Stylized Character Animation (After Effects Tutorial)

in today's video we will be doing a super sick stylized running character animation if you follow me on Twitter or X you might have seen this video that I posted that is exactly what we're going to be doing today with the help of this video sponsor story blocks there are three main steps for this animation the first one which is super important is the assets this s in particular heavily relies on the assets so make sure to pick some high quality ones but also something that looks visually interesting don't be afraid of fun lighting like B lighting or Rim lighting to make it look a little bit more interesting and cinematic this will make or break your animations in most cases the second step is the reference and that's one part of the reason why I really wanted to do this video because I think it's a really fun way to think about character animation it can be super hard to know anatomy and know how everything moves together so using references can really help create some natural look and movement you can either find drawn or video references online or you can even go ahead and make yourself by just propping up your phone and doing whatever you want your character to be doing last but not least the third step which is the sauce if you watched the videos before you know this is probably my favorite step because it's just a little extra way of making it look a little bit more unique and we're going to be throwing some really fun effects on there and making it look super sick but as mentioned the whole process starts with the assets luckily today's sponsor story blocks is going to make that super easy on us they offer unlimited downloads on high quality assets at one predictable subscription price story block has everything you could ever need from images like the ones we're going to be using today to Vector files and sound effects music video files even templates for Premier Pro off effects D resolve and so much more especially the Denture resolve ones are super sick not only do they have a crazy variety of templates for denture resolve but they're always perfect to speed up the workflow a little bit especially in YouTube videos like this where I want to get it out on time and still make sure that it looks super sick speaking of they regularly fill in content gaps in their motion Library based on consumer demands so whever they see there's a need for something they'll commission someone to do it that keeps their Library updated and filled with fresh highquality assets most importantly they compensate the artist fairly they have you covered with clearcut licensing and coverage so that you can focus on being creative and not having to worry about all your legal rights in using all of those assets you can be assured that everything you download from story blocks is 100% royaltyfree And they keep you protected in perpetu to the highest level of legal coverage in the industry to get started with unlimited stock media downloads head to story blox.com or head to the link in the description and with that said let's have a look at the assets these are all from StoryBox I also have a link to a folder where I have gathered all of them in there so that you can download them as well if you have a store Blox subscription essentially I've just gone for something that would look kind of interesting focused a lot on the lighting as I mentioned cuz it's super important but with all our assets in place we can finally hop into Photoshop in this case I want to start with my Run Cycle which I have here and I'll just drop drop that in and then hit okay so that we can see the little cycling that we will be going through and essentially this is just all the phases of the animation that we're going to be going through I really like this one cuz it's pretty simple but it has front and back so it goes through a full cycle the next thing is dragging in the photo of our woman and in this case I have this little image and as you see it's the same asset as I used in the example I am going to flip it you can always I have a shortcut for it but you can always go into edit and then go into transform and then you can flip it horizontally just like that next step is cutting out all the limbs and that is the most tedious part of this process but once you have that done it's a fairly straightforward process it's just a lot of moving around but it the results are worth it the idea here is to cut it into the same elements that we have in our reference so we have a hand we have a forearm and a a nut forearm or just an overarm I don't know what it's called we have neck head torso and then we have the back arm and all of that stuff and in that case with this image we only really have one side which is fine so we'll just duplicate that and then put it behind it's not too big of a deal especially when it is pretty FAL pasted and we don't mind that stylized look of it either cuz that's kind of what we're going for other than that we have the little hip area and then we have the upper leg we have the lower leg and then we have the foot and the same with that and we're just going to flip it again so without further Ado let's start cutting out some elements so I'm just going to start by centering this up and I will be using the pen tool if you're a bit curious as to what tools there are what how you can cut out images I would highly recommend my last Photoshop tutorial where I kind of cover the basics of cutting out things of images but the pen tool will be my go-to in this just because we