Advanced Character animation in explainer videos - After effects

1. Character animation course preview Trailer: Hey, what's up? Motion artists? So you want to animate characters and not just the basics, but have them run, express their emotions, walk and look different. Maybe you want to add characters to explain their project or start animating your own show. Maybe even create social media content. Well, you are in the right place. I am only customer senior motion artists. I started animating characters in After Effects a couple of years ago and tried and learn multiple great plugins and script and styles on how to animate characters. However, I created my own style and technique that helped me achieve some interesting results quickly that does not require any external plugins. I wanted to share it with you. You will learn the basics of this technique and how to regulate it. And then you'll apply the character animation on multiple projects that aren't going to be sharing with you. You'll learn how to make them work, do some action, and run, and mix them together. If this does sound interesting to you, then jump in and let's get started. 2. Ep 01 : Intro & getting started: Hello motion artists, this is Ali, and today I welcome you to this course about characters and how you can bring them to life using After Effects without any external plug-ins. First of all, thank you for taking the time to watch this course and to consider learning this rather difficult but yet much needed skill. Hopefully by the end of this course, you will find the great understanding of how you can achieve the animations and movements needed to make the next great explainer video or any piece of art, personal work you want to make. So starting off, I would love for you to get some points correctly. So you can have the motivation to go through this course and finish it knowing that you could definitely add more value to your skill set. Well, let's start off with why you should even learn this skill anyway. So just take any of the recent animation that have been featured on any art showcase platform, 2D or 3D, you will see characters being a huge part of it, if not, the main focus point of any of these explainer videos. Let's for the value that a good character animation will add to the project. So you are looking for a needed scale though it not only lend you a job if you're looking for a job, but also willing to create content that will go viral. Character animation is great skill and tool for that. Now, there are plenty of types of animations of our character animations that you can learn in After Effects alone, you'll probably find more than five popular styles too for these are the most used and they are rubber hose and Duke. Or at least most of the plugins that you can add to have to refer to work. And they're one of two methods that are used within those two plugins like a rubber hose, as I said and Duke. The first is paid rubber hose and the second is free. And both of them are great tools to learn and which one to use depends on what are you worried? What are you looking to make or what are you making? E.g. if you are working on with complicated characters, with complicated art styles, you might need to learn Duke, since it has more advanced rigging systems. However, for a quick rig that doesn't require that much time, not require any power or from your PC. You can not go around with a rubber hose. However, they both have some limitations unless you really spend a lot of time Reagan and refining the rig. And that much time can only be reasonable if you are going to use or create a series using the rig character and not just one scene of an explainer. Therefore, I'm going to teach you in this course how you can achieve a quick effective rate using only after effects and some logic. This week will allow you to have almost any type of movement that you are looking for. You just have to experiment and get used to the techniques that I'm going to teach you. It is good for both one explainer and also if you are aiming to create multiple episodes, are multiple explainers using the same character, since Reagan is fairly quickly and it will save you and shave some time from future animations working with the same rank as I said, the examples that you have been looking at, what all made by this style that evolve around path points follow null and that's available in After Effects. I hope you have a great fun time in this course, and I'll see you in the next episode. Have a good one. 3. Ep 02 : The Basics: Hey, what's up motion artists, this is Ali, and today we are in the basics of Reagan with this style. Welcome to the second episode. Hopefully, you will get an idea of how to make this rig. We have, as you can see, a sample scene, hand, arm, and hand, leg and foot. I will show you how you can manage this rig and how you can make it. And then it will give you some example of projects that I made. Hopefully if it's absorbed, you'll get the entire basic that you need to get started with this technique of automation. From there, the next episode we'll talk about how to animate actions, will animate a character. And then the episode after that will go towards animating a walk cycle or maybe run cycle. Then the last episode we'll be going through combining all of the episodes. So first of all, if you have any idea or you do have any experience on the mating in motion graphics enough to repent, then probably just this episode will be enough for you to get started with this technique. However, it's better to go through the entire course to see all the process. Maybe pick up some tips and tricks on how you can actually animate and have a proper motion. So to begin with, as you can see, I have a very simple setup. One composition with all shapes layer. Here. It's just a stroke, stroke layer. Simple, as simple as it gets. Just two dots of stroke. That's all there is to it. Without the fill, of course, we'll only the only the pill completely so you click on fill, remove it for now. Of course. As I said, that's as simple as it gets. I have a hand which is just circled. The other side we have a lag. The same shape just rotated. And that is also just the shape. And then we have under that law, you can say it's just a rectangle. So what do we need to get started? We need to go to window, then select create nulls from paths. It will show up like this. Create nulls from paths tends to options. The first is points follow normal, which means if we open the arm and go to the path, this path has three points. If we click on Points Follow null, it will give us three objects, each related to a point, which means if we move the null will move the point. This gives you the opposite small objects that move with the bath. Obviously, we need the first one, the points fall on molecules. That's what we're going to use to create the Ric. So before we get started, I'm just going to explain the setup that I have here because they said it's very simple. It's the going into the minimal setup and just add in motion tools for the quick, easy, ease. I'm not going to use it today probably. And also just to relocate the anchor point and the create mole and then align. Alright, so nothing fancy. So let's actually start from the beginning. So we can follow through. Instead of having those legs, we can just create it right now, make the stroke. Then. Let's do 123. Okay, that's 50 would be go to the lung. So if you click on the Shape now, just relocate that arms however you want them to look. Obviously, according to your style, the style that you are going with. You can obviously open up this shape and play with the type of stroke. However you want it to be. You can do whatever you want. You can even do the tape. We're going to do all of that in a moment. So let's now start off with adding also the hand. Just quickly add the hand. Small hands. I'm going to use this to move the anchor point in the middle, but you can click Y and drag it like that or like that, like control to have it in the middle. I will also drop the stroke by clicking on the shape tool, chocolate syrup to zero and have some sort of scale light color. And basically just move this shape there just to indicate that it's a hand or arm and the hand. Let's start off with this. Rick will go into the path, clicking on the path and points follow null. Now it will give us three nodes. Each node is controlling one point of this path. Great. We're going to rename them. Hello. And shoulder. Okay. Now the next step will be to link logically how the arm is linked IRL in real life. So we have the hand, this one is the hand, so this one link it to the head. Lincoln, the hand to the elbow and then the elbow to the shoulder. Then obviously there's funneling the name. It will only doing it because it's already linked. If we have the body e.g. in this case, let's say we're going to add another circle like that. This is the body. Alright? We're going to link the shoulder to it. We're going to keep it there as an example. Alright. So let's see now what will happen if we move the shoulder. As you see, everything moves. If you move the elbow, everything moves. If we move the hand also everything moves the hand and the hand. But it's still linked to the album. That's great. However, that is like you can say, Okay, we can animate it this way. But then there is one main problem with this. The problem is if you start, if you start animating with position, it will look ugly and it will look, it will look too cartoony sort of, and it will not hold the same shape. So the trick is to use only rotation. Like our hand actually function, it only rotates. So we're going to use on your rotation, e.g. if I'm going to animate this and from this position to arrest in position, I'm just going to add a keyframe. Let's say maybe ten frames. And then rotate this. The rotate this as well. Hit F9 and basically separate this a couple of frames like that. Then I'm going to end it here. Let's see. You see, that's an example. Now you might say, Okay, That's very simple, but that's the point. It's very simple, but it's linked to a stroke. So what do we can do now with this stroke is basically had an effect we want, Let's say e.g. we want to add around on those. We can decide how round we want the hand to look. We can also remove this, duplicate this, and go through and add a trim path. Let's say go into the earliest shape. We have changed the color into the same hand color. And then go to the one that we just added with a stroke by with a trim path and push it back like that. We can add the stroke of it like this a little bit. And then we have sort of a hand with the shirts. If we are rotating, it will follow the same movement. And obviously you can do everything you can do to a shape stroke. E.g. we can work with the tape here. Let's say we work on the table on the other side. Sorry, likeness. And then just give it some like that. I don't know. This is just an example obviously. But as you can tell, it still will be even better if we make the body the same color as the AG body, the same color as me. So obviously, now this may not be impressive, but what is actually impressive because that's exactly what you can achieve with other, other with other like rigging tools. However, this one may take a little bit more work since with e.g. rubber hose, you're animating the hand with this one. You're not animating the hand on limiting the arm. With this. You can actually, if we have this, let's just do something different. Let me show you how you can probably manage to create something