Animate Characters in After Effects: From Static Art to Expressive Motion

1. 1 Class Introduction: Ready to bring characters to life with movement, personality, and expression, welcome to meet characters in After effect from static art to expressive motion, another exciting class in my Skillshare After effect mastery series. Hi, I'm Elli and I'll be guiding you through this class. In this part of the series, we're going to step into one of the most exciting areas of motion design, character animation. Character animation is where your static design stop feeling flat and begin to move, react, walk, run, speak, and express emotion. And in this class, I will show you how to make that happen inside Adobe After effect using practical, beginner friendly and professional techniques. We'll begin by looking at the basics of character design and rigging inside After Effects, so you understand how a character needs to be prepared before animation begins. Then we will install and set up Duik Angela, one of the most powerful free character rigging tools for After Effects. From there, we'll create bone structures, explore auto rigging, clean up our rig, and use those tools to build real character nision projects. You'll learn how to create a work cycle. Set up a facial rig, art facial expressions, work with lip syncing using SF Caddy and even create a cycling mission scene. This class connects beautifully with the bigger After Effects journey because character and mission brings together so many skills, designing, rigging, timing, movement, storytelling and expression. So instead of only animating shapes or text, you now learn how to animate characters that feel alive. By the end of this class, you'll have a stronger understanding of how character mission works in After Effects, and you'll complete multiple practical projects that help you apply everything step by step. So get your project files ready, open After Effects, and let's start turning static artwork into expressive motion. 2. 2 Class Project: In this class, you'll be working on three main class projects, each designed to help you practice a different part of the character and mission workflow. These projects are not just random exercises. They are built to help you understand how aging, movement, facial animation, and sin bulling come together inside after effects. The first project is a work circular mission in Duik Angela. This project is covered in two parts. In Video seven, we'll begin by creating the first part of the work run circular mission using Duik Angela. You'll practice working with the character rig, pushing the body, and creating movement that feel more natural and controlled. Then in Video ten, we'll contut the same project by finishing the work cycle and mission scene. This where we polish the movement, improve the overall scene, and make their mission feel more 3. 3 Character Design & Rigging Basics in After Effects: Hey, welcome once again to the very exciting module on Character Admission in After Effects. In this video, we're going to get started with Character and Mission. We're going to look at how to design our characters, and I'm going to be using Adbillusito for this course. So how to design our characters and how to kind of structure them in order to make them animitable here in after effects. Okay? So without further ado, let's go ahead and bring in our Adobe Illustrit of file. So I'll click it going into my folder and bring in the girl character one, AI file, which is Adobe Illustrt of file. So select the girl character one and come to import us and select composition routinely sizes and hidimport. Yeah, and I'll just click here on the composition to go into our composition, and this is our character. As you can see, we have lots of layers here, and these layers are basically our body parts, right? We can see the names, arm one, hand one, fingers one, whatever, whatever. So first of all, I will just go into AdobosFito now so that you see our character. This is our character structured. We can see that it has, of course, designed in AudubosFto and these are all ears. So it was created here, and then we imported it into after effects, and we now have our layers. You get the point. So let's just go ahead and see what these layers look like. So if I just click here, I'll be able to select everything in arm one. Okay? And if I just move it, we're going to see that now we've moved arm one, and this is the arm of our character. Okay? Now, if I click on hand one, you're going to see that this is the hand attached to the arm, and then if I click on fingers one, you're going to see that this is the fingers attached to the arm and to the hand. You get the point. So now I just want you to take note of the way the structure, the way the design, you can see that the end of each of these parts is rounded, okay and fits perfectly to the next one. Okay? So this forms kind of a hinge structure between the both parts. You get the point. Now, that's in order to make rotation easy and realistic, okay? So if I just select everything here, for example, and come to opacity and reduce my opacity to have reduced my opacity. Okay? So now, if we look at our parts now and look at the joints, okay, the point where there will be movement, rotations. We're going to see that it's darker and it's kind of rounded, okay? So this is basically showing us an intersection between the both layers, the boot layer. So in this case, we have the thigh one and also the leg one. So we can see that they are intersecting to form this circle. So it means that our ankle points will be positioned at the center of the circles in order to enable us to rotate our parts realistically. And this works everywhere, okay? This is basically how I have structured the layer. Even though I didn't design the model from scratch, so I got the model from freepik.com, but it didn't come structured for admission like this. So I was the one that structured it like this, making sure the intersections are rounded like this so that we can rotate realistically. So this works everywhere, even on the arm, even on the head. Okay? Probably not on the head because there won't be much movement on the head, but it works everywhere where movement is going to occur, or rotation movement is going to occur. So I'm just do this. Yeah, basically, that's how to design your character. Now let's go ahead and see how we can animate this character in after effects. Yeah, so here we are in after effect. And what we want to do is first of all, position our ankle points properly. Okay? Now there are very easier ways or more advanced ways using plugins to animate our character or to rig our character. But now I'm going to take you through the most crude and natural way to do it without any plugins. Then in subsequent videos, we're going to learn how to do it with more advanced plugins. You get the point. So now I want to show you how to actually do it without using plugin. And yeah, so we first of all, have to position our ankle points properly, okay? In the center of our joints. That's what we want to do. Now in order to see the position in properly, we have to select everything and just reduce the opacity just like how we did in Adobe Illustrator. I'm just going to hit T on my keyboard and reduce my opacity, in order to see through allies. Let's make this 44, for example, or maybe less. 38. Good. So 38 works fine. And now we have our first layer, which is the foot one. I I move this, we're going to see that we actually have foot two. Okay? Now, this is the foot. So we have the foot one. We actually have the foot which is behind our foot one, okay? So that's how I have structured the layer. Now, we can see that as I select my foot one, it actually has a big bounding box. It's very big, so it's very hard for me to select my leg one because of the bounding box of my foot one. So the very easy fix to this is I'll just mask it out. So I'll select my foot one and come here and pick my rectangle tool and just create a quick mask around our foot one in order to just cut the bound of our layer to the side of our mask. Here is our foot one now. I no longer has that big bound. Now, let's do that for foot too because they are basically the same layers. Yeah, so I've selected my foot too, and I just want to pick my recant and create a quick mask around my foot, too. Good. Now we've done the very first steps. Now, I just want to take my foot one and start positioning my ankle point. Take my foot one and I'll just pick my punt behind tool or ankle point tool here and I'll position it right here, in between the foot one and also my leg one. Yeah, so here so that we have a very sweet round rotation. You get the point. Now since I've done this for foot one, I'll just go ahead and do the same thing for foot two. I'll select foot two and bring my ankle point right here. Perfect. So we've done that for foot one and foot two. I'm just going to select my leg one. And I want to bring my ankle point right here, okay? Because the rotation of our leg one is going to be happening here. We get the point. So I'll bring my ankle point right at the knee level here, here. And I also want to do this to my leg two. To select my leg two and bring my ankle point right here. Just here. Perfect. So we've done that for leg one and leg two or foot one and foot two. I want to just select next my finger, my fingers. Yeah, so this is fingers one. As you click and bring the anchle point here. Then I'll do the same thing to fingers two. So fingers two, click and bring the ankle point right here. I'll do the same thing to hand one and hand two. So hand one, click and bring the anchle point here to the middle. And same thing I'll do to hand to soh my hand too. So I've basically positioned these layers so that we have an easier mission. You get the point. So everything has been positioned in the way it should be for us to have no weird movements or no weird distractions, you get the point. So just take note of that. So when you are creating your characters, you have to take note of that, okay? Yeah, you have to take note of that. It's very easy to create characters in Illustrito. If you can't use Illustrto, you can take my course on Illustrto and learn how to use Illustrito. It's a very good course. And I promise you, it's going to be amazing. Yeah. So we have hand one selected, and we have our ankle point brought to the middle. We need to do that for our arm one and arm two. This is our arm one. Okay. So we want our ankle points for one to be around here. So click and bring it around here. And also arm two. So I look for arm to arm should be down behind. Okay? Yeah, it should be here. So this is arm two and I'll bring my ankle point also let me do for my head, I'll just bring my ankle point right here because it's the same layer with my neck. So I'll just bring my ankle point here even though there really won't be any