can be as precise as we want to and get some pretty clean edges which is super important so I will just start with this one leg and I'll just start by cutting out the shoe that will be our kind of foot type thing and I'm just kind of roughly following along and I don't really need the shoelaces so I won't be focusing on that too much no one's is going to notice that anyways and you don't have to be super perfect with this of course depends on the result that you want but we are going for a pretty stylized collage character look with the shoe selector with the pen tool I'm going to right click and then make a selection and hit okay and then I will use this little button over here to create a image mask and that'll just keep it so that we don't do anything destructively we can just keep that as is and then I'm going to duplicate it and then delete this image mque and we can hide this layer as well and we will just name rename the this to foot one it's very important especially in this project that we stay organized because we are going to have a bunch of layers at the end of this so keep that in mind next up we have our little foot this might be a little bit easier if you do have a character that is like standing straight or something like that but in this case we're just kind of going to roughly go with the knee somewhere with this is and I might even add a little bit of a bulge almost a little bit half circle to where it might connect and maybe right there would be a little bit better just so we have a little bit of extra detail in there or information I should say it's probably the more the right term and again we're just going to trace this as best as we possibly can until we get something that looks pretty nice and again right click make selection and then of course make sure you have the right layer selected and then again hit the layer mask and that will give us that so now we have two individual pieces and it doesn't matter if there's just a little bit here stylized is what we are going for so I'm going to rename this and name it leg one and then I'm going to duplicate it and we will hide both of these and delete that layer mask and now we will go on to the thigh here we want to go kind of to to where we had that knee connected and just a little bit of extra skin right there right click make selection hit okay and again layer mask and we will name this thigh one and we actually might want to name this lower leg one just so we know exactly what it is and this same process is just going to be continued until we have all her Parts cut out now the Torso with this one is going to be a little bit tricky because her arm is covering it I'm going to cut it out as normal and then we will use the wonderful Adobe to fill in the spot of her arm that it or the spot of her torso that is kind of missing and with the Torso selected I'm going to hit L to bring up the lasso tool but before that I'm actually going to hit command J to duplicate the layer I will first turn this into a smart object and then I will ruze the layer and I'm going to hit L to bring up the lassle tool and I'm going to select roughly where I think her Tang top would go and Mark around kind of roughly stay pretty close and with that selected we will right click and go to content aware fill and then I will remove some of this as the reference cuz we don't want it to be skin colored just like that that fills it up pretty good and that's about as good as we need it to be we don't even need to mess around with any of it really you can even select some of this too if you want it just and there might be a little bit better result with some of that lighting and we're going to hit okay and then we can hit command D to deselect then we can delete that layer and then with our new cover up and our actual torso layer we can go to right click and convert the smart object and rename this to torso and that'll just give us a nice little torso layer we don't need to worry about these little armpits here cuz it's not going to matter too much in the animation that we are going to be doing but now that we have all our layers cut out we can turn each of them into a smart object that's just going to make it a little bit easier with the bounding box so if I hit command t on this one you can see the bounding box is just in that area instead of if I hit one of these it's going to be the whole image we are going to convert all of these to Smart objects by right clicking on each one and then convert to Smart object now we can duplicate all the things that we want an extra set of first we are going to move the Torso down right above the hip so that our arm shows so with the arms we are going to select all of them and then duplicate it by hitting command J and then we will go in and rename this to two so two is behind one is in front and we of course want to position these layers to be behind the the Torso since they are going to be on the back side just like that and then the same with the thighs we're going to command J that and then rename all these two two and we want to place the thigh in front of the hip so that the forward leg which is going to be our white leg in this case or the not filled in is going to be in front of the hip and then the back leg is going to be behind the hip so that way we kind of get a more natural looking person in in the sense that we have the depth of the person now that we have all our layers we can finally start laying out our actual animation and we are going to be using this run reference which will also be linked in the description