in uh getting a discount on that course there's a description or a link in the description to that where you can pre-order it the discount is half off so i'm i'm planning on about an 80 range for the course you get it for 40 bucks also there is a link in the description to a survey that will give you an additional 50 off of that discounted price if you complete the survey um then you can go and purchase the uh the course for um 20 bucks and you'll get the 80 course for 20 bucks the survey helps me understand kind of what people are looking for so i can make out the course um make a course that people actually that benefits people so anyway also there's a link on that website that if you don't want to pre-order but you want to stay updated about the course you can just leave me your email and i'll update you when the course is available and of course if you pre-order the course you take the course and you're like this course sucked or wasn't what i was hoping or didn't fulfill the promises that i was given or whatever your uh if you're just not satisfied with the end product of the course i will of course refund you because i don't want to sell you something you don't want to take so anyway just thought i'd give a little plug for those who have joined a little bit later on so you're aware that that's there yeah max magnus i've actually taken the uh rigging boot camp from motion design school and while it is a very thorough course it's like it's literally like 30 hours it's a lot to get through and there's still a lot in that course that i think is left out and uh it doesn't cover all rigging i mean it it covers how to rig with dewick and it covers very specific rigs with duke but it doesn't it doesn't cover everything in fact i would say in in terms of like when i took it is very surface level and of course like i'm billing out these courses um but that doesn't mean i'm gonna stop posting and doing live streams like this on uh youtube w i think a project based source would be uh course would be cool um i like that idea i always think that project based courses are the best because they actually give you a direction to go to to apply the the skills that you're learning in the course but yeah that's cool that's a cool idea for a course two characters dancing together why not make a basic course for beginners do you mean like a basic course on uh character animation or just a basic after effects course let me finish up with my okay you that looks dece all right so i'm going to go back to my original composition and i'm going to drag my head in here which is going to be way too big so we're going to signs it and i accidentally used the same color so i'm just gonna go in here and choose a different color for my head so i can see it and it's a little too small if you know what i mean i got a really long neck i just realized that's okay all right so the first thing we need to do is we need to link the position of this head to this slider so i'm going to grab my shoulder layers and my torso layer and i'm going to disable the expressions so that i can place my head where it needs to go for each of these okay and then instead of going back to duke i'm just gonna go to this property here copy this expression and paste it onto the position of my head and then it's all going to become misaligned because i need to re-enable my keyframes okay oh we got a new subscriber patty warner i guys i'm loving this feedback really it's you have no idea how um much thought i've tried to put into this course because like i said this in the beginning i'll say it again one of my frustrations with courses and i've spent quite a bit of money on courses and it's always super disappointing when you take a course and the when you are on the other side of taking that course you don't really feel like you've made any big transformation in terms of your skill set you take course and you're like stuff's kind of surface level and especially as you get more into the intermediate skill level you start to realize that like a lot of the courses out there are just like surface level stuff and you're really trying to find the course that will take you from a to z on whatever topic you're taking the course on so having you guys give me these this feedback is huge in terms of what you look for in a course and how i can create a course where before you start the course versus when you end the course like your skills are totally transformed and you can do things that you weren't able to do before so i'm going to go in here to the head rig and i'm gonna push this joystick to the parent composition and why didn't that go oh it's because i didn't have the joystick layer to parent you know it's in the parent because it turns red so now we can animate this head turning and let's make sure we have everything linked back up to the why is this not working oh okay so now what i can do is have the head turned this way and it turns and i'll just copy the ease of these oops if you guys don't use ease copy it's an awesome tool and now the head turns with the body but actually the way i like to animate is i like to like have the motion of the body or the head um let's see make sure i'm grabbing all the relevant keyframes oops not the torso up that and the torso controller sheesh okay i want these to actually follow the motion of the head so the head starts turning so the head starts turning first and then the body follows that's how i like to animate because i feel like you turn your head and then your body kind of follows that correct me if i'm wrong