This is the Best workflow for DUIK!

So you're scrolling through Instagram and you see this awesome character animation someone claims they did in After Effects and you're like, "Pff, this is easy I can do that!". So you decide that today is the day you're finally gonna learn character rigging in After Effects. So you plop yourself down in your chair equipped with the essentials: an energy drink and a good podcast and you vow that your butt will not leave this chair until you are done. A couple of hours later you've designed a character that can only be described as your life's greatest work and a stroke of pure genius yeah...ok buddy keep practicing. After many hours of trial and error and having to repeatedly pause your podcast to watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials you finally managed to import everything in After Effects and it's all rigged up and ready to go. You begin animating your first limb and... everything falls apart... So why does this happen? Well let's look at a simplified limb. Here we have the upper and lower part of the limb this applies to an arm or leg as they both work on the same principle The problem arises when the point of rotation for the elbow or knee is not perfectly centered on the joint. And so when the lower part of the limb begins to rotate it breaks away from the upper part of the limb The point of rotation often times isn't centered on the joint because you try to eyeball where the center of the joint was. Okay, so now I'll show you some steps you can take so that you'll never have to guess where to put your anchor point. It all starts in the design process so let's jump into illustrator. Okay, I'm ready to create my limbs so I'm gonna grab the ellipse tool and I'm gonna create the top of my limb and then I'm going to use the selection tool to create the elbow and the end by holding alt and clicking and dragging Okay now I'm going to select all three of the circles go to the align panel and make sure it's set to align to selection, which you can't see because it's off the screen, and then I'm going to distribute the alignment so that my center circle is in the center of my two ends. Next I'm going to select the center circle and I'm just going to hit 'ctrl + copy" to copy to my clipboard and then I'm going to grab the pen tool and I'm going to start on the top and draw a rectangle between the middle of the top circle in the middle of the middle circle. now I'm gonna grab all three shapes and group them together. Hitting ctrl G, or command G, now if you remember we copied that middle circle so I'm gonna hit control + shift + V, or command shift V, to paste that circle in place and then I'm just gonna repeat what I did at the top of the limb this time for the bottom part of the limb. Okay so, if you're not doing outlined artwork like I am in this video then you can actually just skip to this part of the video but if you are doing outlines there's a few extra steps that you need to do Okay so now I'm going to start with the top of the upper limb I'm going to double click to open up that group and I'm gonna grab the rectangle in the middle circle and I'm using the shape builder tool I'm going to combine them into one shape. Now I'm gonna grab the scissor tool and I'm going to cut off the top of this new shape so that it's open and then with that being done the upper part of your limb should look like this. Now I'm gonna exit that group and I'm gonna go into the lower group and I'm just gonna delete the center circle because I don't need it anymore and then using the shapebuilder tool I'm going to combine these two shapes into one shape and then using the scissor shape I'm going to cut off the end of the lower limb and once I've done that it should look like this with an open path at the end of your shape I'll exit that group and now this is pretty much it. If you look your limbs should be working correctly it's a little off because I'm just eyeballing the rotation point but we won't be doing that inside of After Effects. So now your limb is pretty much ready to go to create the sleeve of the shirt I'll just copy this upper part of the limb and I'll scale it up a little bit and change it to the same color shirt and then use a rectangle with the shape builder tool to cut the sleeve off I'll hold alt to cut that sleeve off and then I'll combine the sleeve back into one shape Next I will grab the upper part of the limb and the sleeve and group those together Okay so before you go into After Effects if you want your limb to be tapered I have one more trick for you. Instead of creating three circles you're gonna create two circles the beginning and end and then what both circles are selected go to blend and switch the blend to specified steps and switch that to one hit okay go back to object, blend, make and now you have the center circle so now you can grab your end circle then you can adjust the size and it will automatically adjust the size of that middle circle to be even between the two ends of your limb and now you need to just select the two ends and go to expand hit OK and boom now you have three circles to work off of and then now the process is exactly the same as before Okay so now for the easy part I've got all my art work in After Effects and I've converted everything to shape layers if you don't know how to do that just right click on your illustrator layer and go to create on create shapes from vector layers okay so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to solo my arm just to make things easier to work with and I'm gonna start with the top of my arm because I'm gonna be using Duik to do my rigging and with Duik we always work from the top down so once I've created my bones I'm going to grab the top joint and, while holding ctrl, I'm going to drag it to the where I think the top circle is and because we made that circle in Illustrator I'm gonna see it's gonna snap right to the center of that circle so now we know that that joint is right in the center of the shoulder and it's going to rotate properly okay now I'm going to solo the forearm and I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm gonna grab that joint and hold ctrl and I'm going to make sure it's right at the top edge of that forearm and right in the middle of the arm so it lines up there nicely. Next I'm going to solo the hand and I'm going to do the same thing I'm going to take this joint, and make sure you only have one joint selected, and I'm gonna do the same thing holding ctrl the whole time it's gonna Center that right in the middle of the limb that joint and right on the top edge of the hand and then once I'm pretty sure that that's in the center and lined up with my other joints I'm going to take this tip and I'm going to just line it at the tip of my hand and make sure that it's aligned with all my other joints. So they're all in one straight line O kay great that looks pretty good. I'm going to turn on my whole arm so I can see the whole thing and now I'm going to parent the arm layers to the structural layers and I like to name my arm layers the same as the structure layers just so I know what to parent to makes parenting really easy. And now that everything's parented to the right bone, I'll go to those structural layers and I will go to Auto rig. And after a couple seconds everything's rigged up. So now turn off the visibility of my structural layers and it just has my controller now I can drag the controller and you can see that the limb now bends perfectly seamlessly. Okay so I'm gonna wrap up and I just want to quickly review what we did. We made those three circles. These three circles act as a guide for After Effects to know where we want to Center our joints. So when we click those joints and we drag them over while holding ctrl After Effects we'll know that we want to Center this joint right in the center of those circles so those circles help After Effects and then we build the rest of our limb with those rectangles that we drew out off of these three circles so if you just follow these steps every time you create a limb for a character and this works for the legs as well as the arms then it will always work flawlessly. If you liked this video you found that it was helpful hit that like button If you want more videos like this character design type tutorials I recently did a poll and this was the highest ranked topic so I'm gonna be doing more tutorials about this make sure you're subscribed and if you do subscribe make sure you hit that Bell icon so you know when I'm uploading new videos and with that being said I think we'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Keyframe Academy

Views: 63,041

Keywords: After Effects, Character Animation, Character Design, Adobe illustrator, Shape builder, Character Rig, Character Rigging After Effects, Adobe, Tutorial, design, animation, Adobe After Effects, Lesson, Duik, Duik Bassel, After Effects 2020, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, character animation, rigging, duik, Duik bassel

Id: PNs4jY-S2SM

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020