Jammin' Out After Effects Character Animation Tutorial

hello i'm scott and i'm going to show you my process for animating this angry young lady with a guitar we're going to be working entirely in after effects and just to give you a heads up i'm going to go ahead and just assume you already know the basics so if you're just starting out this might be a little bit difficult to follow along with okay so this is our finished product but i started off with just two finished illustrations the starting pose and the pose i wanted to end in i worked with a really limited palette only a few different colors because it can be really helpful to keep the design feeling cohesive the other thing i wanted to think about was to have a manageable amount of layers i didn't want a crazy amount of details going all over this i knew i'd have to recreate this all in after effects and the more shapes i created the more time consuming it would become another bit of my process i wanted to share is that for me and most people your first drawing usually sucks your second one too so it's okay to give it a few tries before you get it somewhere you're happy with this was originally my first design well actually that was probably about three or four drawings in and uh it's still cool a little more realistic a little more grounded uh but i thought since i was just making a short little three second animation i might as well push the style and well yeah it's it's better now this is this is just better anyways back to after effects the first thing we've got to do is uh trace all the shapes it is that first really boring step for every animation if you're not used to using the pen tool you will be soon because this is going to take a little while sometimes i keep the layer turned off but you can still draw on it as long as it's still selected you can also just mess with the opacity settings whatever works okay right here you can see i started drawing the hair one way but then i delete it and i go back and i separate all those little hair strands into different bits i thought that would be a lot easier to animate later i could uh stagger the keys so they're all moving at different speeds when i'm just animating the paths there'll be a lot of little parts like that where i'm realizing ah this will be a little easier to animate later on and that sort of thing it's really only something you figure out after doing this a few times eventually you'll just sort of know how you want to build it this part can be a bit boring but it's really important to create the best shapes you can you also want to keep in mind that it'll be easier animate the paths later if you use as few vertices as possible that also just keeps it looking nice and clean when you have fewer points it's just smoother curves that go along the paths although i'm not sure that these little facial bits are the best example but we'll get to how they work later okay so this is where i put the shadow underneath the hair that goes on the face and instead of using a matte i'm using an effect called the set mat which you can see in the top left corner and i'm just setting the mat to this face layer so i don't have to worry about it too much anymore so here you can see i'm working on the eyes and there's a lot of different shapes and i tweaked them for a long time i kept all of it together in one grouping here and once i was done with them all and i felt moderately happy i grabbed the whole thing and i duplicated it over to reuse for the other eye i just have to rearrange everything so it looks like a proper eye in the right position so i'm just going back and referencing the original drawing see if it looks quite right seeing if i can improve it and eventually it does get a little bit better one thing you'll notice is that i'm often putting a bunch of different shapes in the same layer this is important because when they're in the same layer and you're animating the paths you can select and move them all around at the same time if they were in different layers you'd have to deselect the layer you're currently on select the new one then select the paths and then move it separately it's way more of a pain and it feels less intuitive so here we're building the jacket for the character and it's made up of two parts it's the foreground part of the jacket and the background part of the jacket and as we're animating we just have to make sure they line up next to each other continuing on we're just going to get all those details in there all these little lines that you know show the folds of the jacket and make sure they have round end caps this lower arm we're putting it all together in one little shape definitely we're keeping it kind of like a normal rig with an upper arm a lower arm and a hand they'll all be parented together we'll get into that stuff later though although for this arm because it goes behind the back part of the jacket and then in front of the guitar where the wrist is we need to have an extra layer that kind of pops up on top and then it'll just follow along it's kind of a patch going through the guitar the original style didn't have that brighter yellow uh for this pose but for the other pose it did have a brighter yellow for the underside of the guitar so i changed it a little bit guitar strings also there's only four strings so i guess it's probably a bass guitar and each of those strings ties up into one of the little circle bits you can tell i really know how guitars work it's a loose guitar it works each finger here is just a single shape you can separate it out into joints but i'm not doing anything really detailed with the hands so i'm not going to bother in this case [Music] lots of tweaking throughout this whole thing the stomach is made up of two layers the the skin and the shadow on top of it the hands only have two real joints which uh makes it a little easier to deal with but we can always add in more definition later all right this shape is going to be our hips it's our center of mass for the entire body this is where all the motion comes from everything starts with the hips and moves on out then we have all these fun little lines and since we're still doing an upper leg and a lower leg it's actually