but still felt short you mean the motion school of motion rigging academy felt short or you felt like the motion design school character animation felt short so i've taken them the rigging academy um from school of motion and i've taken the science of character animation from motion design school um i've taken both of those i think there's good things in both of them but again i feel like there's certain things that see that's so here's the other thing that i think is frustrating is sometimes a course can be too specific in like what it's teaching you so it's not necessarily and i i struggle with this with just tutorials on youtube as well it's like trying to teach you the principles and not necessarily teach you how to do one specific thing like right here i've taught you how to make a rig that turns around now i've tried to explain how the rig works so that you can take the rig and you can uh apply it to whatever artwork you're using or whatever animation you want to make or whatever like i really try to focus on principles so that you can apply those principles to your own ideas if that makes sense are you using uh reference uh for this i'm not using a reference because i've already made a character rig like this so i'm just really redoing what i did before and for that one i didn't really use a character reference because it is it looked just like this it's just basic blocked out shapes and so i didn't uh you know but if i were making this for a client i would definitely use a reference thank you for the stream you're welcome aj i want to ask if there's a way for a 360 degree character rotation if one is not good in frame by frame animation uh yeah you could there is a way there is a way i don't have time to go into how i would attempt doing that um i've gotten a lot of questions about character turnaround and i'm i'm actually kind of curious why there is such an interest on being able to animate a character going in 3d you know i i i have use for maybe like slight turns in my character animation but i i don't i don't know of any situation where i've needed to animate a character or at least build a rig that can go in 3d if i were to do a 360 character turnaround i'd probably just keyframe the whole thing and there's lots of lots of tutorials online on like the science behind character turnarounds this isn't necessary this little live stream isn't necessarily the science behind it it's just kind of i'm showing you one method to accomplish this in after effects yeah this this would be interesting unfortunately a lot of times clients do you know you have to get permission from a client and i just rather not um go through that hassle but yeah i like the the overcome this the obstacles and struggled i like to include a lot of that stuff in just my youtube tutorials so i think that's good stuff yeah ben marriott has a great course i have not taken it but i'm assuming it's good because he's really good at what he does honestly everything you can learn is out now yeah that's the thing i mean obviously you can learn after effects for free completely on youtube it does take a lot more time because you have to kind of piece together your education from different videos and like um some people have said in the chat it's uh you know it's hard to find a tutorial that shows this you know so you might not be able to find exactly what you've learned that's why i want to come up with a course now um mikhail you had mentioned like a beginner's course i do have a beginners course but uh i've there hasn't been much interest in it and it's not it's a it's a beginner's to after effects which obviously like there are so many beginner after effects beginner tutorials online that it's just too much competition for it but so to anybody still watching this live stream will be online later under a playlist on my channel called live streams so you can access it there you can go back and see what i did um for the legs we would do the same thing we did with the arms with the uh expression on the opacity the thing i like about uh limber and why i choose limber for this kind of thing so i've tried to do this with duik and i don't know if anybody in the that's watching right now will know how to solve this problem but the thing i like okay so let me first explain why i like using uh limber so when you create a new limb with limber it gives you two controller layers and it gives you it gives you two controller layers and an art layer which is your which is your limb and your art layer follows those controllers right and with duic you have basically three art layers per limb you have the the bicep the forearm and the hand and then you use duik to rig those up and then do it creates one controller for the limb that you use and that controller has all the like rotation controls and the position controls whatnot here's my struggle with doing an animation like this with is with limber i can duplicate that art layer and it's just one layer i could duplicate that and i can apply the expression to the opacity and then i can animate when uh the arm is above the torso and below the torso which is crucial for pulling off an animation like this okay but with duic i would have to duplicate all three of those art layers so my thought was well with duik you can extract controller so i could i could rig up the arm layer in its own composition extract the controller and then i could just duplicate that composition put it underneath the torso apply the same uh opacity expressions that i applied on this limit thing bada bing bada we're in