rotations for head. Okay. But let's just keep our ankle point here. Next, we have the chest for our chest, we want our ankle points to be here around here around here. Even though we won't really be moving our chest that much. Let's just go ahead and cross check to see if every part has been positioned properly. For arm one, it's properly, or hand one been done properly, fingers one, correct, head, correct, chest correct. Here, we have a separate layer for hair too. Because the way the hair has been designed, it has another part which needs to be on a different layer. You get the point. So let me just check for the others. We can see that Taiwan is not positioned properly. Thaiwan is showing us the anchor point here. I just disable my my transparency to see properly. We can see that She is here. We need to bring the ankle point for hew to this point because rotation for Thai one, it's going to be happening here, right here. Same also for Thi two needs to be here. Okay. So Thai one is the Th two is here. Okay? Thai one Thi two, arm one has been positioned properly, foot one positioned properly, foot two has positioned properly. Leg one is perfect. Leg two is perfect. Finger one. Perfect. Hand one or hand two is perfect. Let's look at finger. Okay, this is finger two and hand two. Let's look at finger one and hand one. Yeah, they all plays perfectly. Good. Now the next thing we have to do is parent our parts. Okay? So we have to parent the smaller part to the bigger part. Now, what do I mean by a smaller part? And what do I mean by a bigger part? Now, in this case, for the feet or for the foot and the leg, the smaller part would be the foot and the bigger part would be the leg. Now why is that? That's because the leg controls the foot. When the leg rotates, the foot rotates. With it. Okay, realistically, naturally, the food doesn't rotate and rotates the leg. You get the point. The leg rotates and also the food follows. Same also with the thigh. The thigh rotates and also the foot and the leg follows the thigh. You have to basically do this just like how a natural character or natural human is structured. So the natural structure of the human skeleton is what we are following here. You get the point. Same also with our head, with our arm, with our hand and so on and so forth. The arm is the bigger boy and the hand and the fingers are the smaller boys. The chest is a master. Even though it's not really the master in the real sense, because the wist will be the master in the most realistic sense. But in this case, we don't have a wist. So everything is happening here. The way our character has been structured, it doesn't have a wist. It just has long thighs. You get the point. So basically, the chest is the biggest guy now. Now, the chest will control all the rotations. So it won't be parented to any other thing. Now let's go ahead and do that right away. So we select our foot one and parent it to our leg one. You get the point. So foot one will take the pick whip or parent whip two and parent it to the leg two. So foot 22 leg two incredible. And foot one, two leg one. So leg one to thigh one, and two to Thai two. Okay? So that's how it's going to be now. If I pick Taiwan, for example, and move it, we're going to see that both leg one and foot one are following it. You get the point now. So for Taiwan, it's going to be parented to the chest. So Taiwan to the chest and also Thai two to the chest as well. Perfect. Now, the head is also going to be parented to the chest. Okay? Like I told you before, the chest is the biggest boy. Everything is parented to the chest. Nothing is parented. No, we don't parent the chest to anything. So if I sack the chest now, we're going to see that we're moving all these parts, okay? Yeah. Incredible. So if we want to move the character forward or backward, we're going to be moving the chest, okay? And everything will follow suit. Yeah, now let's do our parenting to our fingers and our hands. Now, just come down, select my finger. Okay, it's a bit hard to select here. Now, let's just look for it right here. So we're looking for fingers one. Yeah, this fingers one, and we want fingers one to be parented to hand one. Perfect. Then we want fingers to be parented. Two hands two. Now, fingers two fingers two should be preented to hand two. Incredible. Now, hand two should be presented to arm two. Hand two should be presented to arm two and hand one should be parented to arm one. Incredible. Now, arm one should be parented to, of course, the chest. You get it. And also arm two should be parented to the chest. Yeah. So if you select the chest now, every other thing should follow along. Everything should follow along. Let me just enable transparency and see. So we can see that the head is not following, right? So the head too has to be preented to the head that the extra hair we created. Where is it? Yeah, this is a head tool, and it should be parented to the head. Perfect. If I select my chest now and move, we are going to see that everything is moving along with our chest. Yeah. Incredible. Now it's time to animate, okay? And I'm just going to quickly do a work cycle animation. So that you should understand how this thing works, okay, how rigging and animation works manually without using any external plug in. So in to start, I'm going to first of all, select my leg one, my foot one, and my thigh one. So I want to keep this very simple because things can get very complex sometimes because of the number of layers, plenty number of layers we're working with. So I'm going to start with my foot one, my leg and my thigh one, and also my chest. You select my chest and I will just isolate them. So what I want to do now is just right click on them and invert selection. Invert selection and I'll just hide the selected ones now and just, first of all, I'll just select everything and hit T and make my opacity back to 100. Incredible. Then next I'll just select everything, enable them Okay. And now I'll do my selection one more time for my Ti one, my leg one, and my foot one. So foot one, Thai one, and leg one. Okay? And also my chest. I'll just click on them and select Inverse or invert selection. And I'll just hide the selected ones, and I'll also shide the selected ones so that we now have less layers to work with. Incredible. Now, this is what we've got to work with. Yeah, so the next thing I would do is select my thigh one, my foot one, and my leg one, hit R, and create a Q frame for rotation. Create a keyframe for rotation, and for my chest, I will hit P and create a keyframe for position. I just do this and zoom in a bit. Yeah. And what I want to do is I want to work with 30 frames per second for this animation. So I will just do Control K to go into my composition settings and make sure I have 30 frames per second. As my composition frame read. So you want to make sure your film at here is 30 frams per second. Hit okay. If you have 30 frams per second, I'll just zoom in. And now I'll just select my Thai one and go ahead. And create my first puse. So select your thigh, and I'll pick your rotation tool. So click your rotation tool and just click and rotate and create your first pose. So create your first pose something like this. And I'll just do Control R to bring up my ruler tool and click and drag Aula here, okay? So I'll just leave it here, and I intend to make this my ground level. Incredible. Now the next thing I will do is just go to 15 fims. Good 15 frames in time. Now that's about here. Yeah, this is 15 frames. So I'll go to 15 frames and create my next pus so I create my next puse while still having my Tai one selected. So I'll create my next pus, which is this. And I'll just key make sure this is happening properly. Yeah. So this is my next puse, and I will just click here to add keyframes or to repeat these keyframes for these layers. Yeah, so just zoom in just skim through my key films to see what I've got. Yeah, so this is what I've got incredible. Okay? So just come here, see two films. Okay, two films after my first key frame. And I'll just go ahead and try to position my foot properly, okay, realistically. So at this point, I want my foot to just look like this for now, and at this point, on my foot to just look like this for now. Okay, I'll just come here right here to the middle and select my Ti one and just create a keyframe for my Ti one to just have a keyframe here. And yeah, so we have this and this. Now, I'll just come to the middle one more time and select my chest. And for my chest now, I want to actually make this go up. So I want to take my position for my chest up. Okay? Just up a bit. Say from 362.6 to, let's say, 32, five. Okay? So we have this. Yeah, this is the realistic way of movement, okay? So there is this up and down movement of our chest or waist, okay, as we move. So the next thing I'll do is just go to 1 second. Okay? That's now 30 frames. So 30 frames, and I'll just copy these keyframes, all of these keyframes and piece them here. All of these keyframes, Control C, Control V, contro C, contro V, Control C, Control V. And the next thing I'll do is just zoom in and come to the middle between these keyframes between these keyframes, I'll just come to the middle and in the middle or around the middle, I'll just copy this guy, Control C and ConroV. Okay And after I do that, I'll select my thigh layer, and I'll do this and select my leg and do this. I want to create this pose. So my thigh and my leg, let's see, this might be too much, but let's just see how it goes. Okay. Yeah. This is perfect. This is good. So let's create this pose at this point. Okay? Yeah. So this and this and this. Yeah. Okay, so at this point, we just want to play with the rotation of our foot. So let's see, let's see, we can make our foot look just like this. And then, Yeah, you get the point. So just try to achieve something that looks just like this, okay? Zoom in and clean up the rotation of my foot, just make everything look realistic. So come here, you know, just maybe do this at this point. Okay? Perfect. Come here. We do this at this point, Yeah, you get the point. So this is what we want to achieve, basically. So I'll just select everything here and just easy ease them with the F nine button. Yeah, so this is what we want to get. We want to achieve for starters. Yeah. The next thing I will do is just go ahead and enable some more layers. I'll click on the Shy button here to enable the other layers and I'll hold on Control or command on the mac and click on my ec two button. Sorry, my ec two layer. I'll then enable it here and also my thigh two layer, and also enbtia and finally, my foot two layer, my foot two and enable here, just enable shy or shim. Get the point on she them, and then just do this to hi the other ones. Yeah. Now the next thing I'll do is just copy these keyframes and paste for the corresponding layers. For