Pose to Pose Character Animation in After Effects - Stop Animating the Hard Way

morgan williams here character animator and animation fanatic in this short video i'm gonna teach you about the power of the pose to pose character workflow and after that this workflow is something we practice extensively in character animation bootcamp so if you're interested in learning more go check out that course also you can download the squash character rig and project files I'm using in this video to follow along or practice with after you're done watching details are in the description if you're used to doing more motion graphics type of work then trying to execute a scene like this might be pretty daunting and there's a pretty good reason for that so to show you let's take a look behind the scenes of what's driving this animation so here we are in the pre comp for this character and as you can see there's a few keyframes in here there's a lot going on not just a lot of keyframes but there's also overlapping animation anticipations overshoots and all of these keyframes have been adjusted in the graph editor so just looking at the graph editor for the rotation property on the head you can see that there's a lot going on here and if you try to make an animation like this happen straight ahead or just going from frame 1 until the end you would probably get lost pretty quickly so here's an animation that's quite a bit simpler than the previous one this is squash and you can see that in his current form he doesn't even have arms he's just jumping off the ground hanging in the air for a moment and then landing and even with this simplified character shape with no arms and a lot less pieces you can still see that a lot went into making this animation feel as good as it does and what I see a lot of animators do and faced with an empty timeline like this is they think well maybe the character needs to start by crouching down to jump and that is correct so we're gonna lower the center of gravity and then we're gonna go forward a few keyframes then we're gonna have the character jump up in the air which is gonna require key framing both the center of gravity and the feet and so you sort of have to do this little dance like this and then you end up with something that doesn't work at all in any level and then you realize oh I need to go back I need to set more keyframes here and you've got to try to figure out how to slowly but surely get this character to jump well I'm here to tell you there's a better way what we're gonna do is use something called pose-to-pose animation and it works exactly how it sounds we're gonna think of each step in this animation as a distinct pose the first thing I'm going to want to do is select all of the keyframes on the initial pose and convert them to hold keyframes you can do this by control clicking on the selected keyframes and saying toggle hold keyframe or use the keyboard shortcut command an option on a Mac what this does is tell after-effects that these keyframes are not going to smoothly interpolate to the next set of keyframes I'll show you what I mean most actions that you want a character to do are going to have a series of key poses that they need to hit with a jump the next key pose is an anticipation pose squatting down gathering energy so to do this let's grab this controller the center of gravity controller the COG and let's just bring squash down like so now one of the principles of character animation is exaggeration you really want to exaggerate these poses and posing is something we talked about extensively in character animation boot camp so make sure you check that class out if you're interested I'm going to hit W and grab my rotate tool so I can also tip squash forward a little bit then I'm going to use the arrow keys to just nudge them down as low as I can get them try to get a nice squashed pose we also have a control for squashes eyes so he can sort of blink as though he's getting ready and bracing for the jump I'm also going to play with the center of gravity a little bit more you'll notice that with an IKE a rig like this where you place the controller makes a big difference and I want squash to get as low as possible so I want you to notice how the timeline looks right now all of these keyframes are hold keyframes and you'll see that while I have keyframes on these properties here I only have a few keyframes on the next pose so I want to make sure I have keyframes on everything so I'm gonna go ahead and create more keyframes so now what we have are two vertical lines of keyframes that our hold keyframes and each of these vertical lines our poses if I use the J and K key to go back and forth between them I'm almost starting to flipbook my animation hopefully you're starting to see how pose-to-pose animation works so let's go forward a few more frames and do the next pose together the next pose is squash pushing off the ground and about to go up in the air so the center of gravity controller will come up like this but I also want the viewer to feel that squash is releasing a lot of energy and pressing really hard against the ground this rig has a heel roll control on both feet and by adjusting it I can actually have the heel come off the ground as if squash is pushing off the ground with his toes I'm gonna adjust the same control on the other foot and then this is going to allow me to push the center of gravity up even higher now this rig has stretching turned on which means I can even stretch the legs out past their normal point if I wanted to and I think I'll do that a little bit I want a little bit of bend in the leg here so I'm going to just nudge the center of gravity until I get exactly the pose I want I'm going to open his eyes too and then I'm going to use a controller we haven't used yet the squash and stretch control on the center of gravity controller squash and stretch is a principle that you may have learned about an animation bootcamp but in character animation bootcamp we use it extensively as squash travels up his body will actually stretch in that direction vice versa if we go back to the previous pose we can even squash down toward the ground a little bit and now we've got three poses I'm gonna complete this pose by adding keyframes to every other property and now I can use J and K to flipbook through these poses now right now each pose is just sort of arbitrarily spaced out timing wise we're gonna fix the timing in the next step but in pose to pose the first thing you need to do is just set all of your poses so I'm going to do the rest of them now so now we have several poses set up we have the initial pose crouching about to leap off the ground off the ground about to land back on the ground absorbing the impact and returning to normal and what's great about having these poses set up really easily in vertical stacks like this is that I can use the J and K keys to flipbook this and I can even play with timing in real time for example I could try having something that's pretty even just tapping my finger like this I could also try having squash hang in the air for a little bit longer like that and you can play around with these things and because these are hold keyframes there's not much rendering happening so if we ran preview this you can get a really good sense of the timing of this animation but let's say that you want to change something right now when squash crouches down I don't really feel like he's gathering that much energy I want him to hang out down there a little bit longer so that's really easy if I go to this pose and select all of these other keyframes and just scoot them down a little bit more now that pose will hold for longer and now since he's holding down there a little longer when he hits this pose boom I want him to pop up in the air a little bit quicker so now I can move all these poses down and then maybe have him hang in the air a little bit longer and there you go now you can see the power of using poses it's really easy to experiment with timing and it's really easy to adjust poses if you see something you don't like on this pose when squash is about to hit the ground might be kind of funny if his eyes were looking up almost like the inertia is pulling his eyeballs up so why don't we just go ahead and grab his eyes and scooch them up a little bit like this they're looking down on the previous pose they're looking up here and then they're back to normal let's see what that looks like it's a pretty quick movement so you don't really feel it all that much we can see what happens if we add one more frame to this pose maybe you'll feel it a little bit more and there you go the whole point is that this makes it very very easy to experiment with timing with different poses add frames take away frames and it's really a lot of fun once you get the hang of it now once you're happy with all of your key poses and you're happy with the timing you can move on to the next stage which is to tween the key frames and create overlapping movements anticipation x' and overshoots and things like that but that's a lesson for another time well I hope you've learned something working this way will save you a lot of headaches if you're doing character animation hit subscribe if you want more tips like this one and make sure to check out the description so you can download the character rig from this video if you want to learn and practice the art of character animation and After Effects with the help of industry pros check out character animation boot camp from school of motion have fun [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 48,251

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, character animation, character rigs, pose to pose, jump animation, DUIK

Id: 3wwH1Vahu7M

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020