business it works well with the arms however with the legs where you ha where you need the hip controller to be parented to the body it doesn't work because for whatever reason if i create a controller for the hips inside of its own composition and then extract those controllers and then parent that hip controller to my torso layer it doesn't follow it it gets way screwed up it doesn't work and so i haven't been able to figure out an efficient way to do this with doing i could do it with do it but it wouldn't be efficient so um yeah by the way um thanks everybody for your input on the course again you can go pre-order the course uh with a link in the description keyframeacademy.com character dash pre-order or you can just click the link in the description or if you want to get an even bigger discount there's a link to a google uh form which is a little survey where you can give me a little insight into where you are and kind of the things you want to learn in a course just helps me outline the course and that'll give you an er at the end of that you'll get a link to buy the course for even cheaper and if you don't want to pre-order the course but you want to help me i would really appreciate if you went and filled out that form it's not a long form it should take you like two or three minutes um there you go also at that keyframeacademy.comcharacter-pre character dash you um you can uh if you if you don't want to pre-order the course totally fine i get it you can go to um or there's a link right underneath the purchase button to just give me your email and i'll i'll let you know when the course is out you won't get the discount on the pre-order but you know if you're interested in checking out the course when it's all finished i'd appreciate that sam shapiro says how will this course compare to school of motion rigging academy um it won't be as long it won't be as expensive and um at this point i think like that's still to be determined because i have an outline of what i want to teach in the course but it's not going to be like the school of motion rigging academy is a a little outdated in my opinion it's a couple years old and i think that there's better ways that uh more efficient ways to rig characters see the problem with a lot of times when you're rigging a character uh for like say an explainer video you don't need to like overdo it in terms of the rig you kind of plan out like what the animation is going to be beforehand and you kind of just rig the character according to what you need it to do um i think with the the rigging academy from school of motion is a great course and it's very thorough but i think that it's it's really long it's tough to get through everything and um yeah exactly you said exactly what i was trying to say sam exactly what i was trying to say so complex and breaking it down by body part was just hard to retain invo yeah it's hard to get through that it's such a long course and it's expensive so if you purchased it and then didn't get through it that's kind of a bummer yeah man i don't want to keep anything secret max magnus that's why i'm doing stuff like this and again i'm i'm building out this course i'm going to continue to do live streams i'm going to continue to post tutorials on my channel i'm not uh i'm not stopping that but uh so anyway thanks thanks max for joining and we'll see you guys next time we'll see you next time i'm not jumping off quite yet but so sam good question right now i'm planning around like 80 bucks for the course but you can pre-order it link in the description for 40 and if you go fill out the survey that's also in the description you can get it for 20. and again i want to reiterate to everybody watching if you end up if you uh pre-order the course and then you end up taking the course and it's not what you thought it was going to be i will of course refund you your money but i'm hoping that those of you who pre-order the course and fill out that survey you will kind of help me build the course in a way that you you will you will be satisfied with yeah again the science of character animation course i took that one too from motion design school really cool the problem i had with that one was it was so uber specific to the the style of that animator that it was kind of hard for me to go okay cool the animations you do are cool but how do i learn character animation in a way that i can kind of come up with my own style which is kind of how my approach to teaching after effects is very much like i want to teach you principles i want to teach you the underlying how things um how things work so so sam asks a good question so how do we get the 20 so when you complete the survey you will um you get a link to where you can pre-order it for uh 20 bucks startup motion so for how long is it going to be at 40 bucks that's a good question and i actually forgot to mention that so i'm only going to keep this up for about two weeks maybe because i want to do one other live stream at a different time to try to to grab uh you know people maybe who couldn't join this live stream because they're at work or they're asleep or whatever so i'm gonna do that one more time maybe next week and then i'll i'll keep it up for another week and then yeah that that pre-order price will kind of will shut that down because you know i'll i'll um so tentatively just think two weeks from now is you know if you want and if you're not ready to pre-order right now you can go and you can just leave my your email for me and i will email you before pre-orders um shut down