my Taiwan, I'll copy all the keyframes on Taiwan. Control C, and go to the first frame and select the Ty two and Control V. Yeah, the foot one, select my foot one, copy my key frames, Control C, and go to foot two and Control V. Okay, I'll hit you to expose my Q frames, and I'll do that for leg one as well. Select my Q frames, Control C, select Let two and Control V. I'll hit you expose my Q frames, and I'll just expose my Q frames for all these layers to make sure everything is working well. Perfect. Now we have all these animating just the same way. You get the point. Now the next thing what I'm going to do is just add expressions in order to enable our layers loop out continuously, so that we don't need to keep repeating these keyframes. So of course, you know how to add keyframes, how to add expressions rather. So I'll hold down all or option on the mark and click here to add an expression and click here and go to proper T and add the loop out animation. So loop out, just click and add and click away and do same to all other layers. So add the loop out admission to all other layers, the loop out expression to all other layers that have been animated. Yes, guys. I've added the loop out animation to all our layers. If we play them, we're going to see everything. It seems there's a little problem. There's a little arrow in the way I apply the keyframes here. For my leg and leg just select all of them and hit you to expose my key frames and I'll just make this longer, two layer longer to sort the problem. Now, close this now what we want to do is offset our layers by 15 frames. Yeah, so we have to pick the let, the foot two and the thigh two and offset them by 15 trims. So we'll select them and then just go ahead and bring them 15 trims before the other before the other layers. Now, if you play this, we're going to see that we are having our admission, okay? Yeah, so you see we're having our work cycle and mission. Our incredible work cycle and mission. Yeah. So most of the work has been done now I'll just shy the remaining layers and just hide them. Yeah, and now I will just do Control K to change my background color to white head okay so that we see our body parts animating properly. Yeah, so now we need to admit the hands, right? But before we do that, I just want to adjust my rotation for my chest just a bit. I feel my chest should be a bit rotated. Let's see, by one point four degrees, 1.4 degrees, okay? Just a bit. And I'll just do Control Q one more time and just increase the width of my composition so that we are making sure no parts are being cropped out, okay? Let me just increase my rotation a bit more and see if it makes more sense. 2.8. Yeah, I think 2.8 degrees for rotation of R looks good. Now I just want to now select my arm. I want to select my chest first of all, and then my head and I want to select my arm one my arm two and my hand one and hand two as well. Hand two, yeah, my fingers two and my fingers one. And I will just unshide them first and then right click on them and select Invas innate selection and make sure I hide the selected ones and also hide them. Can maybe not hide them because I actually want to see my legs, right? So you know what? I'll just unshy them, okay? Or untry them. Yeah, so that I think we can still perfectly work even without layers being visible here. Okay? So let's just take the arm one. And now for our first pose, we need to just hit R m one or take the rotation tool and make sure m one is here, okay? Yeah, you know, the leg one is in front, right? So the arm one needs to be at the back. Okay? The arm one needs to be at the back. Okay, I'm finding, this is my arm one. So my arm one needs to be at the back. Okay? And then arm two needs to be at the front. I'll just hit R and do this manually. So arm two needs to be here. And we actually need to make sure Thi one is above Thi two. Yeah. So Ti one needs to be above tit. Yeah, Thai one is above title currently. Yeah, it's above Ti two. So everything is working well. So our arm one needs to be rotated just like this. So we just create a keyframe for rotation and same also for arm two. And let's just zoom in and come to 15 frames and see what we've got. So 15 frames, and we want to bring our m one to this position, and our arm two to the position it was before. You get the point. So this is what we want to create. And then we just keep repeating the cycle. So we just need to really make sure we are having the correct rotation for our arms. Okay? Now, just hold on and click here and then give this loop out animation or expression and do same with this guy. Come to properties and op out. Okay? Now, let's play this and see. You can see that it's not really doing well. We actually need to come back to 1 second and copy this keyframe, Control C, Control V. Control C Control V. Now, let's play this and see if it doesn't work well, we will have to undo the expression. Yeah, so we can see it's playing well now. It's playing well. So our work cycle is just going well. Incredible. Incredible. Super incredible. Yeah, so maybe just select the keyframes and just easy ease them. Yeah, just easy ease them and incredible. You can see the easy is really going in there and making this look very sweet. Okay? Yeah, and if we wanted to add more detail, we could further animate our hand, our hand one and hand too. So maybe at this point, we want it to be this. At this point, maybe just come in. Now this is not necessary. Okay? This is not necessary. So if it's going to cause any complications, we might just forget about it anyways. But let's just try seeing if we can make things a bit more interesting by animating our hands. Okay? So I'll just first of all, create a keyframe for rotation on hand one and hand two. And let's see. So at this point, maybe maybe for hand one, I'll just do the rotation just a big backwards. And then for hand two, I'll bring it just a big forward. Okay. And then come here and copy this keyframe, Control C, Control V, and do same here, Control C Control V. So you can see this is a really subtle animation, nothing serious, but it just adds a little layer of realism. Okay. And, of course, we can just add loop out expression. Same also here. At loopOut expression. If we want, we could even admit the fingers. Admit the fingers if we want. Let's see. Let's try admitting the fingers. Select the finger one and finger two hit R, at this point, we want our finger one to be justice this to be justice. Create a key frame for rotation for fingers one and fingers two. Fingers one and fingers. And I'll just close this other layers that are opened, which we do not need right now. Yeah, so now we only have fingers one and fingers two opened. So come to 15 trims. For fingers one, I'll make this just this. And for fingers two, I think I will rotate it just this way. Then come to 1 second, and for fingers one, I'll do this. For fingers two, I will do this. I'll do this here, I'll do this. You just select them EZ keyframes and easy. And of course, hold on. Optional mark, click here, to add our expression and add the loop out expression and do the same thing to our fingers too. Look out expression. Incredible. Okay, we can see that even our fingers are animating. Yeah, just make this bigger. Make this fit my screen. And just like that, we have created our first character admission here in after effects from scratch, how incredible that is. So that's it for this video on character admission, here after effect. So this is just an introduction. In the next videos, we're going to be using a more advanced tool to achieve this fit. Okay? Yeah, so that's it for this one. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 4. 4 Installing Duik Angela & Setting Up our Workspace: Hey, there, welcome back. In this video, we're going to be installing the Duik Angela script in After Effects and we're going to be setting up our workspace to enable us start animating using the Duik Angela script here in After Effect. So all you need to do now is just go to the website for Duik Angela, which is rxlabortor.org slash download Duik Angela, okay then forward Slash. Or you can just do simple Google search. On your browser, and you should be brought to this page. This should be the first link you see. So go into the page and just come down here and you are able to donate using this button. So I encourage you to donate to the founders or to the developers of Duke. This enables them continuously provide Duik for free. Okay? So when you're done donating, you just click Take my Download. And it should bring you to the page where we are able to download Duik. Okay? Yeah. So just go down and now you can download Duik by simply clicking on the Download button. Just click here and it's going to download Duik for you. You can see that this is marks Windows, it works for both operating systems. And this is Duik API. Okay? This enables us to create scripts which include features of Duik. But this is advanced suf. You just need to download it and then come to your downloads. And this is our downloads, go ahead and extract your file. And right here inside our folder, this is what we get to see. You have a read me text file, which gives you instructions on how to install Duik, Okay? So basically, you want to come to scripts and then come to script UI panels and just select everything here Control C, select everything, and then go to your folder. That your C dot dot or the folder in which you have your after effects installed. Mine is C dot dot and program files and Ado B. And then just come to Adobe After Effects, 2024, because that's the one we're using and going to support files, and you want to go into script and then you want to go into script UI panels, and just go ahead and piste your files here Control V as you can see, I have all the panels pisted already, but I'm just going to do that one more time. Okay. And after you do that, all you need to do is to restart after effect, okay? So we're going to restart after effect and get back to setting up our workspace. Yeah, so back in after effect, all you need to do now to enable Duke is come to Windows and just scroll down. And you're going to see all the panels you pasted, okay? So all these are different features of Duik, okay? Different components of the script. So in order to have everything in one place, you can just enable the Duke angular script that this particular one, my mouse is on. So just click on it and going to open it up, and that contains all the features, okay? All the features. So let's just wait for it to load, and this is our Duke panel. Yeah. So right now, I'm just going to go ahead and set up my work panel so we can start using Duke. I'm just going to close this temporarily. And now we want a workspace which gives us enough room. We want the workspace which gives us enough room for our layers. So what I'm going to do is just click