and then it's just a matter of laying out all of this I'll start by grouping our whole person I'll name this run one to match with this right here so we're just going to number them according to each of the different Cycles so in this first case let's pick our character and we can take this whole thing and move it over this way unselect all of it except for let's start with with the head and then we'll move that down and then we will do the Torso and always hit command T to make it a little bit easy on you rotate it just a little bit and kind of position it to where it somewhat matches up with the drawing and then if we do the hip show that hit command T and we have that just maybe a little bit like that and move it ever so slightly and then we can start with our first arm so we have the upper arm going back that way so we'll take the up arm we'll rotate it back like that and we can always move the head below the first arm so that her ponytail is covered by the arm kind of like it's behind I guess and then take the forearm hit command T and position that over this way and last but not least the hand and rotate it move it to fit over here maybe zoom in just a little bit so we can get the position real good just like that and then we will have arm too we can select all that so upper arm will go somewhere like that and then let's take the hand and move that Up and Away over this way and the forearm let's drag that out and rotate it like that bada bom bada boom and then maybe take the hand and move that forward a little bit I think it's important to note that your person will not perfectly fit in these it's just about getting the rough positioning of where everything is supposed to be so let's take thigh number one and and rotated it forward so it kind of matches up here and then the lower leg will do the same thing bada bom bada boom and one thing I do want to emphasize is once we have connected all the parts somewhat closely I I want to make sure that we do hit the ground in the same spot so where this shows to hit the ground I want to emulate that so let's move that up like that that's just going to ensure that we keep correct ground contact the whole time because otherwise our animation is going to look like it's it's bobbing which is just going to look super weird at least in a way that we don't want it to especially if we want to keep it grounded and kind of realistic and I will take the foot and move it above the lower leg so that we have it showing above kind of like the foot is in the sock and now we can move on to the back side and let's start with the legs we'll take the thigh this time we'll be following in and lining up according to the filled in spots in the back and we'll take that rotate that and again foot above the lower lick to make it look like she's actually wearing the shoe so there we go now we have person number one and as you can see it lines up pretty good the next step is to duplicate this and we will name this run two hit command T to enter the transform and move it over to the next and then we will hide run one and again open up the folder unview everything and then start with whatever you want to start with and start lining it lining it up based on it and now we will take it and move it up just a little bit make sure that our foot is contacting with the ground and we want to make sure the same with the first one that we kind of contact it with the ground in the same kind of area like we talked about and then we're just going to repeat the process double click the name to name this run three and move her over into the next stance now that we have all seven other Run cycles laid out according to our little running guide we can select all the layers over here all the groups and then we will Center them right in the middle we won't Center them horizontally just because then we won't get that ground contact that we want now we can hide the Run Cycle cuz we don't need it and then you want to save the project wherever you can find it and then it's finally time to hop into off theix where I already have a 1920 x 1080 composition set up at 24 frames per second I am going to drag in the Photoshop file right into the composition and then merge layer Styles into footage import kind composition hit okay and that'll just bring everything into Photoshop and then we can drag in all of these so the little files that it brings in we'll drag that into assets and then we can open this up open that up and just copy all of these Run cycles that we made and paste them into our main composition and delete everything else cuz we don't need it this next step is super easy we can either do this manually by just using going C forward a couple frames and then moving them or we can use motion tools which is a free plugin to stagger them however we want so if I hit command a that's going select all our layers and then let's do offset by three and then we can see our first one is at the very top so we want to make sure that our staircase is going from the top to the bottom and then we will hit sequence and just like that we have a little Run Cycle as you can see they overlap and don't just continue perpetually we want to cut each layer as it ends so let's hit shift command D and we will just do that for each of these layers you can also do this before staggering the layers of course and cut that right there and then if I go one frame back and then hit end that'll just Mark the end of the composition and if I play this back you can see we now have a running cycle so far so good pretty simple we