or are taken away or whatever the however you want to describe it and stuff like that sam uh pretty soon i mean like i've i've already outlined what i want to teach i'm kind of using these pre-orders as a way to confirm my own suspicions on what people want to learn so i can leave out things that people aren't interested in and i can add topics that people want to learn that i didn't think about um so i you know i've already outlined the course i'm hoping by end of april i'll have the course out so this isn't like a you know six months down the road thing this is pretty pretty soon i love to i love to make this channel like my full-time gig you know but right now it's not a full-time gig because i don't make you know that much money from adsense it's certainly not enough to pay my mortgage so i work as a freelancer but i love to make teaching after effects kind of my full full-time thing because i i love i mean you can ask my wife saturdays i'm on after effects tinkering around it's something i love to do and i like to teach i like to help people have those breakthrough moments where they're like well uh sam i would just check which ones you do know and which ones you're interested in in learning because that's the other thing too is the reason why that that question uh the reason why that question is in there is because i want to know like how should i include like if i'm gonna teach duik which everybody seems to be interested in um should i also include a lesson on like okay if your preferred tool is limber here's how you do that in limber or if your preferred tool is rubber hose here's how i would approach this with rubber hose so i just want to see if people are interested in which tools and which tools i should spend time teaching about so good questions though i love them those are really good questions uh the other question i had all right the other thing i wanted to announce um is i actually have memberships on my channel now i don't have anything fancy it's one dollar it's mostly just to gauge people's interests there's a little join button next to subscribe one dollar and i've come up with these little like icons um and these little icons that you get next to your name when you talk and chat or comment on a video um i don't know if anybody would be interested in that it's one dollar a month i'm not trying to make money i'm just trying to just gauge the interest that's why i said it one dollar a month if if there's enough people that join at one dollar a month i might consider uh doing like member only content or member only tutorials or stuff like that as a kind of a reward for becoming a member of the channel i'll be transparent with you i haven't joined any channel on youtube so i don't even know what it's that end of it startup motion i don't have a patreon but that's kind of what this the member thing is i just don't want to have to push people to another website you know i don't want to have to push people to their website if you can just join and i can provide you member exclusive content right here on youtube why not why do i need to jump to patreon unless there's something that patreon offers in terms of distribution i don't know but i don't i also don't want to uh start a patreon and promise patreon only content if i only have one or two people who join the patreon that's why i'm kind of just i'm just putting out the memberships this is c just to gauge interest i'm gonna keep plugging it um just to see you get a cool little uh keyframe icon next to your name when you comment in fact i think yeah you can alr if you're a member you can already uh comment a pic whip and a keyframe so i mean is that worth one dollar i don't think so but and if we get enough members we'll make some more little icons you can do the other thing too is i actually uh for future future live streams and i want to get your guys opinions on this for future live streams having like a review section where you guys can send in some animations and we can review it as a as a community and we can give our feedback on the animation or the art style or whatever i'd love to do something like that um if there's interest there uh i've see i've watched some channels that are motion or not motion uh graphic design oriented and they do like kind of a logo review and people will give their opinions on like how well the logos design and whatnot and i think it would be cool to kind of take that idea and apply it to motion graphics so you could send in like a scene from a explainer video and we could go through like the the motion and the transition and stuff like that and maybe give suggestions on how to improve it or teach a lesson from it like for all of us to learn from so i also have a buddy who may join on a future live stream as soon as i can figure out how to make it work um so that we can kind of have two people explaining how things are done and and they can keep an eye on questions so that that we can get your questions answered quickly when you ask them in the chat i don't know if that sounds appealing to you guys or not but it'd be really cool if you guys told me if that's so appealing or not just kidding uh before we sign off any other questions about this character rig and this character turn pretty good right obviously if i were doing this i'd finish off the legs and then the feet maybe i'll do a part two where i can finish the legs i think that's what i'll do yeah sam this will be in uh uh live stream uh playlist on my channel you can get it there i may just publish it i don't know yeah mark um this