here and drag this panel here. I'm going to drag this panel here, so we have our layers here. And first of all, I'm just going to just temporarily create a new composition, but that's a very useless composition just so I can see what I'm doing properly. So here, I'm just going to close my audio panel, close my effects and presets panel. Okay. And I'm going to bring my composition panel here. Okay, so that I have my projects and effects control panel in the middle and my layers here. So I also close the preview panel. I don't need this. And for my properties panel, I think I'll just position it here and also my aligned panel. So I'll just dock them in the simplist so I can switch between each panel like this. And I'll just make this smaller so you can see our composition bigger here. Yeah. So go back to my my project panel. Now let's try creating a new layer. So let's see solid and hit okay. Good. So now you see that we're able to see our timeline here and we are just going to use this button here to expand or collapse our timeline. So this is basically enabling or disabling several features or our timeline. So these buttons will basically enable or disable features we have here. Thereby increasing or decreasing the space for our timeline, for our timeline, yeah. So this is basically what you want to have. This is similar to what you want to have. And now you can go ahead and enable Duke. So Dungla enabled. Yeah, so it takes some time to load because it's really complex and ruboed plugin. Yeah, I'll just do Control key and change my composition colloquy, not my composition cool actually my solid. Yeah. So I want to just change my solid color. I don't like that green color. I just want something bright, even though it's temporarily. Okay, so what you want to do now you just click here where my mouse is click and hold, and then drag your Duke panel right under your projects and effects and control panel. Yeah. So this is what you want to have. You want to have your duke panel docked here. And you want to have your layers panel here, you want to have your composition panel here. Okay, you want to have your projects effects and controls panel up here. So this is how we're going to be working while using Duke. Now, come here where it default, come here and then click Save us new workspace, so we can see Duke Angela and hit Okay. Now, we just saved our panel, and the next video, we're going to use this panel to continue learning how to use Duke in after effect. So that's it for this one, see you in the next one. Bye bye. 5. 5 Advanced Rigging with Duik Angela – Creating bone structure: So we now have Duik Install here After Effects. And the next thing I'm going to do is go ahead and bring in my artwork. So I'll click here to go into the folder and select the girl to character EI file, and then import composition retain layer sizes, and hit Import. Yeah, and this is our character. I'll just click to go in, and I'll just control K to go into my composition settings and change the color to white so as to see every part of my character Clee. Yeah, so this is our character. We can see our character Clee. And these are, of course, our layers. We can see that I have named our layers properly with R and L for right and left, okay? And on top of our layer, we have a joint layer. And if I just hide this and enible it, you're going to see that this is actually the joint layer. This is our joint layer here. That's this layer with the circles, right? And what this does is it basically shows us positions of our joints, okay? So the way we design our character, it basically shows us the position of our joints, okay? Because the way we design our character, we design our character so that part of our character overlap so they overlap and create a circle so that those parts can rotate around that circle. So if I just hit T for transparency or opacity and reduce my opacity a bit for all my layers, apart from my joints, and I disable my joints temporarily, we're going to see that these parts overlap, right? For example, the left forearm and the left arm, they overlap and create this circle, okay the circle that's darker. So these joint markers are just there to show you the position of those circles because we need to place our ankle points for these layers right here, right in the middle, okay? Remember, from the first video in this module, we learned that we actually need to reposition our ankle points properly at points like this so as to help us achieve realistic movements. That's also true for using Duik. Okay, I'm just going to take my past it back to 100. Now the next thing I'm going to do is just select my joint layer and right click on it and create shapes from vector layer. Now, I've done this so that it can be easy for me to kind of snap our anchor points to the middle of these layers, since they are now joints, okay? So I'll select the vector layer and shy it. And I'll select the joint layer and just lock it so that we don't select it accidentally. Yeah. And now we are going to reposition our joint for every part of our character. Okay? Now, before I do that, I'll just do Control K one more time and go to the composition settings. And now let's look at some features of our composition. We have the width and height, and I have them as 2000 pixels, and I've created them as 2000 pixels so that we get the best resolution. Okay? We need to get the best resolution or high resolution for a character. You can go as high as your system can handle, okay? So 2000 is just okay for me. Now, that's because sometimes you might need to zoom into our character in certain parts of our character, and that will cause pixilation or reduction in quality. Therefore, you have to make your initial character design. In a high resolution, okay? And then for frame rt, I'm using 24 frames per second. And for duration, I'm using 2 minutes. Okay, you have to make your duration a bit lengthy so that after we are done again later on, you might not run out of time, and need to start increasing your duration, which would then cause things to be complicated. Okay? So just make your duration as long as possible initially. So you can even make it 3 minutes. Yeah, 3 minutes, 30 seconds, okay? And it, okay. I will now collapse this and just make sure every layer now is up to 3 minutes, 30 seconds. Including my joint layer, but not really including my joint layer because I don't need that joint layer to be that long. If only I can, if only I can have my have my ankle points placed on the first second, okay? So it's just a temporary layer. We don't need it to be that long. So Controqa motion and make sure everything is perfect. And yeah, everything is perfect. We just hit okay. And now let's start positioning our ankle point. So let's start with this guy, make sure my joint layer is enabled. So for this guy, our ankle point is supposed to be here because the rotation is happening here, right? So just take your ankle point and bring it here. Now if you hold down control, you are now able to snap to the middle of your joint layer. I'll just zoom in one more time and select this and hold down Control. And yeah, now I've snap in the middle. Sometimes it gets a bit difficult to do that. So if it gets too difficult, just try to do it manually, since we have very little circle in the midst of in the middle of this big circle, which will make it really easy to please our ankle point. Yeah, so I'm just going to do that for every other parts of my character. This is the torso and for the torso, let me just isolate this and also this. So for the torso, we actually need the ankle point to be here. Okay? We need to be here. Build the hip also. So we need it to be here. So select the torso and bring your ankle point here. Zoom in and make sure your ankle point is right here. Put on control and snap it properly. And then for our hip, I want my ankle point for the hip to be in between the two joints for my two thighs. Okay, so I'll bring it here in between here like this. Perfect. And I'll unsolu all layers so I can go ahead and walk on other parts. So we are done with the arms. Sorry with the left arm and the left hand and the left forearm. So now let's go ahead and do same for the right arm, right hand and right forearm. So I'll just isolate these layers. So also with my joints. And for my forearm, the ankle point should be here. So select and drag my ankle point here, for my forearm, it should be here. Then for my right hand, it should be here. Perfect. On isolate them. And now let's move to the next guy. Let's work on the head and the neck. So the neck, the ankle point needs to be here. Okay? Yeah, it's perfect. And for the head, it needs to be here. Perfect. Now, let's work on the leg. So for the thigh, for the left thigh, ankle point needs to be here. Yeah, for the left leg, it needs to be here. So my control is not working here. I'll just do this manually. Please this manually. Perfect. Now for my left foot, my ankle point needs to be right here. For my right foot, needs to be right here. Good. For my right leg, it needs to be right here. For my right thigh, it needs to be right here. Yeah. So we have our ankle points perfectly set for everything. Let me just set also the ankle point for my hair. This hair. All we need to do is select it and bring it here. We need it to rotate from this point. So that, it rotates just like, Okay, it's not really doing well. Okay, we are actually not going to be animating it anyways, except if we're going to be animating it. Let see. Let me try different location. Let's see here. Okay, yeah, let's just reposition it here. Perfect. Yeah, and now we've perfectly repositioned all our anchor points to their appropriate locations. Now the next thing we're going to do is actually go in and learn how to use Duik. Yeah, so this is the interviews of Duik. This is what you get when you open Duik for the first time, and I'll just click and reposition and dock my Duik right here one more time. Okay? Yeah, so this is what we get. This is the first thing you see. And these are the list of the sections. We have the OCO meta ik section, which is the open cutout meta ik section. We have the boon section, the links and contraints section, the controller section, the automation section, the admission section, the camera section, the tool section, the get help, and so on and so forth section. Yeah. And all these sections can make Duik seem a bit cumbersome, okay? Because there are lots and lots of features right in all these sections. Okay, but you don't need to learn how to use every feature here because you don't need the knowledge of every feature in Duik to be able to create custom rig. So we're going to just learn what we need to learn to create custom what we need to learn to create good rigs. So here am I in the first section, which is the open cutout section. And this is just a library, four