kind of difficult because that that tracksuit line needs to continue into the lower leg every time we pretty much just have to to babysit it as we're moving the legs around and make sure they keep lining up i'm not even since the toe little cutouts for the laces are the same color as the background i'm just letting it extend into space it doesn't really matter once again i duplicated my uh right leg to get copied over to the left at least it'll stay the same length that way even if i'm going to change up where all the folds are it probably didn't save me much time but it saved me a little bit of time almost to the end now almost there get the shadow we leave those little cuts out in the shadow that we're from the drawing because i thought it looked nice and then of course we need this scribble on the top of the head and just like that we're all finished laying out our shape layers all done it looks just like the original illustration now right so the next step is to set the pivot points for every shape so it rotates from the proper spot and while we're doing that we're going to parent everything to what it needs to be parented to so the hair gets parented to the head and the head to the neck the neck to the collar and the collar the shirt to the stomach to the hips you get the idea then the hips will uh connect to a null that controls the entire thing and that's basically our camera control and uh at first i'm just connecting the feet to the lower leg and then the upper leg to the hips but later i'm going to decide to just leave the feet parented directly to the main knoll i'm never really lifting the feet off the ground so it doesn't really help me to connect them up so as you can tell we're not really building a rig so much as we're building a collection of shapes to help us keep everything organized but you're probably asking why not build a full rig well rigs are very good at specific things uh wait let me qualify this statement there are two kinds of rigs there are these amazingly complex rigs that let you do nearly anything and they're built by a team of people over a period of months and they're what you'll see on big animated tv series but i don't have the interest or frankly the ability to spend that long on a rig for my three second animation so we're gonna set that aside the other kind of rig is a nice simple duic or other similar setup that creates ik and fk handles for your arms and legs and what they do is very cool but only if you stick to doing only what the rig is capable of and that means keeping everything very flat and two-dimensional if you want to distort for perspective like we're gonna do or even just move your hand directly towards the camera in 3d space you're out of luck so in the end you'll have created this rig that is constraining your imagination and you'll begin to settle for the what the rig can do rather than what you first imagined and the second you begin to settle in your animation well it's gonna show it in your work and realistically building a rig probably isn't going to save you much time in any case there's no right way to do it but certainly this is the way i prefer yo alright we've parented everything on up and now we're ready for the next step first just setting the comp to be only three seconds long because i'm pretty sure that's how long this is gonna be then i'm gonna select all of my shape layers search for paths so the paths bit opens up then i'm gonna set a path key for everything easy peasy after that i'm selecting everything again everything again hitting p and r to bring up position and rotation and setting keys for all of them i'm also going to separate the x and y position because i almost always prefer to have it that way so now we have a butt load of keys and if i move stuff around at another spot on the timeline i know it'll be animated some of these keys might never be used so it's a little messy but i can delete unused ones later if i want right now i'm more concerned that i have to go look and make sure i've keyed something than if i have too many keys and finally we can start animating that really took a while to get here but at least we can get started so first things first i've decided that i want the first pose of my animation to be our young lady looking off into the distance to the left while the wind blows through her hair you know classic album cover shot so we've got to start moving all of our shapes into the new position of what the profile shot of her face would look like and this will take a minute [Music] we're doing this with the uh the path frames not the position frames for the most part by the way and since i haven't drawn this pose out before i kind of need to work it out and decide for myself what looks right so there's some trial and error going on a lot of people kind of hate doing this because it looks so janky while you're still in the process of getting everything in its proper place if it's bothering you sometimes it helps to turn everything off except the layer you're working on on layers that you're finished with i remember at this point i was struggling a lot with what her face and nose shape should be honestly if i just popped open photoshop and sketched it out the whole thing would have gone a lot faster but uh i opted not to do that for some dumb reason so we're gonna hit the fast forward button a little harder from now on and uh now we're at a point where i'm starting to feel a little bit better about her head shape all right and then i just made a few last bit final tweaks to make the hair feel more dimensional a little less flat on the side after this i want to have her shift her weight when she turns her head so i'm moving the hips over to the left just a tiny bit this is just a little adjustment when you turn your head your whole body kind of goes with it it's really hard to only turn your face so the guitar is also going to rotate around at the same time and i just grabbed all the paths of the guitar and scaled it on the x-axis a tiny bit because basically the front end of a guitar is pretty much a flat plane then you just have to adjust the the edge the bottom edge of the stem and the main guitar shape to make it look like a three-dimensional object