can take all of these if we select them all and then shift command C to pre-compose them and we will name this running cycle pre and hit okay we will drag this back out to be our full composition length which is 5 Seconds now we can duplicate this a couple of times for the sake and we will just line them up pretty good so we can kind of see what we are working with right here hit end to Mark the end of the composition and now if you play this back you can see super nice little running cycle animation now we can start working on the background and giving it a little bit of context for that I have already found some files again you can find that in the link below you can get the story box link to all of these and we are simply going to take all these empty roads and drag them in and let's place them behind and then scale them down in this case we want to make sure that the road lines up so if I take this move it over this way and then go to the one beneath it and I just want to make sure that they line up as best as we possibly can and increase the scale of that one a little bit and line it up right there and then take these two move them over to the side a little bit and then make sure this one also slides up very nicely with that that looks pretty sweet and then we can take the L layer and move it to be right where these two meet and then take all three of these move them out this way and then take the first layer and have it connect right where this one links up so now if we precompose all of these background layers and we'll just name this background pre and then hit the continuously ruze or in this case it'll just show the whole composition with p and let's align it all the way to the left so it starts right here set a key frame and go to the end of our composition and then we can just use the opposite one which is align it to the right we now have a back background that Scrolls through and we don't need to animate the person because our background is animated so it just makes it a little bit easier cuz it can be a bit funky sometimes matching up the leg movement to the position animation so it's a little bit easier doing it this way we can take the lady we can move her down to actually be on the road so it looks like she's actually running on the road you know we have a couple of hard stops which doesn't look too pretty so we can use something like a foreground element like a light pole for example which might be relevant for this specific scenario so we'll go back into Photoshop open up our little layer and just drag that up up here into the little tab area and it should open a composition with the photo and that just makees sure that the photo is the actual size of the alt board is the size of the photo and then we are just going to use our quick selection tool to kind of Select this light pole as best as we can and zoom in a little bit go up and get this whatever this little thing is up here and once that is done we will hit the layer mask tool which down here that will give us a nice beautiful cutout pole and then we will save it somewhere where we can easily find it so going back into off effect I'm going to open up my final View and then drag in our Photoshop file with the hit okay and then go into it and copy that cuz we don't we only want that one layer paste it in there and then delete the precom and again you can take all of these and drag it into the assets folder cuz we don't really need it and we can take this and let's scale it up a good bit like that actually we will copy it and we will put it in our precuts folder where we have all of these so we'll just paste it in right there boom duplicate it and add another one right here where it links up so if we go back into this now we should have another Pole right here which just kind of transitions in between these points and makes it a little bit easier and if we take the two preut folder let's drag it into there so we have you know some nice organization and duplicate The Background precom by hting command D and open that up and hit command K and we'll name this foreground delete the backgrounds from it and then go into the background and delete the two polar layers and then we will take the foreground and place it above everything else so that way we actually have some nice foreground on there then we will go to the very beginning and select the position parameter for our background copy that and paste it onto the foreground since they are the exact same it should link up perfectly and we of course want to make sure that we enable continuously Ruiz so that we get that outside just the 1920 x 1080 composition so playing that back we have a nice simple little animation going through some scenery that doesn't look too unnatural because we have that foreground now the last things there really is to do is add a little bit of spice a little bit of sauce to it let's start with the foreground we are going to add a litc color to it just to give it just a little bit more uh just basically just decreasing the exposure of it a little bit just so we can barely see what it is and we will also add a litri color to the background in this case I want to take the highlights just decrease them just a little bit and and the Shadows increase them just a tiny bit just to give it a little bit more of a cinematic look and then I want to use a plug-in called Sapphire and we will add BCC half tones which is a super nice half tone plugin you can't get much better than this we will set the color scheme into RGB and already there you can see we get some