rigs. You can come in here, select a rig that has been created for us and apply it to our character with just one click. Okay? So if I just go into Ant for example or anthropods, for example, I can click on Ant and create a rig t for an Aunt character. Similar for Scorpion, and this list keeps increasing. Okay? The list keep increasing. We can also create our rig and save to the open cut out metal rig library. Okay? So there are different types of characters, the birds, which include the chicken, the penguin, the rooster, and we even have the plantigrade, which include animals like the bear, the emo, the monkey, the rabbit, okay? Go back and select the hominoid, which includes gorillas and humans. So for our human character, this is what we are going to be using. Yeah, so I'll just go ahead, create a new composition named this composition Angela. And hit okay and name our character Angela. Now, this is just a test. We are not really going to be using this. I'm just trying to create a simple rig and show you how it works. So it's telling us to hide layer controls, we just hit Ignore because we don't have layers anyways for new composition. So we see that Duke is creating our rig automatically for us. And screting it and parenting the different parts that need to be parented, okay? So it's parenting the tip to the root. Okay, it's parenting the tip to the root. Yeah, so this is an arm, as you can see. You can take your rotation tool and rotate this, and you're going to see that the entire arm will rotate with it. Okay? And we just created this with the click of a button. Yeah. So you can select your bones. You can even go into the effects and control panel and have lots and lots of settings, even the color of your bones, the size of your bones, and you don't need to change them from here. You can just come to the bones panel this panel right here and click on select Bones click on Select Boons, it's going to select all your boons. And you might not see your options, just like how I am seeing them. Now, in order to fix that, you can click here. Right here that edit settings. And now, under this please, you're going to see standard in yours, okay? You're going to see that it's set to standard. Now this is just different levels of experience with the software or with the script. So for you as a beginner, you need to come and select Rookie. Now, what rookie does is it creates text labels for all the parts in Duik and gives you text explanations for all the features so that you can understand properly, understand what feature that is and what it does. So just do that and click Apply and it's going to apply that setting to your Duke Angela script. Yeah. So here we are one more time. We can go into the open cutout section. And we've looked at the open cutout section, just go to boons and select your boons by clicking this button and now go to boon settings. And in boo settings, we can actually edits buns. So for example, we can edit the side that our boon appears. Is it the left side of our character or the right side, the location? Is it the front or back, the color? Click color and just skim between colors, right? So we can see that as we click here, the colors change. When you have your color, you just click Apply. That's the color you want, you just click Apply. It's going to change the color for our character. Yeah, so we see that the color has changed. And same also with the size can reduce the size of our bones if our bones are too big. We could make this 50%, okay? And it apply. And yet, you can see that the sizes of our bones have decreased. Yeah, not just only our bones. We also have a feature named envelope. And this envelope basically creates an envelope for our rig and gives us what our character would look like or should look like. So this can be a first step for design our character. We could even start design our character from After effect, because we can reposition this. We can move things around, okay, move our rig around to the push we want, but this is just, by the way. This are the main thing we should be looking at, so we're just going to delete everything here. Or select boons and delete everything here. There and delete. Good. Now, let's go back to our composition to our girl composition. And for this girl composition, I'm just going to first of all, delete the extra composion I created and rename this Angela. So our girl composition should be Angela. Perfect. Yeah. So just close out of the boon settings, and now let's go ahead and create boon structures for our character. Let's go ahead and actually create bone structure for our character. So there's a very easy way to create boon structures in Duik. We just need to select the parts from the roots to the tip. So, for example, for arm now, we have to select from the arm, okay? And then the forearm and then the hand. So you have to select them in the order which they occur, okay? So, of course, the arm has the ultimate control over the forearm and the hand, right? That's how you need to select your characters, or your parts, and then come here under bones. Come and click on this huminoid option. And you're going to see that we can create an arm. We can create a leg, we can create a spine and a hair. And of course, this is an arm we want to create. So just click on this arm Options button. That's the gear box. Or the gear icon, and you're going to see this interface. And for this interface, you can pin it, you can close it, and you can select your options. So for our hand, we need a hand, a forearm and an arm, right? But we don't need a shoulder, and we can then select the position, which is left, of course, because we've named it properly, and then the location, which is the front, right? So this is all you need to do in hold on control. And click here. So if you on control and click here, it's going to automatically perent our bone structure to our okay to our hand. Yeah. So if, for example, I take my rotation tool now and select this and just rotat this, we're going to see that everything will follow along. Okay? It's meant to follow along. I don't know why it's not following along. Everything is foling along. I love this. You can see how easy it was creating this very first step, okay? Yeah, so we just need to take the tip of our rig here and bring it to the tip of our fingers. Perfect. And I don't like the colors because the colors are not tanding out from our character. So I'll select all my bons here and then go to color settings and just change the color. Just change the color I don't need the envelope, so just sect the envelope and just change the color, hit to this color, and just okay position this a bit more so I can see my apply button and apply. Good. So we now have our boons tending out. Perfect. Now the next thing I'm going to do is, of course, close out of my boon settings and do the same thing for the left arm, right? Or for the right arm. So we have our torso in the way we can just hide our torso and now select our arm, our right arm, and then the forearm down shift and select it. And then the hand in that. Okay and then click here, then click on the arm Options button. And now Dukes intelligent enough to know that this is now the right arm because the last one we created was the left arm right. Only that we need to change this to the back, not the front, pull down control again and click here to reposition everything or to reparent or to parent our bones to our hands, our left hand, okay? Everything is positioned properly, can take our rotation tool and try it out. Okay, we can see that we're getting that same error we got initially, but this one is working. Now let's try working with this. Yeah, so it's working. Apparently, I think we're selecting I was selecting the arm instead of the bone structure, right? So you need to actually select the bone structure, not the arm. Okay, not the arm, but the bone structure. Okay, that's this bone structure right here. And again, I don't like the color, so I can just select them and change the color, and change the color. So I'll go to my bone settings, change the color to something that turns out. So this should work. Yeah, this turns out better. Close out on my bone settings and go ahead and do that to my thigh to my left thigh, my left leg, and my left foot. Click here. And this time, we are creating a leg. So click on the leg options, and we need to have the tool selected, the foot selected. Okay, let's just do that one more time. Yeah, so we need to have our tool selected, our foot selected, our calf selected, and our thigh selected. And this is actually the left foot, and it's actually in the front. So do this, click this a couple of times to bring this to the front, okay? And then hold on control and click here. So it's going to take its time to create our foot. Perfect. And now that we have our foot bone structure created or our leg bone structure created. The next thing we're going to do is just go ahead and fix this. Okay? So what you want to do is click this and bring it here. Like this. Okay? And then just click on this joint and bring this joint to the tip of our foot, okay? Just like this. Then the next guy will be this guy. So click this and bring him to the back like this. I find it difficult to click and select so you have to bring the joints to the back of foots. Just here. And this one actually needs to go a bit below. But if I move it, it's going to affect this. So there is what we call the edit mode. You can select a bone, which has been parented and click on the edit mode, and it's going to temporarily unparent everything so you can manually take it to your location. I'm just going to hide my joints layer. So you can manually take it to your location, to the desired location, it should be at the tip like this. Okay? So you can manually take it to your desired location without affecting the child. You get the point. So do that. And for this one, I actually think bringing it here will be better. Yeah. So let's select this guy and bring him here. For this guy should be here and then click out of the Edit mode or click the Edit mode back. It's going to that of course, while having the boon selected, the boon which we enable Edit mode for, you just click back and it's going to present everything back properly. So this is what we want to have for our character. I'll click this one more time and enable Edit mode. And let's just bring this here. Okay? Just bring this here. Click back. So we want to have our foot looking like this for our character. Yeah. So the next thing we're going to do is test this, select this and just select your rotation to and try to rotate your leg, and it's working perfectly. Good. So let's go ahead and do that to the other leg. So select the right thigh, the right leg and the right foot and go into your humanoid, click care, and click here. This time, it's the right one. Yeah, sometimes moving