i'm just adjusting the keys a little bit here to work on timing see how it'll feel giving it an an ease all right and what i'm about to do right here is add an adjustment layer with an effect called posterize time and that makes it animate on two so it animates every other frame basically i only have half as many frames that i have to really focus on on getting just right so here i'm selecting all of the keys for the face turn animation and i'm giving them all a strong ease so it's going to turn a lot faster and ease in at the very end after that uh what i'm trying to do is give the the head turn animation just a little bit of an arc to it usually everything a human does is an arc so it's never really this flat turn from left to right so i just kind of pull everything down a little bit so it looks like there's just a little tilt [Music] watch it like a billion times we're also going to give the hair a little uh overlapping animation my hair just takes an extra second to catch up with the rest of the head so like that and that's kind of what we were going for it's a lot snappier it pushes it eases into that final frame really hard i'm still not entirely happy with uh everything and i'll continue adjusting it but right now what i'm doing is i just wanted to have that that wind blowing her hair a little bit i i'm probably getting a little ahead of myself this uh is something i probably could have left for later i should have hit all the main poses first but sometimes you just want to see how it's going to look once you add some of the finer details so getting the lapel jackets just animating the paths just going left and right left and right just giving everything some movement it's the easiest thing in the world i didn't even touch the eases it's uh just a tiny bit of pant movement too when everything moves it feels really nice lots of hair adjustments and now we're looking pretty good obviously i haven't done the wind blowing for the after the turn but we're moving on to the next pose and i know after this she's gonna turn and raise her hand up with the guitar pick to uh hit it and i was thinking maybe she like slams or he heals together and kind of goes on her tippy toes uh i was kind of working this out as we go i had it in my head this idea that she was raising the guitar pick over her head but i hadn't sketched it out and i knew she was going to turn towards the camera a lot more so i started just moving everything over and i hadn't even touched the arms yet and i was looking janky and then i got really frustrated and started all right i'm just gonna open photoshop and make a sketch so skipping the photoshop drawing part made myself a quick little sketch uh and i figured i'd just work on it piece at a time start with the legs match it to the sketch scale them down since we're going for a perspective the feet are going to be further away from the camera so they get smaller and then we just have to connect you know the upper legs and lower legs so it uh it gets larger as we get closer to the camera not worried too many about too much about the fine details yet just trying to make it work [Music] the sketch made it so much easier to visualize what i was trying to do and i was annoyed that i didn't do it earlier obviously this isn't the final pose i ended up going with but uh at the time i really like this idea of the arm going way above the head to slam down on the guitar just testing it out making sure everything's moving in a way doing one shape at a time so it's a little easier to work with i'm sticking pretty close to the sketch right now even though the sketch was super rough but later all exercise some creativity just scaling it all down so it looks like it turned sideways a little bit and you can see how i'm adjusting the the back and top of the guitar that gives it its 3d shape it's also showing how it's useful to have all your shapes in one layer so you can move them all at once i'm still trying to figure out the jacket shape here i thought maybe the lapel came off over on top of the guitar strap but i ended up not liking that and worry about the hand pose at this position and the way the arm was rotating wasn't gonna be the final animation if i kept it this way it was gonna just head straight up but for now we're just setting up a pose and we're not worrying about the transition in between now we got a bunch of pieces obviously the motion is weird but i'm not thinking about that too much we're just trying to trying to get that pose this idea i had of her looking like straight up at the sky as she's about to throw the guitar pick down i don't know why i like that idea at first but it ended up just feeling weird right a bunch of different hair pieces i duplicated the ear to get the new ear in there okay so right now what i'm doing is i'm copying over all the keys from uh when her head had just turned and i'm gonna give it a nice hold pose basically so she turns her head and then it holds for a half second instead of just the smooth motion that goes from uh from turning her head to raising her hand in the air this would be like look pause then make the next pose this point i'm getting more and more i'm like what what is happening why did why does she look like this but i still i still haven't given it up yet i'm still just messing with eases still thinking about it like how do i make this work okay and this is the point i was like nope no more no more arm in the air no more hitler youth pose i'm just gonna have her holding the guitar pick up in front of her chest a little more obviously there's some layer issues but what i'm going to do later is just duplicate the lower arm and have it at a higher layer and it'll just switch over from one to the other when it needs to but i'm not not stressing about it yet it's it's not important to me yet in fact just hiding the hand for now so i don't even have to look at it i'm also gonna make the perspective a little stronger uh bringing the feet up a little closer to the main body and his head no more looking at the sky looking forward it just seems more like what the character would want to do it's dragging all the shapes putting them into our new position movement's starting to feel good getting