complicated yet still useful. We're going to delete the entire rig that we had before. Let's move the hand here or the arm, sorry, the hand here. Good. Now, let's open up the first part, which is the hand or the other path with the color of the skin. And then open the path, the other one, we both, when they're moved by clicking Alt, remove the thing, remove the expression. I'm going to link the first part, the second, or the newer path to the second. Now, any movement that will happen to the second part will be followed by the first one. Okay? So that's why we link them. And now we can just basically take one path and then duplicate this path, this path, however we want this, we'll just follow the first button so we don't have to ring every path or have multiple paths regularly to nulls. So let's start up also with, okay. So what I'm going to do is actually add the neck, then have an entire setup be like that. Like we have shoulders and not just 1 h. You will see what I'm, what I'm doing. So let's go ahead into this bulb and then go to trim path. And we're just going to rotate this to be homeless, maybe give it just a little bit more of a path or a shape or a stroke. And then. We can even do this same taper in each site. So 2,672.46 and we have the same shirt texture. We can even add some stroke to it like this. So I'm going to the body quickly. I'm going to open this content ellipse. We're going to click, right-click and then converted by the eight. But just so we can show you how, what the neck is there, that's way too much of the neck pairs, so definitely drop it down like this right? Now, what's so impressive about this is that you can actually animate the shoulders. Shoulders give expressions. Let me show you how you can have the prereqs. And from there we're going to animate a small piece just to show the benefit of adding this are useless. So let's try to figure out how long it will take us to make this rig. We have hands and then you open a barrel, we open up. Obviously, we're going to add this second path to the point. Now, it seems like we have too much Knowles. We don't we actually have that. Let's name this one e.g. left. And we can just put L for left elbow and L4 older, older. Older. And then we have neck obviously when we will start right there. And the left sorry, right elbow and finally right hand. So we're going to link like we did before. We're going to link can do and maybe even name it. So we're going to make a mistake. So this is the right. Obviously, if you're looking at the character is like in reality, it would be flipped. So that's not the right, that's the left, but we're typing it from our perspective. So left hand. Alright, we're gonna link left hand to the left hand. And then we're going to link the left, the right hand to the actual right hand as well. Then we move from this and link upward to the shoulder. From this link downward, sorry, the opposite. And elbow, shoulder and elbow, shoulder. Then we'll have all shoulder and neck. We're going to link these to the bottom. Alright. So now we have the option to animate this character only meeting only the rotation off. Set offset. Null, as I said. So let's say we want to animate this like this, and it's doing that. Let's give it a quick try to see how it will work. So if we are going to add our clinic are to bring out the reason we can go e.g. here and then just plus, Shift plus and then maybe go to the elbow. Like this one. Also, this one a little bit. Then two goes back into this, into this. Or maybe you can do like one more. Then finally, let me just do this so we can see more of the timeline here as well. Then finally, we will have the first frame. Just go back to resting pulse e.g. have F9. And just as a simple animation, scroll it like this. And let's shift the elbow to be rotated slightly delayed than the hand. And look at that. Now that's great. But what you can actually do further than that, we would choose animations and shoulder. So if we hit position it, do you need to be careful that you're meeting the shoulder is you don't want it too distorted, too much because it will ruin the shape of this shirt. So just keep it small motion like what will happen with normal shoulder? Let's see this. Well, that doesn't look so good. So it's because of the emission should happen here and the like. And then from here, down, from here. Then from here, as I said, go down. So let's see, quickly. As you can tell, this is basically how it will work. And obviously if we move the body, everything will move with the body. Now this is as basic as it could get. But as you can see, you can even let say e.g. let's go here. We can even do. The pose to pose. Let's just stop this, but key Premiere and do hold frame, hold frame. We're going also to be able to this. We're going to work with the shoulder position and rotation and then only rotation of the elbow right here, also the title. Then only the position for the neck, of course, if we need it. But let's say you wanted e.g. to achieve this this kind of movement where the character is lifting their shoulders as if like they don't know the answer to something. I have to drop the body. This thing on the boundary like this. So it's sort of like this character is doing it and go from there too. We're going to have this doubled as well. Double hold, okay, Just to give you the example of like, alright, so we're doing this through the shoulder and let's say the rotation as well of these go like that. This one as well. So from here into, that's why I'm using emotion terms as well as I can just click loan, which is basically copying and pasting keyframes. So this is just as opposed to pose. And then from there, let's say we're going to hit F9, maybe even give it much is the ease. And you will have like obviously, as I said, always separated by a couple of frames, the elbow from the shoulder. So it looks more interesting and we will have this, well, that's way too past. Let's do this. You see is like this character having more expression or not even a character is just a line. I've been more expression and it's taken literally no process. And it's fairly, let's say fairly quickly to animate. It's not as smart as easy to animate as animating like with the rig or rubber hose tricks, certainly a browser. But it's still very, fairly easily and quick. Especially, especially if you have a complicated movement and you want to do it quickly. And not basic movement. Obviously, you have the full control of even the rotating the hand that to the other side. You have minimum. This will not look weird. So yeah, this is the basic of how this works. And obviously you can apply this to the leg without having to link the leg. You can even link the leg if you wanted to do something to the body. Now, this is, this is the main concept of this accumulation of this animation technique. Sorry. However, I'm going to basically go through one of my projects to oral couple of my projects to show you how I use this technique to rig a full character and animated. Therefore, you can understand and see how powerful it is in animating characters. Alright, let's get started with this first project right here. So as you can tell, looking at this, it looks like it's very complicated to read, but it's not red. I'm using here rubber hose but for the neck, but you can definitely use the same technique we used is just that. I had it already so I kept it. So let's start off. As you can tell, there is a rotation of the body. So this guy is walking and then rotate and then licked his shoulder. That's just some details that you will definitely have some trouble making with the other. So how is this done? Now we have the obvious first art which is just the name them. I didn't even name them. Sorry about that. But as you can tell, that is obvious part that we just talked about in the first part of this video, which is a Reagan, the shoulders with the hand and everything. Then we have the arm, one arm. The arm. If we just have to show the arrow, this is how we test two shapes around corners. Rounded corners, not activate it, but obviously depends on the look you're going for. I always like to keep it and see how it looks in the final scene. So we have just one white path and then just the skin color there that we added this one. But it's also not linked to the, it's linked to the hand. Let me show you the body so you can understand what's that is. So that's the stomach, then that's the body than that is the past. And the legs. Alright? So this is just a shadow linked to the hand. It will appear whenever there is a hand under or over the body. So let's not focus on that for now. Let's focus just on the hat. The movement that are used in this hand obviously is just as before, position rotation. And that rotational neck has some position. Along. The neck has some position because the character is moving. Alright? Okay. So it has no rotation. Animation is just the keyframe that as you can tell, it, did not add any animation. I did not add any limitation. And if we go into the hand, this hand is just lead to the hand as well. Now, there is some movement. And that movement can be done in a precomposition like I'm doing here, which I don't know. You can add the other knee movement here as you can tell. Yeah. So that is this kind of movement is happening right here where he is kind of like just terrain of the problem that he had and he opens his hand. This is done inside on pre-comp, so you can work comfortably on that animation. This is just a path animation, but then this part is linked to the hand null, which will make it animate and move like the other hand. Then from there, I will show you how did they achieve. That is some lines that I added is just for style. And then that is the neck. As I said, the neck is Is a rubber hose. So just look at this part, e.g. look at the neck. All of this just to link one. We take it as an example along all of this. Just to link two points with a path, you could have easily done there. I could have, sorry. I could have easily done that using the same technique here. Just do this, open up the stroke, trim path, sorry, taper and then just taper off the bottom of it and then taper the top and then give it like this. Also like this here. We rotate this and we rotate this. Now obviously we can do we can do like more depending on how you want the neck to look. And same thing goes for this. And they can just reduce, sorry, can just reduce also the stroke a bit. So it looks like this. And just like click on Path and create null. And now we have it. We just have this two in the neck. Which is sort of what's happening right here, except that we have like this to control their natural one. So we have this two contracts, alright? Now obviously you can spend more time to fix this and make it look exactly like this. That's not a big deal. But let's continue with the explanation. We have the arm, we have the neck. The neck is a rubber hose. But as I said, we can use the same technique and then we have the base, which is a pre-composition. Let's just the same technique as the hand. I like to animate the face alone and then just basically placed it in pre-comp and then link it to the neck and then we have it following the neck like this. Above that we have this is the shirts of this guy and the shirt. Alright, so to solve that issue, I added this. Let's remove the effect of this shape, which is a circle. And just like a white rectangle or white or white shape. And then they added Set Matte. We do not need to add Set Matte. Now in After Effects 2023, since we