this little box gets frustrating time. So it has to be the right this time and it should be at the back, not at the front on control, and click. Everything is being created automatically. Perfect. Now the next thing we need to do is just go ahead and, of course, reposition our joints properly. So we're going to start with this joint right here. Just select him bring him here. I select this guy and bring him here just to the tip. Because we want to create our rig in such a way that our character can stand on the tip of his toe, right? Yeah. So that's why we are taking much time to create the rig for the foot like this. Yeah. But if you don't want that feature, you can just create a normal food or simpler food. Yeah, so you want everything set out just like this for the right leg. Yeah, let's rotate this to see if everything is playing well. Perfect. And the next feature is the spine, okay? So we need to create the bone structure for our spine. So we're going to start with the foot. So with the hip. So select the hip and then control and select the torso and then control and select the neck and then the head in that order. So click here and click on spine this time. Click on spine options, and we need the hip. We need just one layer of spine. So I'm just going to hit one, put in one here, and then the head. Okay. Perfect, and then hold on control and click here to perent everything and create the bone structure. Perfect. Now, let's go ahead and reposition the tip of our head just here. Bring the tip of our head here, okay? And just like that, we have our spine created. We can test this by rotating our boon. Yeah, and everything is working perfectly, except that the features of our fist are not fully in the head. So we need to perient the features of our fist. That's the eyebrow, the eyes, the mouth, parented to our head, and also the extra hair we created here. It also needs to be parented to the head. Yeah. So everything moves along with the head. Now, let's try rotating our head or neck. Now we're going to see that everything follows the head. Yeah, so that's what we want to have. And right now we have everything perented properly. Everything has been perented properly, okay? And all bron structures have been created. So we can go ahead and start regain our character. Now we'll do that in the next video, so see you in the next one. Bye bye. 6. 6 Auto rigging & Cleaning up: So our bones have been created and have been parented to our artwork, and this is probably a good time to save your work. As you can see here, I've gone ahead and sieved my work. Do it regain. So just go ahead and save your work, and now let's continue. So the next thing we're going to do is just try to clean up our scene a bit to enable us to rig our character. And the first thing I'm going to do is select my bones, and I will just rename my bons. Yeah, I will renew my bones. This is something I should have done earlier, but I failed to do that, and I will renee my bones now. So I will just go to bone settings and go to group name. Click on group name and our name is Angela and look for the apply button. It's way down. So this is the apply button, I just apply it, and now we should see that all our bones get renamed. And this is a very good way to work, even though I didn't do this initially. So let's collapse our angela back. And the next thing I'll do is just duplicate my angular composition so that I can always go back if I get into trouble. So just select it and come to edit and duplicate. Okay? So I'm just having it as Angela too. So back into Angelo one. I'm also going to delete this composition one because it's useless. Yeah, so now back in our Angelo one or back in our Angelo composition, the next thing I'm going to do is just go ahead and delete some unwanted layers like our joint layers. Our joint layer, we really don't need it, so we're just going to delete it and yeah, basically, that's the layer we're going to delete. I think we have one hidden as well. So this joint layer as well, we're going to delete this so that we only have the parts which we are going to be rigging. Now the next thing we have to do is select our bones. Okay? You can do that by just clicking on this button, but I just did that manually here. Now, after you select your bones, the only thing you have to do next is just click At Rig. Click A to Rig, and it's going to tell you to hide your layer controls because they, of course, will slow down your process. So I'm just going to click Hide Layer Controls here and do its magic in the background, do all the calculations and the expressions, and do our gain for us. So our auto regain is completed, and as you can see, we have new layers that have been added to our layer stack. And the way Duke creates and organizes these layers is just incredible in the sense that it creates them with layer tags, with layer colooring and so on and so forth. So it's very easy to actually work with them. Like we can select each layer group. Let's say we want select the controllers, which are these ones, we can just click on the layer colors, and then select each layer with that particular color. Okay, so that's a really incredible way to work. And yeah, so the next thing we're going to do now is just go ahead and clean up our scene. We have too many layers which we don't want to actually be seen in the layer stack. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is just hide my bones. Okay? So we can hide our bones by coming to the bone section and just hide bones. So hide bones, and all our bones will get hidden. You can see it cleans up the scene a bit more. Yeah, now the next thing I'm going to do is just go ahead and lock all my artwork layers, Lock also all these layers. Apart from my controller layers. Our controllers are these little icons, let me just zoom in here you see these little icons that Duke has created, which enable us control our character. We just go ahead and clue all these layers. Sorry. Go ahead and log all these layers. I'll just click and drag and then also hi them. I'll select not really select. I'll just enable my shy option here and then click and drag and hi all our layers. Yeah. And of course, enable the shy switch here. Just click here to go back. And yeah, so we have only our controllers. And now let's go ahead and clean up our controllers. You can see that we have the first controller here. It's a head controller, and we have effects under it, right? So this is the head controller. It controls the head. Controls the head. And before we kind of go in and mess up with the controllers, there is one more thing we need to do. We need to select all our controllers here and hit P for position, and I'm just going to enable the position property here. Now, we're going to see that we have different values for position. And this is our neutral pose. This is our initial post, and we should be able to always go back to this initial post. And that means that if we mess with our controllers, it's going to be hard for us to go back to our initial push because we are then going to need to memorize these values and apply them correctly to go back to our initial pos. And that's nearly impossible or even impossible, okay? So how do we fix this? We can fix this by selecting all our controllers minus these ones that have zero, zero, okay? Or you can select all of them and just click here. Go to links and cotrans and just click on t zero. Now, if you click on At Zero, what after effects does or what it does is it creates null objects for our controllers and gives us the ability to go back to our initial post by just typing in 00. As you can see now, every value here is 00, right? Every value here is 00, so it means we can just mess with our controllers, and all we need to do is just type zero, zero. And we are back to our initial pos. So this is a very important thing to do. So always make sure you do that before messing with your controllers. Yeah. Now, let's go ahead and see our controllers. Let's select the first guy. This is the head controller. Or we can go into the effects and controls panel here and open the icon menu. And now we can actually increase the size of our controller. Okay, we can flip it so that it's facing the actual position of our head and then or the actual direction of our head, and we can even move it. So we can move it just behind our head so that it doesn't obstruct our view. If we want, we can change the color by of course clicking here. Yeah, so that's the head for us. Maybe I will just reduce the size a bit. And the head does this, it controls the head, right? Yeah. And we can see that after doing this, the bounding box for our controller now increases. That's because the anchle point for our controller is here. We can bring the anchle point back to the position of our controller by going into the anchor option here and just make the size. Hid enter. Now, we see that the bounding box is brought has now been brought to the position of our controller, and this makes it easier and cleaner to work with. Yeah. Now the next controller is our neck controller or shoulder controller. Yeah, it controls our shoulder just like this. Okay? Without controlling our hips. Okay? It controls our shoulder without controlling our hips. Yeah. So we just undo that or bring the value back to 00. And now, I'm just going to make this bigger, open the icon menu, make this bigger and position it also to the left hand side. Go into the ankle and make this zero, so we can control it right from here. Yeah. I'll do that to all the other ones. This is the torso controller, control to torso and it rotates from the torso anchor point, right? So we can just go into the icon, make this bigger. Okay, and position reposition it. Okay, sorry, not orientation, but position reposition it here. And for anchor, we can make a size zero. Yeah, and positioniyF this shoulder, we could make it bigger. So increase the size maybe to just this. And yeah, we can see this is the ankle. So this torso, we can use this to control the torso just as you seen. Okay? Control the torso. And sometimes these controllers can do some wet stuff. But there is this really important one, which is the body controller, which I have selected right here. I would just go into my icon, make my icon bigger and position it just outside here. I'm going to flip it so that it's in the direction of a carta, take it a bit lower, take it a bit further from the body, or maybe just reposition it here and then move the torso controller, a bit up Yeah. Now, this is the most important controller, the body controller, okay? It controls the entire body. And if you want to control the entire body, I would suggest you use it, not these other ones. These other ones should be used when you want to create little movements around the specific part they control. Okay? But if you want to control the entire body, you should be