that perspective a little closer her head was way too far back it should be overlapping more with her shirt collar like it is now this whole process is lots of just finding problems and fixing them much like sculpting you're just slowly cutting away all the imperfections until it starts looking the way you imagined it which can be difficult to do so you have to continually look at your work critically i'm using the main body null right now to figure out the the camera move it scales in on the character a little bit as the camera moves above her one thing to keep in mind is that when you're animating a camera move using the paths and the character layers and the perspective and the character's body shape is changing a lot is that you can't have overlapping keys you have your first pose and you have all their keys set on let's say one second and you have your second poses keys all set on second number two all the eases also need to be exactly the same later we'll go ahead and adjust and add overlapping motion but unlike when you're working with a simpler setup you can't just slide over some of the keys to the side to make a motion overlap at first i was thinking maybe her eyes look somewhat closed from uh this top angle but later i decided maybe we'll just pop them open a little bit so you can still see the whites of it and you just kind of gotta tweak the points so it curves around with the face once again copy and pasting the the frames from one eye to the other the nose can overlap the lips just a little bit i with the shape of everything on this for quite a while i remember shadow is what's defining the difference between the uh the head and the neck since they're both the same color trying to give a little depth to the guitar just tweaking the shapes everything needs to be tweaked basically there we go this is kind of like the first pass and we're getting closer so i duplicated the uh the lower arm and i have a version where it's uh above the the shirt the jacket and i just turn it on when uh when the hand rotates up [Music] so i grabbed that that second keyframe image that i drew and i'm just using that same hand as reference and it'll take a minute to get all the fingers and lines in position but but once it does it'll be it ought to work the stroke widths are just too wide right now but i'll adjust that later you can animate the stroke widths by the way so in preparation for moving along to our final pose i'm just setting a keyframe for all the layers all right so now we're going to start moving into this next pose so first things first is the guitar which took me a second and this first time i actually screwed it up because i rotated the paths instead of using the rotation uh of the entire shape when you rotate the paths it uh it's just the in-betweens aren't right so while this is going to be close to what i'm looking for eventually i'll have to do some minor revisions to make it actually animate properly but still this wasn't a complete waste of time i still did use these shapes in this position i just had to un-rotate and re-rotate you can see the strings are all coming off uh that was part of the broke problem because i rotated with the paths also it just didn't look right for a little while just took me a while to find the shape i needed [Music] the illustration itself didn't show the entire thing the arms were covering it up i you know cheated it a little bit so i'm bringing the entire torso down because i'm imagining her kind of like leaning over as she bends into it now because the very first pose that i started with actually i had a three-quarter view for the face i just copied all those uh path frames over and uh started working off of that because that was so much closer than moving everything over from uh the view in the last pose [Music] once again this is so much easier once i know what i didn't want the final post to look like honestly i should spend way more time in photoshop than i do and uh after effects planning makes everything easier so looking pretty close to the original but still some room to get it closer going back and forth between the the frame you're trying to hit and uh what you've actually made is important so i'm not using the old hand for this i'm redrawing an entire new hand because why not we're just gonna kind of pop between this hand and the other one old hand pops the new hand still messing with the eases for everything i select all of the frames now currently this is just pose to pose so it's not you know all the way there yet it's uh it's really boring it's not really a actual animation yet but we're not worried about the transition just doing the post-pose just getting getting the pose where we want it as i've said about 100 times in this the color of the hair also we're uh animating it change on a certain frame for that back hair that's a lighter blue than the rest of the hair taking my time tweaking this eye the eyes are what everyone looks at so you might as well take your time to make it look as close as you can duplicated that bottom lip to add a shadow and then i turn it on when necessary adding more shadows [Music] so at this point i'm just trying to uh get the follow through of the hand strumming the guitar figuring out exactly the path it's going to take and the pose we end at i also need to make sure that uh the hand comes up a little higher as we move into the next pose it we don't want the hand to go first the hand is uh a later motion than than the camera shift so i'm just kind of raising it up even after the camera starts tilting in also making some small leg adjustments uh we want the the leg on the right side of the screen to be grounded uh there's no lines on the ground that give us a reference uh and the camera is moving to the right so it looks like the feet are just coming together but in fact it's the right leg stays grounded and the left leg comes to snap into it you can see that that uh the way the hand holds a little bit in the air before it strums the guitar it's much better than it was before now i'm just adjusting the kind of the motion of the the main body null and here i added a second null that just adds this little bit of extra scale at the end right there so the motion