super nice texture maybe increase it just a little bit take the brightness down smidge and the same with the contrast copy that to our running cycle and in this case we'll just open it up and then we will add it to an adjustment layer and paste it onto that decrease the scale of it a little bit maybe up the brightness a little bit and up the contrast then if we go back we already have it added onto that and we will also add it to our foreground which will just give us some nice texture in there as well and maybe even add a bit of a drop shadow to this layer as well set it to 180 and distance to zero and then spread it out just a little bit and decrease the opacity just ever so slightly and place it above the half turns we can also go ahead and add a little bit of Shadow to this lady so if we duplicate this layer and then hit s to bring up the scale and unlink it we can scale it down a little bit so it kind of looks like it's almost in a 3D perspective almost and we want to make sure that we drag it below the actual lady herself and we'll add a fill to this and we will set the fill to a nice black color and then a force box bler to add just a little bit of Feathering to it and decrease the opacity a little bit then we will duplicate this and move it along so that it's all our composition you can always change the blend mode as well if you want hard mix looks pretty good for this actually and it just gives us a little bit more of a natural looking Shadow next let's add an adjustment layer and we will hold shift command y to open up the solid settings and we'll rename this to a shake cuz it will be a slight camera shap shake and then we will add a transform effect and set the scale to 101 alt click the position and then add a posterz time let's do 12 and then wiggle 1 comma 10 which will just give us a slight little bit of sway in the animation just a little bit of camera movement next we will add the classic posterized time so rename this and we'll name this posterize time and add that effect as well and set that to 12 that's just going to bring it to life a little bit more just give us a little bit more of that stylized feeling there you can even go slower if you want to I also want to add motion blur to the background and the foreground as well which is just going to bring it to life just a little bit more give it gives it a little bit more movement and then really sells the effect that we're going for and then in our background layer I'll add a brightness and contrast effect and I'll hide the BCC half time for now I'll alt click the brightness and then let's add a posture time let's do something like 12 and then add a wiggle maybe something like like 10 comma 20 to give us just a little bit of flicker in the light see what that looks like that might even be a little bit too hectic maybe increase the Wiggles to 30 and then set this to something like five so it's more of a a subtle flicker but a little bit more frequent I think that looks pretty good we can turn BCC half turn back on and that'll just give us a slight bit more of you know just that stylized look if I go into my running cycle I would like to hide this adjustment layer let's pre-m all of these and name this running cycle pre running cycle two pre then I'm going to duplicate this and I'll add an expression or an effect called extract and I want to take out all of the high all the shadows and just leave the highlights something like that looks pretty good and this is where the lighting part really comes into effect because we have this nice interesting rim lighting kind of almost a silhouette we can get some really cool looks with this then I'll add a deep glow to this which just give us a little bit more flare almost kind of in a sense I just think that looks super sweet and that just gives it just a little extra pop maybe add a limitary color to this and decrease the exposure of it just a little bit so that more of the focus is on the character and then we'll add another adjustment layer and we'll rename this as well we'll name this vignette and funny enough we will add the vignette effect and add that below the posterized time and that again just brings it in towards the character itself which is exactly what we want to do and that's pretty much all the rest to this tutorial super important to take care of the assets and make sure you find some really good ones so shout out to story blocks cuz they definitely have a lot of good stuff as you saw that's what we use in this video don't worry about it being too perfect especially when you go for stylized look like this have fun with it make it look pretty crazy and go for some nice lighting cuz especially with that glow effect Ed it it just looks super cool super stylized and the H tones as well you know who doesn't like the look of that you get what I'm saying hopefully you enjoyed watching this video maybe you feel inspired to go and make your own references or use references more in character animations and uh yeah that's pretty much all I just want to say thank you for watching along and uh I'll see you again next week peace out

Channel: Mapal

Views: 19,097

Keywords: Mapal, Berenson, Videos, Stream Packages, Overlays, Edits, Editing, Pictures, Video, Picture, Vibe, Vibes, Denmark, Danmark, English, Vlogs, BRNSN, photography, tutorial, sony, a7iii, tamron, tips, tricks, helpful, after, effects, animation, after effects, cinematography, story, story telling, studios, mapal studios, modern, grading, davinci

Id: A2swfdRKuBA

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024