using the body controller for the anchor point, just make the size. And yeah, this is the body controller. It's the most important controller here. So it controls everything in the body, but the hands, the torso, the hips, the legs, you get the point. Yeah, so the body controller next is the hip controller. Open the icon and make this bigger. For this, we use this to control the hips. So you can just actually use the rotation only for this, and you see we are controlling the hips by just rotating the hips controller. Yeah, so just position it properly. And sometimes we might don't need all these controllers, really. Sometimes the body controller and the limb controllers, that's for the hands and the legs are just enough to do all the job for us. But this is how we clean up our controllers. We clean up the ankle, make the ankle just in the middle and the position and the size as well. Yeah. So that's it for these controllers which control the spine. The next ones are the ones that control the hands and the feet. So for the hand, this is the left hand controller. You can see us it to control our hands or left hand. So I'll just open up my icon and make my icon bigger. It's too big. I will rotate it to 180 degrees and just position it right here. Below my hand and I'll just flip it so that it aligns with the direction of my hand and then go into my uncle and make my uncle size zero. Yeah, so that we have this incredible, we can rotate it rotate our hand. Hello and move it to move our entire hand. Yeah. Next is this guy to select the controller, go into icons, reposition it here, rotate it to 180 degrees, flip it, resize it to the appropriate size and move it and then the uncle, we just need to bring the uncle size to zero. Yeah, and then we'll go ahead and work on the fifth controllers. So for the fifth controllers, go into the icon or make this bigger teeth our teeth eats. And position it properly. Maybe make it even bigger position it properly. And for uncle, we're going to make this zero. And do the same thing for the right foot controller. Yeah, so just like this, we have gone ahead and worked on our controllers. Now, I'm going to hide some of these controllers because I didn't need all of them. I will hide the hip controller to select the controller, hide it here. Okay? Yeah, just hide it here and lock it so that we don't select it accidentally. Now we only have the head. And also, I think I'm going to hide the torso, so hide the torso and also lock it. So now we only have our head, our neck and shoulders, and also our body controllers. Yeah, the next thing we do from here is just go ahead and see what some of the things we can do with our controllers or some of the effects we have right here. Just close this up and I'll select everything one more time and hit P and make our positions zero, zero, so that we go back to our original pose. Now, I just will select my right hand controller, and now under my effects and control, we have IK effect added. Now on the here, you're going to see that we have an option for K FK, and IK and FK are basically two systems by which we can control our RIG. In animation, in character animision, we can either control our rigs by IK and FK. And the difference is that for IK, the computer goes in and does a bit of calculation for us, so it gives us limited options to edit. So it gives us limited options to manipulate manually. So in this case, we are actually using the IK because we have the handles here, and we just need to manipulate these handles, and the computer automatically controls how every other thing reacts, okay, how every other patch reacts. Okay? But for the FK, it gives us the ability to control everything manually, everything manually. So the FK is kind of giving us more controls, but things can get a bit too complicated using the FK. So sometimes we're going to switch in between the FK and IK systems while animating our character. Okay, so while having my hand selected, I can go into my IQ settings, and I have some controls here. I have some options. Let's say I kind of move my hand this, okay? We can use the side option here to actually change the side of our movement. So right now, it's set to 100%. If we make this mis 100%, we're going to see that our hand moves in the opposite direction, right? Moves in the opposite direction, just like this. Yeah, so this is just a way to kind of control the direction of our movement. Yeah, so we could take this back to 100 to have the initial. Same also with our foot and all other parts. So our food also has the direction. Food controller also has the direction. Let just zooming biting with our foot. So with our foot non, you can see that can make this site 100 and we are turning the direction of our character towards the left hand side. Yeah. These are some of the very few options or some of the options we can get with this or we get with this. Now, if I just disable the Ike, we will now be able to use the F key to manplt our character. Let's just take this back to 00. Oh, no, even take this back to 00 so that we can see the effect of disabling our IK. So if I select my IK handle now my controller and disable my IK, we're going to see that our character then goes to the FQ wood, and now we can use the FQ wood to manually control our character. And since we have our characters hand features locked, we won't be able to actually select this, but we can select our controller and just open some of these settings. And now with these settings, we can go ahead and say, go to FK. So we can open FK and now manually manipulate our body parts. So we have our body part and we can manually manipulate this using the FK option because we have gone ahead and disabled the IK option right here. So if we enable the IK, we'll go back to what we had using the IK. I'll just reset this so that we go back to what we had initially. Make the 00. Yeah, we can see that we've actually messed up our character. Yeah, so I'll just do Cont Z, Country Z a couple of times to go back to what I had initially. Yeah. Now we have everything looking normal now, 000. All we needed to do was just make this 000 and everything will go back to the initial. So I suggest you just work with the IK. So just work with the IK. It makes things easier. So whenever we want to use the FK, we just go ahead and disable the IK and basically use the FK. Yeah. So that for the hand handles, and then for the leg handles, for the leg controller, we have a lot of options as well. Of the controller option, we have the foot IK option, which works just like the one we looked at for the hands, right? We have the FK, which we can control the upper, lower end manually when we disable the IK, okay? And right under the foot rule, we have some options here. We can actually edit our toes. Okay. And right under the foot rule, we have the tip toe, which enables us do this to our toes, okay? So we can use the tip toe option to make our character tip toe, okay, just like this. And we have the heel as well. Okay, so our character can do this and we have the foot rule. And these are some really advanced rigging features. And we achieved these controls due to those limbs or those bounds we added to our character's foot when we were placing the bones, if you remember correctly, yeah. So that's what gives us the ability to manipulate the foot in this manner, in this manner, yeah. Yeah, so these adoptions, we get with our foot, and we've basically seen how all this work. So in the next video, we're actually going to go ahead and start animiting our character to make our character move and perform actions. So that's it for this one. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 7. 7 Walk run cycle animation in Duik Angela: So in this video, we're actually going to go ahead and create our walk and run cycles using Duik automatically here in After Effects. So the first thing I will do here is go ahead and read enable these controllers and unlock them. And in order to create our run and walk cycles, we just need to select all our controllers, select all your controllers and go to the automation and expressions section of your Duik Angela in. Or script, and then all you need to do now is just click on walk run cycle. Click on it, and Duik is going to run its magic in the background and create our run and walk cycle. And our post will change here, and my character is looking really weird. Yours should also be looking weird. If you followed all my instructions. But don't worry, we're going to fix this just in a bit. If we try playing, now we're going to see our character actually working, but our character is working in a very weird way, and that's because of the way we designed our character or the way we positioned our character. So our character is positioned on the left hand side, and that's why our legs are looking like this. Our left leg is looking like this, okay? And also for hands, let's go ahead and fix our hands. Why are our hands not moving correctly? That's because of the weight option. So if you go into your effects and control panel while selecting your hand, you're going to see weight at 100. So you just need to relax this, okay? So as you relax this, you're going to see that your hand is now moving freely, right? So you just have to relax this to see 0% or close to zero, okay? And do same with this other hand here. So I'll relax my weight to see zero. And now if I play this, you're going to see that now we fixed our hand. Okay, we fixed our hands. So our hands are swinging how they should, okay? The only thing left is just our legs, right? So for our legs, we're going to go ahead and start by selecting the most affected leg, which is our left leg, which is this leg to select him and go into your effect and control panel. And right here, we want to actually change the side. We see that the side is -100. We want to make this plus 100. So just remove the minus and just make this plus. And now we see that our leg is now in the right location, okay? So when we play this now, it's looking way better than how it was looking. Before. Okay? So in order to enable us play this better, I'm first of all, going to reduce my resolution to half. And then I'll just come here, and now you're going to see this new icon. And this icon was created because we created an automatic walk and run cycle. So it's basically the controller for our run and walk cycles. Okay? So just select it and just come to icons here, and I just want to actually make this bigger. I'm going to make this bigger, and I'm going to position this or reposition it here. Just outside there so that it's easy to select, okay? So when we select our guy now, we are going to be able to edit features of our animation. As you can see, there are lots and lots of options to customize here, okay? Well the first thing I'm going to do is come to computation to open computation. And on the computation, we