continues really slightly sometimes it's easy to just create another null and link the old null to the new null uh just so you can have a separate set of keys to work with that haven't been uh already moved around in this case that new null was in the center of the screen so it made the scale just perfectly centered work on this hand pose it's gonna have to animate a little better than it was before i'll be adjusting that a lot more in the future too just as i'm trying to figure out what's the the in-betweens how how is this hand flipping all the way around as quickly as possible and as naturally as possible so i'm moving back to some of these in between poses and uh the hair is gonna you know need to catch up with the face as we're pushing through really fast so we're gonna have this nice secondary motion where the hair is gonna like fly up after she strums the guitar it'll make it feel a lot more powerful gonna mess with the eases a lot too just uh experimenting until it feels good so there we go that's what we've gotten to it first and that's not all the way there yet obviously but progress a little bit better the hair still feels really stiff though right like there's a wire in it we want this uh the jacket to kind of go with it too and so at the very last frame i'm uh i'm letting her eyes continue to kind of open up and her face to turn just a little bit so the motion continues we don't want her to come to a complete stop as soon as she touches the guitar so now you still get like a little more life in her eyes see this slight opening slight turn the hand is kind of moving down slow while it strums the guitar too so we'll probably adjust that later we also wanted to adjust how the timing for when the guitar gets pulled up we want to make sure it's that right hand that's actually pulling the guitar neck up we didn't want it to just happen randomly get a lot more emotion on the lapels some weird poses i'm trying to fix the in-betweens that just weren't quite right you can't rely on on the path animation to do all the work for you you gotta adjust things where it looks a little bit off it's gonna let the eyebrow raise up a little at the end too so we're messing with this little scribblet top it was just you know for fun just make it make some random shapes it's kind of like a halo but that was a little too smooth right bouncing around so i selected them all and i made them hold keyframes which means it'll just animate every four frames it's a little more uh i don't know it gives it a flavor it's a different frame rate than the character so it's it's interesting i went back to the hand now trying to figure out what a good in-between pose will be because i only need one frame here uh before it switch switches over to the new type of the new hand well the one i had before wasn't working and also this hand wasn't quite working either so i'm just gonna keep keep playing with it until i feel a little bit better this way the fingers feel like they're coming more towards the camera we don't want to rotate the hand too much because it feels like it's flopping around we want a nice the smoothest way from one post to the next hands are difficult so this takes a little while there is feeling a little bit better all right we're going to get these guitar strings animated so we'll just have them strum on down right as the hand goes by and then a little back and forth like that that feels good then i duplicated the guitar strings i made them white and then i'm putting a mask on top of them so that only some of them are only parts of it are white so it kind of feels like a little shiny bit right then i'm going to use this mask and kind of move it a little bit so it looks like the shine is traveling down the guitar just a little bit and there's always improvements i can make with the hair especially for these in between poses we just want to give it some life as everyone as she's like flying around and shifting from bows to pose nothing's worse than static hair right right now what we're doing is we're adding a little motion to the jacket too uh we're still kind of adding in for the wind that we began in the very beginning for the first one second of the animation we still want that wind to keep on going blowing the jacket blowing the hair so every eight or twelve frames we're just gonna move stuff left and then move it right plus we're gonna have a secondary motion for all the other moves clean out the legs they got a little messy so we need to attach those lines this is what i meant by babysitting the legs but there's only so many keys so it's not too hard just push things where you need them to go all right doing this little uh sound line so it's a simple shape and we're going to do some shape animation with the path on it first off we're going to just pull everything over here for the first just one frame and the second frame pushes out and then we're gonna just move it forward like this and let it kind of blur into this new new pose all right this is another thing we're gonna do one of our final steps is an effect that we have going on on an adjustment layer that you can see in the top left called turbulent displays and when we turn it on it kind of roughens all the edges as you can see but the thing is when it's further away it looks like the edges are rougher than when the character is really close to the screen so we're gonna animate the turbulent displace so that it has less power when the character is further away and more power when it's closer to the camera and it's just a subtle thing but it makes it look a little less vectory and i think that's about it i think this is a finished animation uh thank you so much for hanging out all the way to the end i hope this was at least a little bit helpful to see how my process works i know it was a little bit difficult with how fast it was moving but we had to get through this in at least a reasonable amount of time in any case leave a comment if you have any questions i'll try and get back and answer them thanks

Channel: edwin rowin

Views: 884,001

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Tutorial

Id: DhQkyAWY63s

Length: 40min 56sec (2456 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020