can just link any of the alpha matte. And that's a way much better. So let's try it and see how it looks. If we remove the Alabama freedom of the set mud, link, this layer to the arm. Obviously we have to show the arm. Yeah, that's how it looks. It works much better now with the new version of ability to predict. So that's basically all there is to it. All there is to this animation. Obviously that is the legs. And it is the same principle. I used, exactly the same principle and here's the animation of the leg. We hit U. So we have position and rotation. So let's jump in. Let me show you. Alright. So you have one of the legs Passing the other one and then rotating backbone worry if you are not exactly understanding this, this is just giving you the possibilities for what we can do. And then next episode we'll do this. I'm scratch and we'll animate the full character. But it's good to see what is, what are you capable of making with this? I think it's entire animation to around 3 h to animate or something similar to that or like that. Definitely didn't take more than a day of work to make the whole thing. And I think it's, as you can tell, it looks very interesting. It has some interesting movement that is like the stomach are added here and the rotation of the body. And all of this is only used in this effect or this technique. I think in the same project that you have here is how it is. And the projects I was walking. Then talking about how his sink is broken or wherever. Okay, we have another character which is the the plumber. So here's the plumber and here's the scene of the block. Now, as you can tell, again, with the shoulders, It's way more interesting to see the shoulder being animated. And taking the parts of this animation is like a lot of people, at least a lot of people gave me good feedback about this, about the shoulder. So it was like There's definitely, there is something interesting but add in Charlotte on emission two characters. Because usually with motion graphics, the recent modern loving soup just see like animation of the shoulders not really being animated. So it's just static and they make it look like a weird, weird stick figure or something. So again, the same thing. Let me explain to you how did they add the buddies? So we have pants, I mean, with the line. But if we add the leg, this leg, live body and the body is just solid with a mask. That is the mask. I'm just going to activate this so you can see it. And then they added the belt and the things. Hold on. Let me go to the arms. So as you can tell, this same technique, the arms are only this time orange. All the controls that are available. And then we have the hand and the hand. And then we start adding details. The neck, almost the same break. Now, in terms of the t-shirts, I use also the same technique that I used before. I think I only animated it, No, I did not even animate it. It's just linked to the body. So it will move with the body. When the body goes up, it will go up. So the shoulder is linked to the Alpha martyr of it is with the shoulder. So whenever the shoulder raise up, it will also show goes more of this shape. And finally, we have just two dots linked to the shirt. This. So it will look like this one. It's moving. And that's just great, right? It's very simple yet very effective. The same technique, I'm going to even show you some more complicated movement than these, so we can understand how, how awesome it can be. So let me show you this one that can I just change color so it appears better to something even darker right? Now look how this character has a walk cycle included in oxygen. Again, I'm using the animation a lot, but as an example of what you can do, including action on the shoulder and the hand while doing the walk cycle. That's done by that. Now if you're seeing this guy is we're in like this artery close because I work with a lot of motion graphic projects. So we need to animate this job or this type of traditional clothing. It's usually difficult to animate. But with this technique, all I had to do was basically enabled the frequent two legs. Basically content and this path then they will the fill. I only needed to enable the fill. And now I have this bar, this particular post, and I don't have to animate anything else because it's already linked to the nodes. So again, this is a character walk in and in the same time we have the hand move in and everything. And it's all within, done within. The same technique. Here is the the, the body is moving. So our usually animate this stuff over the body like this. So just show what are the budget should be and then add the arms. So we know e.g. in this case, since that is in front and I'm in the back, I only made a mask, I duplicated the same layer, had a mosque and basically made one arm up front and one arm in the back. So with this arm can go under the body. On this arm can go on top of the body, means will look like this. Again, will explain how did we make this in detail and make an animation in the next two courses? Again, the leg, the neck. And if we add the face, the face is just a picture. I did not animate this for project I only want to read it doesn't exercise some tools for the neck using the same technique before us before. And you get this animation. What did we animate if we go here, shoulder or the median again, position rotation only simple keyframe, couple of keyframes, and we got this animation. So here's another Arab character again because they are quite difficult to animate. So I wanted to include this example. This is sort of a guy trying to swim or underwater going up. And we're using, as you can tell from these null objects, just the same technique and the same motion. Legs. And then arm. This case as well. I did the arm two parts, front and back. I do think different style this way. I didn't make a mask, but I just made a trim path. And then you have the body, then we have the parts. Let's get to the front arm and the neck. And you have this ready to be animated. Here is another character is female character them in the same exact movement. And we made this as well using the same technique. We're going through layer by layer to show you how did I make this. So we have the backtrack it and then the onClick. This, and then this one would be linked to the Lego brick. Then the leg. So it is the entire leg. But we were using trim path here. So because one of the legs will go in there and we want to change the color of that leg and add this, which is, as you can see here, an alpha matte or SAT math. So basically when the leg is crossing, it will have this shadow effect. Alright. Let me have the second leg again that is explaining to the leg the leg is crossing will have this shadow effect. We're adding the same thing on the lower leg or foot. Let's see the body. Then we have the hand in hand arms. If we see that arm is the same technique, obviously. We needed to make sure that the body will FPU. So we added a jacket. The shadows are reversed. And we didn't need that actually because we had a scarf or a job. So the face and everything is ready to be animated. Forget about the best, the other side. So with that, you have this complicated character animated with a very simple moles for that. Here we're just using a rotation, some position, in some cases we're really needed this can tell left shoulder, right shoulder because we want that arm to go way up and then down. So I'm in the shoulders to go up and then kind of pushed down. But for the legs were only rotation those legs. And then any additional animation is just added as a rotation with some time delayed. So it looks more interested in and we get this result. Again. I hope that this will get you excited to watch the next episode and actually learn how to make a full animation. What are we going to be working on is basically is this next animation here. So we're going to be working on this character animation. This is a very lovely illustration made by the following artists and Instagram. And I really loved it. They wanted to include how I would animate this. And yes, I did use only that technique. Any additional animation obviously is just added after that. So how did they make the legs? Let me show you how interesting the leg are on this. Reagan. Then hopefully from the next episode we'll start animating this guy. If we highlight the leg, lets me make black round so we can see them. If we open up this. So we have three paths, are three shapes. I'm going to move them. We have the first one is an upside down taper, the second one is a regular taper. Then they meet in the middle to make this kind of look of the specific art style that was done. So obviously the only tricky part here is that we need to make this character using or any character using the stroke. But then again, we'll have a lot more flexibility. Flexibility. And this final one is just some shadow effect to be added on top of the first one. As I said, this is what you will be learning. I hope you guys are excited. I hope you get at least from this episode some ideas, some of the, this concept and how it works. And I will definitely get you guys on the next episode. They have a good one. And thank you for watching. 4. Ep 03 : Action Scene: Hey, what's up motion artist and welcome to the third episode of the character animation course. Buckle up. This will be a long episode. Hopefully I tried to make it and they will try to make it as short as possible. But I'm going, I'm gonna go through and make this animation completely tried to explain the animation completely from start to finish. I gave you this project is to download. Once you don't know this project, you will have one which has the main scene. I'll explain it later on. So we do the animation. This Gmail character is the main character, and then we have a German character reference is also the main character but animated. So you can basically, this is what we're going to create today. This scene right here. And you will be able to see this movement and pick up all the keys that you need in case you, in case you have any issue or problem with animation. And while you're doing this as an exercise, since we will make this animation. But also, I want you to try to do it without looking at the course later on, later on. And this reference will help you. So to begin with, I'm going to explain the character and what am I doing here. So the first part is the legs. The legs are exactly what would you expect except for the last part because there is only the knee and the hips. So like we explained in the last episode, then the bands for pants, I like to add this line and then link it to the lower body, since that is me, then hyp, null the lower body. And then hip and then knee, the left side, the lower body and both hips will be linked to the body. By the way, I might say any terminology wrong, sorry about that. My English is not perfect, but I'm trying my best here. So as I said, this here is the body. The body is simply a solid layer with a mask on it. And this must shaped like a body. Then I added the belly. This belly supposed to just give us a little bit of extra movement in his belly button on his stomach. We look fat like that, but it has that extra bones in his belly. Alright, then we have this layer and this is basically if we go to the arm, here is the arm and I'm going to show the body. I think I explained it in the last episode. But this is the shadow, but I keep linked to this, but only alpha matte to the body. So by the way, we can do it this way now, I'm probably going to