is a good question would you be able to spend time teaching how to optimize projects might have tend to get very laggy uh yeah there are some things you can do um that's probably that's probably like a tutorial or like a video like a uh you know a normal tutorial i would publish on my channel not rather than a live stream but um there's some things you do lagginess is something that is just part of the after effects life but there are definitely things you can do to kind of speed things up a little bit oh that's not good let me uh let me see what you're talking about just a second do hmm oh yeah are you on mobile sam try just try just like uh increasing the width of your window that's something i do need to oh you're on the ipad yeah tr maybe try i forgot that i need to optimize the mobile site are you can you request the desktop site let me see if i can real quick here um there you go yeah just request the desktop but thanks for letting me know i'm gonna i'm gonna fix that so that uh nobody else because it yeah the mobile is probably all screwed up so i've totally forgot about the mobile i i literally threw that website together yesterday so it's really rough all right guys well thanks for joining today hopefully you learned i think we'll do a part two uh on character turn i'll finish off this character turn with the legs and then i'll show you what i do with the feet there's a few little things there i think that are worth mentioning um subscribe if you're not already subscribed and um appreciate you guys joining and and all your questions yes sam absolutely we'll keep you updated in fact you may hear from us before the actual course is out so keep an eye out on your email malay ass do it versus rubber hose versus is regulator rigo mater is not a rigging tool it's like a uh tool that helps you save animations for rigging tools but between duic and rubber hose if you're just getting into character animation and you want to just start animating characters i would say rubber hose it's just way easier to use than do it thanks sam for all your questions thanks everybody for your questions and your feedback about the course again if you want to pre-order the course there's a link in the description if you don't want to pre-order the course but you want to stay uh up to date you of course can go here let me just go to my browser and you can click on this little link here which will just take you to a place where you can put your email in or you can pre-order the course for discounted price half off 50 off and i will let you know as soon as the course is out we're shooting for a deadline of april 30th or end of april beginning of may um so yeah thanks everybody for watching i'm gonna jump off i gotta go eat dinner but i really appreciate everybody's participation and we'll see you guys on the next live stream or in the next video i'm gonna have another video hopefully coming out um for my channel a regular tutorial coming out so keep an eye out for that if you're not subscribed make sure you're subscribed do me a favor and hit the like button on this video that will really help this video get in front of more people's eyeballs you guys know the drill you know how youtube works um if you guys have ideas for future character or a future live stream topics leave those suggestions in the comment section and we'll plan around them um thanks everybody again and is there anything else i forgot oh you can also join the channel as a member for one dollar you get a cool little icon next to your name um and you get preferential response in the comment section and whatnot uh as a as a thank you for being a member members are only one dollar so you know just again i'm just doing it to gauge interest and see if um you know people would be interested in supporting the channel in that way uh also i have some links to some affiliate links to some of the tools i use in after effects in the description these are affiliate links so i do get a little bit i get like 15 if you do purchase it my favorite tool is of course overlord helps you bring shapes from uh illustrator into after effects so i asked earlier if you do your own illustrations a lot of you guys said you do if you're doing your illustrations and you're working in illustrator you gotta have overlord i'm not i'm just telling you it's gonna save you so much time and it will pay for itself in just one project in the amount of time it saves you uh kader cadargo thanks for all you bring good stuff not triggered thanks for joining me cadargo i appreciate your input i always appreciate the participation in the questions um and i love to highlight that everybody has their own way of doing things and while there is a standard for most things if you don't do if you don't follow the standard very closely or if you kind of you can develop your own way of doing things that's okay that's okay um all right guys thanks for watching and again hit that like button subscribe hit that bell notification i've got videos coming out soon and uh this is the last time on this

Channel: Keyframe Academy

Views: 29,320

Keywords: inverse kinematics, character animation, LimberAE, Adobe After Effects, Motion Graphics, Character rigging, 2d Character animation, After Effects Character Animation, Character turnaround, joysticks n' Sliders, DUIK, Duik Bassel, Adobe, Character animation tutorial, 2d animation, character design tutorial, character design tips, character design for animation

Id: O77X1uKp5M4

Length: 110min 52sec (6652 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022