upload the project with this effect. So link the helper method body. Now That's a new trick we can do. So if we go into the left elbow from plus minus, you see that whether that is the body, this shadow sort of thing will appear because it's basically just a Alpha Matte mask with the link to the null object of the elbow. Again, alpha matte to the body. But this entire shape or mask is linked to the elbow or the left elbow of this hand. So basically whatever the elbow will rotate and move, it will follow it, but only appear on the body. Next, the hand is linked to the hand at normal. From there we have some shapes that will give us these sorts of design elements, and they are also linked to every null object. From there we added the neck. This time the neck is also added through null object, the same using the same normal Follow. Points Follow null. So wherever the body will move, the neck will follow, but not just that, that is the pace. And the next shadow, and then this one is another. So whatever also the base will move. It will also be linked to the neck. The neck will be linked to the place. You see this. We can just basically do that. So it does not have to cut at some point. Once we move the base. Yeah, that's basically good. Alright. Then that is a shirt. A shirt is linked alpha matte to the body, so it will appear only on the body. So this will help us hide or create this next scene. However, the arms you need to keep in mind that the elbows, if we turn them up or way up, they will have to pass through the head. So we need to be clever about automating that. Alright. The line, the final line is just the shirt line is linked to the shoulder. So whenever we move the shoulder, left shoulder, that line will move in a little bit. That I added that to just show where the hand is moving. The arm is moving because otherwise it will just be white on white. So that's the entire setup. In terms of the adjustment layer. I'm just adding Posterize Time for 12 brain per second. So whenever we activate it, the animation will render only in brain per second. That will help us reduce the errors and drop the frame rate a little bit. So it looks, it also will look like traditional animated character, right? But that's not for now. We're going to begin this scene here to try to create this again, but create this only mentioned. So what are you not going to animate? Is the base, the hand. These two are already animated for you. So you just have to focus on the body. So as I said, let me give you a tip on how to do or how to work on projects that have this much shapes and they are look complicated to animate. You basically have to use the same techniques that have been used before in traditional animation. If you go and read any of the additional animation books or watch courses on traditional animation, you see that they use like circles first and then they will. The volume around the circle is like step-by-step, are the elements into that first animation that they have. Which is basically the same thing that we're going to do here, except we're going to use directly the elements that we have on the assets. In this case, the body e.g. will be animated first. And then, so basically we're going to animate this movement. Then we're going to add to it the animation of the legs like this. So there, because everything is linked, arms will also be moving alongside the body. They just need to be adjusted a little bit so they look more realistic. So then we're going to add the arms from there. We're just going to link other traits. So that's all we have to do. Alright? So let's get started with the body. Alright? As I said, we will only show the parts that we're going to work on. So to begin with, let's just select everything and remove this thought and show only the body. With a buddy. We need position, shift M, one of the mosque, but we need to animate all of these. Alright? So what do I have here? As you can tell that is the y, x and y position I've separated. This is what I usually do when I tried to animate the character moving from place to place. Since that gives me two options. One is to animate where they should be and then animate the ups and downs that need to happen as you step, as you take a step, usually you have like your body go little bit up and then down depending on whether your legs or depending on how spread your legs are. Therefore, you need to have them separated to be able to just move the character directly from side-to-side like you want to animate it. And then step in and add the steps that you need. Again, everything should happen step-by-step and not like, don't over-complicate things by trying to animate everything at once. So let's start off with the body. As I said, we're going to need the body to end up here. So what I'm going to do is just make it hold frame so we can work on it comfortably without having to basically readjust every time. Okay? So from there, we need the body, let's say B. So it's up there. Let's start moving the body to the left like this. It's going to be taking step, so it goes up a little bit. So let's say that's the first, that's the first place the body is going to be. However, we need the body to be somewhere right here. Alright. Again, let's do toggle. You don't have to do the toggling back. But it's good if you're trying to pose the character first to see if what you're doing is correct or not. This one will be the same. Height, weight. We do nothing with it to be, let's say we just need the height to be the same. Then the final one, the final output also managed to be the same height, we guess. What is going on with Q crimes, okay? So the Panama called also managed to be the same height on this case. Alright, since that, since we're not working on the height yet, it just seemed to be to me at first that the body was a little bit down. Alright. We can adjust that by just adding the base to see what are the places. Okay, So the base is way too high so we can lower this. Let say this looks good. Copy it. Control C, Control C, Control V. And we got the buddy. Alright, so let's hide the base again. Now we have this animation here. Do you think the timing is correct? I don't think so. I think that that means way up. So we should do about the time and basically the timing is how much time or how he has duration of the action. Basically, we're going to take this one, let's say 20 frame shipped down page on page again, that gives us that gives us 20 brain will place it right here. So let's see now, that's much more realistic, or at least that's much better to look at. I think the final one can be a little bit slower since we're not necessarily try. Okay, yeah, I think that's, that looks good. So good. Now we need to start on with the mask. The mask should be animated from this, not from the beginning, since the body would be already rotated. Okay. So to help us with a mask, we need to work on the legs as well. Alright, so let's start off with the object of the legs. We can now just click here for rotation and hit R. So what are we going to do now is try to place again the legs in a situation where they look or where they should be. The last scene. And in this case, we want the leg to be crossed because the guy is walking towards the middle of the screen. So therefore, we need to also animate the position of those two hips. So this will be in this position right here. However there it should not be, should it be more like this? And this one more like this. Okay? And also we can add the position of the lower body and move this up like PAP. So it covers like his stomach. And then we can just oh, sorry, we did one mistake which is instead of moving this here and then animating like this. Because we need the orange and the original, the original place of the each null obviously. Okay, so now let's see what we got. We are going to rotate a little bit and then the other hips as well. The laptop like that, since it's going to take a step, is going to take step like this. Okay? So if we go to the rotation, we have key here and here. So we're just going to click you to have all the key frames that we got. The knee doesn't have to be animated by the way, so we can just hide it in the model as well. So what is this? This is the rotation of the lower body. We don't need to animate the rotation for that. Now we're going to select all of these frames and also the halt, so they don't move in-between. Now, we go right here into this and switch. Basically, what are we switching? Or shorten this to be like that. The right hip to be in the back. So we're basically having him step like that. Okay. And then finally it goes back into the original position. Okay, you've got the idea. Alright. Now we might need to adjust the position of this one just a tiny bit so it looks like. Alright, let's see how it looks. This has to be on the same frame. Alright, now we can move back into adjusting the body. So I'm going to move this to this, and then there's like that and we will have that bodies, body form. But we need to make some adjustment to this side. So it looks like it is actually looking to this side and not just sits in that way. Don't forget that we have the belly. We're going to animate it as a weapon to make this toggle. So let's see, it's so far how it looks. Alright. As you can tell, when we're working on the position, we're working on the body like the buddy. Yes, The body positions that we have imposes and then we're going to animate them. Okay? So in this one like that, I'm going to toggle as well. Okay, so now we should be able to start actually animating line. You see, it looks, it's starting to look like the animation that we have. However, there is one more thing that needs to happen, of course, which is here. We need the up position. Why do we have the up position? The legs are crossing. So what happened is, as you can tell, what happened is the liquid go up, the body will go up and then down. Because you're stepping on this leg specifically. So if we just if we just do not have this key frame, it will look weird that the leg is rotating, but the body is not actually going up. But like this, it makes perfect sense and it looks realistic. And then here we will actually have something different happen, which is it goes down. And that because he's going to pose for that situation. Well, maybe not that much down, or even we can have this step and then the width. Let's, let's try this one. So on this one we're going to have him like that up. Let's see what is the exact position like this that pop. And then here, step down a little bit and goes back to his position. So let's see, it looks somewhat good, but we need to adjust it more so it happens like that. Okay. That's good. Now we need to activate obviously the pants to see how, what's going on, what's happening. Let's see it. So if you'll go back into the reference with the bands, what we did or what I did here, I had a path animation to show case where it's actually moving his belly button. So it goes like this and then it goes into the past the pen. Sorry. I'm going to try to do the same. Basically, if we highlight, if we go back into the pants, open it and look for a path. Hey, P prime, this one again for the last frame. And then we come here. We need this to be more of like this right here. Those as well. Also showcasing his belly is like this. So it shows that this character, it owns the side and then turns. We can add a keyframe at line here. So it looks on the same scale, same speed. I don't like how it looks here. So therefore, we're going to make it exactly where in the other position. So e.g. going to have it like this and like this instead of having it change positions. So let's see this. Let's see. Okay, so the second one is also not looking good. And it's showing the belly of our foreign. They're okay then, but then as the rotation happened, it should also happen in the correct timing. So we're going to duplicate this frame and this keyframe. Or at least let's just add the correct place for it like this. And then it will rotate from there. Sorry, they need don't need to cheap brands and you'd only one. Alright? That's not so important, but it can be once you're trying to make the animation look as good as it could get. So as you can tell, we just did this first part. Obviously, we need to make it look more interesting. If you want, you can even go further with editing the speed, the care-of the speed graph of this motion. So e.g. we can go here and just make each up and down. So this one is going up. Going up will mean that we can have this like this where we're making this out. And this one is n. So let's see it. But again, since we're working with separated dimensions, therefore, it would be better if we keep it this way. Okay. Now we're going to add the belly. The belly will have position. Here. This is the exact position of the belly. And then here, basically, here. All right, so this is what the transition happen and this is where it should be getting in the middle. So here we want it to be just a tiny bit of paint on the side, just like this, tiny bit like that. Just going up here like this a bit. However, with each up and down, we want it to move it up on its own, creating secondary animation. That secondary animation gives us the effect that his belly moves while he's walking. So there's just one extra step. Or what? Extra element to show more of the character, to give more expression to the character. Alright, so as you can tell, if you separate, everything starts working on each element alone. It makes more sense since sorry, even make everything easier. I wanted to try. If we make Let's keep this here. Let's start off with the arms. Now we're moving into the Arabs. Let's see how the arms are looking right now. You see it looking, they are looking weird, but they are following the motion of this character. Therefore, all we have to do is elbow, shoulder, neck, elbow, shoulder. Let's start off with this. Let's hit R and then have these two have are the neck only position? Shoulders we need physician as well. As I said, we have position for the shoulders and rotation. Why? Because we will need to adjust the distance of the shoulders once to adjust that for the perspective like one, the character is turning like here, right here. We need this shoulders to be like that, okay? The shoulders to be more of like this. Alright, however, we are going to work on it to look better, to look even better. So we have to open up the arm content. And then the second shape is the shirt. Like what I explained in the previous episode. What we need to do is animate also the start and end to keep the shirt in the same distance. So we're going to move this as well until the last key frame. Let's go into where the body is rotated. So here. And then move the position of this shoulder like this. Move the position of the second shoulder also inside like this and drag a little bit shirt or sorry, the trim path up so the shirt will stay on the same position. Alright? And then what are we going to do now is only lets see it how it is so far. Yeah, that's looking okay. So now we're going to start off by animating the rotation, the rotation of the shoulders. In character animation. Your arms should be the opposite of the legs. So in this case, the back leg is stepping forward. So therefore, the front arms should be stepping forward. So this one will be going backward like this. And this one as well. We will fix the situation the moment. We don't have to push it that far to then have to fix it. But I'll show you how you can fix the thing. Then we go with this one which should be moving forward like that, and the elbow like this. Okay. So that's the first step. First step looks, Let's try to, okay, so like if we go to the reference arms, okay, so what we should do, as you can see, this leg is backwards, so this would be in the front. And then once we reach the second frames of this, but this leg animation. So this shoulder right here will be moved backwards like this, and this one elbow as well. So I'm going to have to move it like this. Alright? So what's going to happen is this is what's going to happen. They will be in the opposite direction and they look realistic. Now let's go back into the other hand. Are the other shoulder. I know this might look confusing, but just give me a moment and just follow through. What I'm doing is only position and rotation. And I'm using only three keyframes. So there isn't, not really that much complicated stuff going on. All I'm trying to do is try to figure out when this thing is happening on the legs. Try to just make the opposite on the arms. So it's very simple, not that complicated. As I said, you just use logic to try to figure out what should move next. Okay? So in this case here is the hand is moving backward. So as I said, the opposite should happen with the other hand. So in this case, let's do it. Let's do it this way. Then once this arm will go backward here, this one moves in the front and the elbow moves up as well. Now, remember what I said in the last episode. We need to separate always the elbow a little bit from the shoulder. When it comes to animation that make it look more interesting and follow through the animation. Let's see it again. So we're going to try to push it even further and see what happened. Let's see. Maybe we still did not animate this one. That's why with backward. Okay. Hi, there It is. But since we animated it now we can just turn his back and said, maybe give it a couple more frames. So may reach here, we needed to be more exaggerated like this are going to flip backwards. Now we go to the neck. The neck is what's going to add the sort of like the animation of this character here, as you can tell. He did this weird thing where is disappointed to see these water problem. So he moved his neck down and in shoulders up. That's where we're going to do now. We go back. We're going to have these two shoulders. We're going to have the position as well. Go back here. Position of the shoulders, go up like this. And then we have this copy paste here, drag it here. Basically to have the both of the keyframes of the neck and then drop the neck down one extra brain. Let's see how it looks. Okay, It's not looking that good. I feel like the position is way too exaggerated here. Should definitely move it backwards a little bit like this and move this one forward a little bit like that. So we showed the body, Let's see. If we add the neck and see how it looks with the face and neck, we might need to add some anticipation to make it look better. The shirt, of course, we need to animate the shirt by the way. We have to move this position back one couple of frames. Then have this one be exactly at the end. This one as well. These positions would matter much better. Now we go to the shirt, since we opened it. Only the circle on the ellipse open the uterus path keyframe here. Drag this key frame to the last part here, hold Shift so it snaps into the other keyframes. And then we're going to basically select this, move it like that, and select this move it like this, like this. We'll get a bit up like that and let's see how it looks. Okay. Give it up. Nine. Let's look at it. I realized that one of the shoulders is way to position this position and that's the neck. The left shoulder is way to see this way. Hold on. The left shoulder in here is way too way too close to the neck. I kept saying way too. I did not say, Wait, what? Let's see how it looks now. Let's just check quickly. What do we have keyframes? Here are rotations, position, or the rotation three keyframes for the position. Also tricky preps. So here it is. Now this is animation, a full render. Okay. Then I'm going to show you why do we add Posterize Time effects like this on our own animations like bits. So looking at this, it looks much better when we dropped the prime rate. Alright, so let's now go ahead and remove all of the dots and look at our animation completely like that. And see basically what could be going wrong and what should we fix everything else in-between? Let's just remove the moles. We need one more thing, which is animating the position of the baseless. Open up a buddy or neck. Your neck. So the base will kind of dropped down as well. The y drop-down with the animation of the neck. So it goes little bit down and then back up here. Copy paste and F9. Let's see if we can do this more. If we go, if we keep also these ones, if you do what position only? Position only. So what I wanna do is hit F9. But I wanna give it like a quicker snappier animation. So we're going to drag this sort of more like that and drag this end one and see how it looks. Yeah, exactly. So when we give it that snap, it looks like he's raising up his shoulder quickly as an expression. And not just once history. Then we can with again as position and adjust the timing of it however we want until it fits exactly what we have. Let's do this. We're going to keep rendering the exhaust thymine and see, okay, the rotations. This one is not happening at the same time. So as you can tell, there is a, there is a phase rotation, okay? We want it to happen exactly when the pace rotation is happening. So sweet. Perfect. Also, since we modified that, we need to basically multiply the rest of the animation as well. Just drag them back like this. Drag this like that hold Alt. So times it graphically, let's see it. The, these animations as well. All right, let's see how it looks from the beginning. Something is not correct. This one. So we can just make this like that, then have this here, because that's the main animation. All right. I think so far it's looking good. Let's try to see it on the main composition. We hit up, we go into the main comp. We ended on the first scene like this. And let's see. So here we've achieved this animation in less than our important minute. Now, obviously 40 min is a lot for just 1 s. But usually with explainers like these, you are working on this one scene that has one animation like that, then it goes on for 5 s. So depending on the type of explainer, if you're working on an animation like this, it will definitely showcase the scale and the details of animation and each scene. So we need that. I'm looking at the neck and the neck seems to be a little bit taller here. Before we go there to fix it, I'm going to show you why this character looks a bit different here. We're going to this composition that is Layer Style in the shadow overlay with some blue color. So to give it this highlight, it looks nice. So if we go back here, neck and face here are just the pace is way too high on the first frame, we need to drop just a little bit like that. Let's see it much better. Now, with the original, the neck was not shaped this way because of the rubber rubber hose. You can edit the neck however you want by opening the taper. And then basically having that taper adjusted in this having this one adjusted to have the taper either strong or thin. However you want if we keep it this way, Let's see, It depends on what style you want to go for. Alright, you can always adjust also the top, the neck, top null, up and down. So after doing this, as I said, I'm going to explain how you can fix the issue where one of the arms are back, arms still looking on top of the other arm. So to do that, what we should do is duplicate the arm layer and name this one back. And then open it. Go here to contents. Let's highlight it only, and then just trim path. Then open up the trim path. And you can basically check which arm you want to keep obviously. So let's say I want to keep only this arm like this. Then I'm going to move this into the back. Or under the body. You can even do something which is adjusting the color slightly to be darker. So it looks like it's actually on the back. And then we'll go back into the first arm. And we add only, we add only trim path to this part. This shape or this shape, meaning the hands, arms reduced, one of the sides like this. And you end up with you end up with the hand that is under the body. Even if you want it to be under the legs, will look like this. Obviously, the hand is still did not we did not adjust. The color of it is because it's in the pre-comp. But as you can tell, you can actually separate the arm completely to be on the back of this character and not on the front. And then at any given time you can switch back to the original arm, operate any other senior want. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of character animation and I hope you at least saw the process of how I animated this scene. And by that you should have a good idea how to use this technique in your next explainer video and make the best of it. I hope you enjoyed this, I said, and I catch you in the next one. Have a good one. 5. Ep 04 : Run Cycle: Hey, what's up, everybody, this is Ali. And today we are in the fourth episode of character animation course. Today we're going to try to animate this. From the beginning, I give you another project and we're going to animate this character here are running. Okay? So I gave you this project. It has the character rig and that it has the reference of the animation and the main scene where you can place your automation to compare it to the reference and see how your organization is doing. Alright? Now, we don't have to stick to the reference specifically because with the reference really did like aided this animation looking for specific style, we can modify it a bit here to do it even faster or slower, depending on whatever you want it to animate. So feel free to be creative with this project files and enjoy your time animated. So let's, let me explain to you this character creation, all of these characters so we can actually get started. Again. We're using the same Rick obviously. Hopefully within this tutorial you will see how simple it is to animate. We go to the reference here, okay, Let's start from the first frame. So we have the leg, if we highlight it or the arm, sorry. Three pieces. The first let me show showcase only the lower part if we get a black background. So we can show you in detail how it looks, right? So this is sort of the arm shape one. This is the main shape that is linked to the null objects. Then we added this shape, which is just removing the end. Then the final one has a gradient to give shadow to this, to this arm. So that's for the arm. Let's turn every shape back on. Let's go to the leg. The leg has the same style except for that's the shadow that I was talking about. And then we have the tapered up shape and that's the main shape. And then taper down shape mixed together gave us this style. This is more of like a ninja clothing style. And then finally, we added again the shadow. And then we did the same thing for the front leg and for the front arm. So we both with both parts looking like that. Looking at the body after that is the shape. Just to draw enough shape or illustration, we're not going to deform it on this animation. Is just a triangle with a circle. Same here. The first is just the shape back foot, front foot, and then the neck. The same technique with two dots and linked to the notes. Eyes and eyebrows. Eyebrows and eyes. I gave it to you, animate it so you don't have to just animate that. And then you have to focus only on the actual automation. So as always to begin with, we are going to start off with a buddy. If we look at the reference, the body has to do animations happening Too movement. Let's say. The first one is positioned up and down, right? This second one is the rotation of the body. When he's going up, it rotates to the right a little bit and then when it goes down and your taste back down, so that's the sort of movement that we're going to pour. Alright, let's go try to replicate that here in our body movement. So as always, we highlight the elements that we're going to start with. Let's do an actual background is black hair so we can see it better. So let's start off with clicking P for position and then R for rotation. Now you can work with the separated dimension and work only with a y. That's up to you. In fact, we can even do that now. So if we wanted to have some motion left and right, you can add it. So we're going to only work with the y position. So let's click on position here. Go to the middle, add one keyframe, go to the final frame, and also add one keyframe. So now we're working with 16 frames so we can divide them to eight parts. Here. We're going to add our frames right here as well. Just copy it and paste it, click everything, and then the key F9. So it's easy, eased, and we got this now, for me, it looks like a bit too fast, although it did the same thing here. As you can tell, 16 frame. Let's look at it. But it looks somewhat difference. Different. Why? That's because the easy ease on this one is giving the movement the entire time. It's just easy out these in slightly in the last couple of frames. What do I mean by that? As you can tell, it's all the easing out. Two frames and then pick up speed. So let's do it even differently. Usually with the character movement or with any movement. If you're trying to make it realistic, you look at the direction of movement. In this case, e.g. the buddy is going up. Okay? So since the body is going up, its speed will be at the top here, and then slows down before it reached the top. Hold for one frame and then start picking up speed until it reaches max speed. What is going down? Right? How can we achieve that? We simply here, drag this one to the back. We don't want, we don't want it to be as extreme as possible. But just give it a little bit of the tastes of ease out. And do the same thing here since we needed to hold a bit here and then start to pick up the speed. Let's do the same thing here. Tried to make it equal to the other ones. So it doesn't look weird once we're looping this automation. And let's look at it now. I think the why On this has to be not this way and this has to be a little bit more up by guess. P. This though, here they start to see. Okay, it looks like depths are happening. Now we go into the rotation. Let's click on the rotation. So this is on the first position. We want it to be rotated a bit downward like this. So as if the body is trying to pull up itself and then at the top it will rotate back like that. And then just copy both keyframe, paste them here again, here, and then F9 everything, and drag it. One frame maybe. Let's see. Yeah, Let's see it now. Okay, frame is enough. Alright, now we're done with the body animation, as simple as that. Now we move into the front leg animation. Let's go into, we are only going to animate the knee and hip, hit R and only go into animate the rotation. You remember the last time when I said that when a leg pass by, when the foot is passing by, it usually has enabled the leg here. Nevertheless, it's usually means that this, the time it passes, this should go up, which means they have to be sync. So the exact moment when this leg goes far back, the body would be already on the downside and the down pose like this. Alright, so we try to time that correctly. Let's hit the body movement and see it go into the frame or the body is in the lowest point and then rotate the leg, hip back into here. Give this one just a bit of kickback. So it should look like this. Alright, now what we notice is the leg is going away, the body is going to weigh up from the Alexa. We should enable the front foot so we know where to place the body that's dropped the body down. So at the beginning it was on this. So we needed to be exactly at that spot. So here is, let's remove this. So if we drop it down, it should be like that. Alright, so it goes live. Alright? Then by this time it should go back into the original place it was. Then we have the loop. However, that's not how we run as human beings. Our knee here has to turn up like this because we lift our legs when we wrote it, wasn't me to turn it. So it goes like this. And then like that. Alright, you got it. So let's add an easy ease to this one, F9. Let's see if we got it's already all right. I see something will happen in Which is like this has to be here. Or maybe one frame later. So it goes like that and then slowly turns back. Let's see it now. Alright, maybe we're just turning it way too much so we need to give it a bit more. Alright, I like how it is, how it's looking right now. Okay. Now we should be moving to the second leg. Back leg again, go into the knee and the hip hit R We're going to animate the birds later on because we need them to stick to the ground. So let's add keyframes here. At keyframes or the last frame of this loop. So we save the body position. And then in the middle, Let's turn the leg forward like this and then turn this one a bit to the front. So we have basically this. Then the body goes up. Alright? However, we did not fix the body on the second position should have the same position and not. Okay. So remember that we need to add the rotation of the foot right here because it's passing by and we usually lift our our knee way too high if we're running. If you're walking or animating a walk cycle, it could be just like this. But since we're running, we should hire, even if you are on, your character is going even faster. They can be jumping with both legs. And let's just do the outline. As simple as that. We're animating this run cycle. We've already, we're already bought to finish the leg movement, we just need to animate the foot. So let's hide the back leg. Let's animate the front foot, open the front foot, open the path of the front foot. Hit keyframe. Let's say at the start we have a keyframe. And then once the leg reach this position, we want to basically, if we show the path, we want to have this stuck right there to the line and this one as well. Then let's move a couple of frames here. And let's add these to basically keep each one of them stuck to the lane. Even give it one more here. And then here it goes back like that. And then here we can give it like a bit of a stretch. And then it goes into the spray. Just copy and paste the first frame. Alright, Give them all F9. And let's see, it should not be that much noticeable, but it will give us like a more, you see, if it's more realistic movement of the foot will try to do the same thing with the second foot here. So let's get started by hiding the front leg and the front foot and just showing the back leg and the back foot. Let's open up the path. Alright. So starting off with a bad foot, Let's go to the first frame or the keyframe. Go to the last frame, or the keyframe just to make sure that we started and ended on the same point. How we should probably do that as well. Copy and paste this for the front feet. So let's go here. Brains here we should, as I said, drag this back out. We don't have we need to add this. You probably will find it in your project. If you didn't. Also just add, add it like I'm doing right now. So we're adding this extra movement of the foot and then we get it back into the regular foot. Alright. I think we should move it a bit higher here because it will take longer to reach that. Okay, so let's keep it this way. Okay. Let's go back. As we said, that is key frame here we are going to just drag this keyframe here. We can maybe delete this and just add this here because the animation will start from there. So as I said, around this frame, or should be already having the foot stuck to the groundless. That's stuck to the ground here as well. This is this is not looking like how we'd want it to be. I think we should lift up, but a little bit more because this leg is lower than the other leg. Alright. I think I'm not sure. Okay. Maybe not maybe not that much. Just like this. Okay, Let's see it. So I'm going to make these keyframes to our ruler. And then just drag these two here and then this one here. Then the same again, this one here and this one here. That's more like a frame-by-frame animation, but this will make the animation looks way much more stylish and advanced than just not doing that. Alright, so no hair when she did not, it did anything. So the animation will loop perfectly. Let's check what we have created so far. Alright, you see, now obviously you can reduce how much we are exaggerating this, this foot movement. But if you'd like it, you can keep it. I like how it looks on. It adds some more expression to our animation. Let's now see how it's looking without the arms, just with the body and legs? Yes. On the head. Some of the answers was still did not activate them. Front hand. As well. What is the font hand here? Let's see. Sorry about that. Let's see it. Alright, you see, we're doing a good job. Youtube. I think you're doing a good job. I think you are following along. You're doing everything. It's not really that complicated. If we look at the animation that we're doing right now, you will literally have 123 keyframes to animate this entire body run cycle. It's usually really, really scary to animate run cycles. But as you can tell, it's way much easier when you're doing it this way and step-by-step and just automating each part alone, let alone animating a walk cycle would be much, much easier than this. Alright, so let's continue. Now. We need to animate the arms and then we're going to animate the head. So let's just hide. Again. What? Let's not hide, but let's show the arms, one arm and front-end going to start off with that. Now, remember the rule that I was talking about, which is that the front arm should be animated with the back leg. So in the same direction. I mean, let's just do that. Let's go into the front shoulder in our arm. Our hit keyframe. Let's go back into the last frame, have one key frame, and then into the middle frame, we want it to be rotated to the front, like how this will look. Now you can exaggerate hour, you can just keep it like this. So it looks like more stylish. I'm going to move the arm into the front like that. Let's now have F9 on this and it will look like this. However, I like to again, just give it one frame of that movement. So it goes like that. Just some separation. I'm interested in the movement. Let's go into the other arm, the back arm, show, highlight the back arm, shoulder, lever arm, just hit R. Let's keep them on the first frame and then on the last frame. And then go to the middle and just make the opposite of what's going on right there. Like this. You can even push the handle bit further. So it looks more interesting. Now let's select everything. Hit F9. How easy is that? You are just making around cycle on your own within 20 min using this ticket. Right? You see how it looks. You can exaggerate it a bit unwell. So let's say one is going down. You can just give it some extra movement like this. Let's see how it looks. Yeah. Let's do the same thing here. Why not? This is cartoon and we can do whatever you want. This lower are like, oh, that's way too ugly. Alright. You say are the front arm as well? I want to hand I mean, is it front headed on hand here? And what do you think? Like they say voila, there is the run cycle. Now, we definitely need to animate that the head. So let's go ahead and with the head, we just need to have one extra animation, which is the rotation. So here we're going to show the rotation of the body as well and follow through. So we have it normally and then it rotates back so we add more rotation back, just like that. Let's go back. Just copy the base. And one more here. Now we have to click F9 on it, but also drag it. Peak couple frame, maybe two frames. Let's see how maybe won't break. Let's see. Okay. You can exaggerate it even more to see what is it doing. And I guess by rotating the head downward and not upward. So let's copy this and place it. Sorry, I pressed be instead of C Control V and added in the last frame here as well. So let's see how it looks. That is one problem, which is that how much? 1234. So if we go back 1234, we need to copy this and paste it there. So the movement will be exactly how it is right there. Right? The eyes doesn't seem to be animated on this one for some reason, should have kept the eyes elevation. Alright, I zone not animated that. We go back here, we can maybe just copy the eye as elevation. What do we have? Opvs from the fourth frame is doing to the eyebrow from the fourth prime. Let's just do that. And then if we go into the eyes, what movement that we have on the eyes, on this shape. Just copy this path animation. Let's go back into character. I. Shape path. Just paste this. Let's see it. Alright. And within 21 min or 2 min, Let's say maybe less. If I edit this shorter, we have got this character animation now you can go ahead and add hair. You can add swords, you can add the suitcases, whatever you want to this character. And just keep adding things like we're doing right now and make it even better. If you want to add another animation to this guy, maybe he will stop and jump. Remember that? Remember that once we started this loop and where we ended it, it was the same frame. So all you got to do next is animate wherever motion you need next to happen, starting from this frame. Then just cut a composition and add it to be other automation so it will move smoothly between two animations. But keep in mind that if the character is running, it will not just stop immediately, but you don't have to animate him slowly. Stopping and then starting the next action that's only taking, that will take longer, longer to animate, but it will work. It will work greatly, greatly since you have every element here ready. So I'm just going to the main scene. Let's remove the highlights from the let's keep our new animation and see how it looks on this final top. As you can tell. I think it looks great. I hope you really benefited from this course or this motion for this character. At this, you've got an idea and you remove the intimidating idea of learning cycles and walk cycles so that they are scare. You just have to really just stick to automated each part alone and make sure that they feel right in terms of the timing, you don't necessarily need a perfect diamond, but you need to at least have an equal frame. Frames in between each of the main keyframes, such as the body, as you saw we did with the body and the front legs and everything. Alright. Now, you won't usually be animating walk cycles that much in motion. We explainers Or motion videos. So that's why I wanted to be the walks over the run cycle. And I hope you enjoyed this video. I'll catch you on the next one. Have a good one. 6. Ep 05 : Mixed Scenes: Hey, what's up, everybody? And welcome to the fifth episode of this course of how to animate characters. In this course, I gave you another project file that you can work on and work with. Here, as you can tell, this is the reference composition and we're going to be creating this animation here of a character walking and then doing an expression or the movement. So this is bit more complicated than the first one, and I will explain it through This. This, this compare is the reference. It's a little bit different for, different from this one that we're going to animate. So let me start off here by showing you each layer. We have arms. This is the back arm and it's just masked out arm version. In the arm itself we have a couple of shapes. The first one is the skin, then the shirt is a little bit higher stroke width and trim path. And then we added just small trim path as well to this green part. This one is probably on the other side. So let's now highlight the legs. The legs are you have the first shape which are this sort of like skin-like shape. And then they added just fail and with the same color to this one over the round buttons that then we have the neck is just one line. Let me just highlight the green. And then that's the body. Now, the tricky part with the body. So what I did here is make this body with a path. That path has couple of points for parts. Then I linked that to point follow null, which means we have, now, we have these points that control what the, what the body will look like. And I linked these points to the control of each recording part. So as you can tell here, the shoulder links are links to the actual shoulder. So if we highlight the arm, one of the arms, and then this is the front arm. We go into the front arm, shoulder, left, shoulder, right? This one. And we move it up, the body will move according to it. Alright, that's great. I think it's clear, right? So it's just the point file on null. Then these nodes are following, the other nodes are according to the hand or arm movement. So let's get started. What should we do when we're trying to animate to movement? Use or start to automate the least complicated part. In this case, what's that lists complicated part? It is the body of course. So let me just make the composition like that so we can animate it. Now, what are we trying to do here? We're trying to have position of this body go up and down to stimulate, to simulate like a walk cycle. However, since this shape is linked to two nodes, these nodes cannot actually, they're not actually be moved. The body should not move. However, what I did is since these you have to bear with me on this one because this is a bit complicated, but then it's going to understand it. These are the controls of the body. They are linked to the controls of the arms and the legs. But then the arms and the legs, lower leg and shoulder, neck and shoulder are linked to the body. This means whenever I move the actual body, everything else will move with it as well. It's like circle cycle. So let's hit P for position, R for rotation. And let's just work with a y on this one. Again, we're going to use the same timeframe that we worked with before, which is 16. Let's end it. However, in 16, since this is a walk and not run, we just want to have one up and down. I guess. Let's see how it looks. Let's say or let's maybe not have gotten down. Just see how it looks first and then decide if we wanted to have more timer for it or not. Let's see. Yeah, that's that's that's way too much. So let's try to make it exactly double the time. So 16. Let's go 32 frames. I'm reading here. Alright, so let's see two frames, and let's just shift it so it's perfectly aligned. For us. This one is not perfect, so I should be here. Alright, let's see it now. Because a walk should be slow. Yeah, sort of like this one. Let's end it here. So the Preview, and let's go to the rotation. So rotation again, here should be the same. And then just as it goes up also should be the same. Since this is a walk cycle and not run slightly, one is going up just slight bend forward, just slight touch. So we'll go with that. Then here another one, just a tiny bit. Now let's select them all and hit F9. Now let's obviously select the rotation, maybe not so obvious, but just shifted couple of frames to give it the illusion of one frame not coupled. Right? Now we cannot do that. You can just not do it or do it like I did it. It depends on how you'd like them. Motion. Now we're going to show the legs except that this time the legs are a complete one shape. So oh my God, we have to work on this. How can we make it work? Don't even worry about it. So let's go into the leg. We have to animate upper leg, lower body, upper leg, and lower leg. The lower leg or more did I name it that way? But it is just to complicate things more and make you suffer more. I'm just kidding. Let's see. So in this case basically, we need the opposite to happen. Obviously. As I said before, as it keeps saying here, the upper leg, the upper leg right should be on this side. And then the upper leg left should be on this side. But we need to click on position. Let's add a keyframe. Let's drag these keyframes to the back, these keyframes to the front. And in the middle, we're just going to move this position, the fit backward in this position, bit inward. Looking good. Let's see how it looks. Let's select all of them and hit U. Let's let all of them and hit F9. Let's see it now. Obviously that is one problem which we did not add yet. The movement of the lower leg, right on this case. So it goes like stops right here. No one will get them to do what do we do with our leg goes back into this. Let's hit. Okay. And then here, the lower leg. The lower leg, which just want to make this oh, no. Oh, that's the lower body. Sorry about that. Let's not get things more complicated than they are. And here we'll just rotate this a bit more. It goes forward. And what we have just created this walk cycle. Oh my God, how did we do that? Now, I understand that this guy, it looks like a piece of paper on his wall kit, but I think it looks good for character animation. Ready? Now, let's see it with the, with the neck and face. What is the neck? It is the neck. And that is also a shirts. What is the short neck body? Let's just leave this shirt. So let's see if the ups and downloading the same on the correct position. Okay. So as you can tell, that's clearly I don't know if you can tell. I'm not, but that's okay. We have already won control. That's clearly way too much of an app for the body. So if we go back into the body position, and here we have it there, then here we need it to be, we need, we need this to be more. And then this to be sort of like that just a little bit higher than the ground, not that much. Then a second as well. Just a tiny bit higher from the ground, not that much. Alright, That's more like it. Now, let's start actually by showing the back arm and also the front arm. Why not see how it looks now? It looks very weird. Let's start off by animating the back arm. We have the controls here. So the back basically means the left, so left elbow, left shoulder hit our IT keyframe here, keep them off the end. And then in the middle, I had to fix the arm and then we're back on animating the arm. The elbow here, we're going to rotate this backward. Not that much. Like this. Right? So we have oh, no, that's wrong. That's completely wrong. That's the back leg should follow the front leg. The back arm should follow the front arm. So let's just copy this, paste, this, copy this, paste this, and let's delete these two. And delete this to go back here. And basically animate these on the opposite side. So we'll rotate this backward and rotate this also backward like that. But then have this one, it is come to the front like that. And let's go to the final frame and copy and paste this, copy and paste this. And what we got here is a walk cycle. Wow. Let's go ahead and just add F9 to it. Let's go into the other shoulder and elbow and shoulder highlight also the prompt arm. At don't worry about that since we can just add the month. Is it a shirt? That is problem. One, is that showing up on top of that from that front arm. Okay. How did that happen? We just had and just delete this one. You probably find it deleted already. The front arm, Let's animate also the front arm, shoulder, elbow hit R for rotation. Let's put a keyframe on this. Again, look at the front arm with the back leg. The back leg is in the front, then the program should be also in the prompt, right? It's going to the last frame. Add as well, this one, copy paste. Now, just copy paste it one alone. Here in the middle. We're going to do the opposite. Which is titled little bit weird like that we'd thing on the body, right? The ones normally would see that it's just a couple of frames of animation that line. And let's see it. Alright, let's add the face, the neck. I think it's looking okay. Things looking good. Let's zoom out a little bit. That looks like a walk cycle, doesn't it? Yes. So let's now add the action. Now, how can we add the action? We need to actually held this character habit move a couple of frames. Are we going to do something that is a bit not that great. We just copy pasting a lot of keyframes. Actually, not that much keyframe. So you see how the keyframes that we have right here. We're just going to repeating everything. That's all we got to do. That's all you gotta do. How many clock cycles do we need? Maybe, maybe, maybe 4 s is enough, I guess let's do the same thing now for this one you can, I'm just going to do clone. Why not? Since I have the script, just wanted to clone again and we have done it. So let's see the full walk cycle happening. I don't know, four times. Alright. Now we just have to go head to the arm part. Let's just hide the leg so we don't have to or credit. Zoom in, go to the arm part, let's say from 2 s, we want the character to do this thing where if we hide the neck position of the neck, position of the shoulders as well, Shift P or the keyframe in the position of the shoulders. And then move here. Or let's say your status from here. So let's get, let's get them here. Here. Here we have the same thing happened again. They go back into their normal state. In the middle. We move the neck downward the bit just like that. It will not appear on there, but I will work on it. So then move the shoulders up. Not that much, just this much. Okay. And then guess what? Move the elbow into the other side. The other elbow into the other side. Rotate the shoulders and easy ease everything. Let's see it. Now. We can do something which is an anticipation. So let's go ahead and instead of doing this directly, we're actually going to do the opposite. So we're going to do this one like that. This one goes this and goes slightly down, just a couple of pixels to the right. This one goes most of couple of pixels down and rotates inward. And this one as well, if you're going to have this like like frame before it, where it's like this is happening way too slowly. We need this to happen faster. Let's click on this. Go into the graph editor. Oh my God. We're going to select all of these keyframes and drag it like this. Let's see it. Alright. I mean, obviously it's not exactly like the first one. The first one they think and it also a character movement where the first one I did also shoulder movement, I think position where it goes to the other side. Yes. So the position on the first one goes in and out, right? So it goes in and out. But then that is this dimension happened. It's way too extreme. So let's try to figure out what's going on. What is wrong here. And I realized that it's the shirt not being linked to the arms, which it should be. Then it should highlight the arms. Oh, oh, oh, I got it. Alright, let's fix this together and tried to explain to you what was the problem? We should duplicate the arm, open it, open it again, remove the trim path so we can have full arm, alright, with no trend, but then link this to this so that our won't be highlighted. And now we can go into the second position. What did I do? This shirt parts is now only alpha matte to where the arms appear. And then what we can do is on a exaggerate the animation of the neck. Make, okay, not that much saturated like this, but exaggerate more than n-dimensional of the shoulders up. And this shoulder is up as well. Now with the shirt thing would just remove the mask. I forgot to remove the mask. Let's hit M. We don't need a muscle this shirt. Believe the entire mask. And yeah. So what is going up? The neck? What is what's wrong with the neck? I'm gonna do this fixing right now in front of you guys. That area. So this is the body and this is the face. So let's show these are the two controls of the neck. The body should be done with. Okay. But the next should be on top of the shirts. That's what's happening. We just did not correctly placed. So the neck and on top of this shirt n there, the bar under the neck. But on top of isn't let me fix this until we did it. I think we did it. We definitely did it. Alright, let's see. Alright. Now, guess what We did not do. We did not have these two animations be separated a little bit from their components. So it looks like this. Oh wow, it suddenly looks much, much better. And here, within 22 min, again, we did this second one dimension of a walk cycle and just an arm doing its thing. Now, some of the mistakes that was in the project file, I'll just fix that up and your projects hopefully will not have any problems with it. And I hope by this tutorial, you have gained the experience to start experimenting with characters and you have now good knowledge and good enough knowledge to get you started with animating characters in your explained in videos so that it looks advanced, it looks more interesting and add more value to your work and have a great skill added to your skill set. I hope you really enjoyed. Thank you for watching this course. I'll add one more episode. Hopefully, you can watch it. It's a short episode that I give you some resources, some inspirations and other things that you can follow through to learn more and develop your skills more. I hope you had a great time with this course and developed. You can see more of my work on my YouTube channel. You'll find everything in the description and my Instagram portfolio as well be Hands. Thank you for watching. I'll see you later. Have a good one. 7. Outro: Hello again, boys and girls. So finally we get to the end of our course. I wanted to thank you all for watching this course. I hope that you learned what's needed to get started. I also suggest that you practice on other movements using the same project. So maybe create your own projects, your own characters, and try to make them do some actions. So you get used to this style of animation. Therefore, be able to use it in your professional work. Feel free to add any other elements to this rig, mix and match with plugins and scripts. If you've had any problems or difficulties animating using this rigs, you can reach out or email me and I will hopefully do my best to help you out. Again. Thank you for watching. Wish you the best, good luck, and have a good one.