see that these values are used to compute the admission, okay? So they can be helpful for your own expressions. So we have the cycle frequency, which is one. We have the cycle duration, which is 1 second, and we have the cycle duration in frames, which is 24 frames per second. Okay? So this tells us that if we reduce the length or the duration of our work cycle to 1 second or to 24 frame trader, we are going to be able to complete the entire work cycle and if we make that the length of our play time, it means we can keep looping around our work cycle without having to render all through, which will make play now animation easier. What I want you to do now is just come here and click here. If you click here, you are now going to be able to type in the frames you want, okay, the fim you want to position your time at. So now, since it's 24 frames per second, we are going to position our time at 23 frames and hit enter. So it's going to take this to 23 frames, and we want to trim our composition, or our time rather. So in order to do this, the easiest way to do this is just to hit on your keyboard, and it's going to just trim our time to to 24 frames. It means we can now play this and we're going to have a smooth animation because it's playing around our animation cycle. We don't have to render all through, and that makes it easy. So we just close this computation and now let's go ahead and see what else we can do to make our character look normal because it's not looking normal. The next thing I want to do is just select my body controller and just reposition this a bit, maybe to the front. Yeah, reposition my body controller just like this. Now let's play this and see what we get. Yeah, this is better. This is better. Yeah, this is incredibly better. Now, the only thing we have to fix now is our foot. You can see how our foot is being rotated very awkwardly. So the next thing I'm going to do is just re select my animation controller, and I want to just go into my settings now. Okay? So for my settings, I'll just go into my leg settings. So just come to your leg settings, and for my feet height, it should be 25%. For my feet rotation, I'll just reduce this to say 45%. So let's make this 45%. And now let's try playing our admission and see. Yeah, and you can see that our admission is now playing very beautifully. Now the next thing I'm going to do is just go ahead and hide some of these controllers that we don't need. And actually, we don't need any other controller. So I'm just going to hide all of them. Anyone shi them. Even lock them and probably shi them. So for my shy, I want to just enable this and shi them. Okay. Yeah, try them. Click here. In order to make my timeline longer, I'll just click, go into columns and just disable my parents and link so that we have more time here. Good. More space rather. Now the next thing we're going to do is just go ahead and see some of the options we get with our animation cycle. Controller. So right now we are basically working. Our character is basically working. And this is incredible because if we were to admit this manually, we won't get it this easy. It takes a lot of work to actually achieve an admission that looks this good. Okay? Admission is really stressful and complicated endeavor. Even the simplest animations are usually difficult to create. So Duik makes things incredibly easy for us, and that's just amazing. That's not all we can do with our automatic run and walk cycle. There are so many options right here, and we're just going to look at them right now. Now, if you open your general motion, which is the first option here, if you open this, it's actually a slider which controls the motion of our character. So let's make this zero. If we make this zero, we're going to see that our character is now static. Character is no longer moving because our general motion is zero now. Our general motion controls our work cycle and our own cycle. As we can see now, with our general motion at 100, our character is now working because our work cycle is also at 100. We can reduce this to actually reduce the rate of work or how much our character is working. Yeah, so we can see that our character is now working slower because I've reduced my general motion. You get. That's basically what the general motion does for you. It controls the walk cycle and also the run cycle. Now let's just make our general motion 100 and make our walk cycle zero and our run cycle, let's see 85. And now we're going to see that our character is now running. Yeah, our character is now running. Incredible. Good. But we can notice some weirdness with the running, and that's because our cycle duration has changed. So we can now see that because we increased the speed of our character or because we made our character run, our cycle duration is now 17 frames, okay? No longer 21 frames, what is it 21 or 23? It's no longer 24 frames. So we have to change this to 16, okay? We have to change our play duration to 16 and hit N. Okay, to trim this to 16 frames, okay? Because we have 17 frames as our cycle duration. Yeah. So now when we play this, our loop will now be perfect. So we are not having that weirdness any longer. Incredible. Now, let's just go up and now we've looked at our general motion. We've looked at our own cycle and our work cycle. Now, let's open the character and see the options we can manipulate under our character. We have the first one, which is the character height, okay? And the best way to see how this thing works is just by actually boosting up the values to basically see what effect they give us, okay? So the character height, I normally don't mess with this. Most of the time. So it's just the height of our character, right? Like, because I increase the height, we can see the wetness we get so I normally don't mess with character height. Yeah, but for the energy, it basically increases the energy of our character, how active our character can be. Okay? So let's make this 60 so you see the boost in energy. Now, we can see that our character is now running, and the movement is very exaggerated. I think 60 was too much. Let's see 30. T 30 will give us a good exaggeration, not too much, but a very noticeable. Yeah, so you see there is an increased energy in our character. And the softness is basically how soft the movement is. Yeah, so that's it for the character on the walk cycle, we have the work speed. We have it at -100, because it's going in the left direction. If we make this plus 100, we're going to see that we will now go in the opposite direction. So in this case, it's going to kind of reverse our character. It's going to reverse our character. But of course, our character is not working, so we are not going to see that work. Our character is running. So if we want our character to reverse while running, we will have to change this actually to 100. Yeah, that's the run cycle. So now we're going to see that our character reverses. Okay? Running the opposite direction. You get the point. Yeah. So I will just give this a bit of work and a bit of run so that we get to see options for boot workalk and run. You get the point. So for my run, I'll just make this -101 more time. And for my work, I'll just keep this as -100. Yeah, so that we have a mix of boot work and run. Yeah. So next thing I'm going to do is go ahead and look at the walk cycle type. So we have it set to realistic. We can select dancing, and it's going to give us a kind of funny walk, kind of funny walk. We're not seeing the effect very well. You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to make our run cycle to zero and just make our walk cycle C 85 hdenta so that we get to see the options properly. Let's go back to my computation and we are just going to turn this to 23 so that everything happens in a loop. So make this 23 and hit in on your keyboard to trim the time. Yeah, now we can see the effect we get by changing the type to dancing. So let me just change it back to realistic. So you see that we actually have a realistic work cycle. So this is what we know as a realistic work cycle. We can actually now turn it to dancing, and now you're going to see that our character is actually dancing. Yeah, our character is actually dancing. We to turn this to 100. And Yeah, so our character is actually dancing. This is a very cartoony and funny way of admitting our character. So let's look at the neck and head. Open the neck and head, now we can swing our neck and head. So you can see it has a minus two degrees swing and plus two degrees swing for our neck. So we could increase this maybe 12.8 degrees. And we don't want to go wild with this because it can give us some really weird results. Now, let's play this and see what we get. Yeah, so we can see our character's head is swinging. But the head and the neck are swinging. Incredible. And that's what we get with the neck and head swings. And let's close this let's look at the body. So for the body, we can actually admit the torso swing, the spine swing, and the hip swing. Let's just make these values a bit higher and see what we get. So 12%, 10.7%, 9.3%, and let's see what we get this So you see what we get by increasing our torso swing, our spine swing, and our hip swing. I'm just going to make my torso swing even higher. Say, 60%. And let's see how crazy our character looks now. So we can see how crazy our character looks. So we can go really crazy with this. We can make our characters do really incredibly crazy stuff, okay? Our imagination is basically our limit here with what we can achieve. Yeah. So I'll give you the 6% for everything. Let's move to the next one. So close the body, and let's see the arms. So this is the shoulder swing, the arm swing, the arm softness. And now we can also open and control the left arm parameters and the right arm parameters. Yeah, so there are lots and lots of things we can control here. There are lots and lots of things we can control here. So I advise and see for yourself. But in order not to waste so much of our time, I'm just going to go ahead and create a quick admission cycle. So I'll just make this longer. S 45 seconds. And now we're going to come here and create a keyframe for general motion, create a keyframe for walk and run. And also create a keyframe for our work type. Let's select realistic and just create a keyframe and go into the neck and head and create a keyframe for head swing, neck swing, and also the body and create a keyframe for the torso swing, the spine swing and the hip swing. I'll just hit you on my keyboard to bring up all our keyframes and let's start animating. I'll zoom in and now we'll go to 1 second. And just select all of these keyframes and bring them forward. I'll bring them forward to 2 seconds. And basically come here to 1 second, and I just want to make our general motion zero, so that our pus is maintained so that we start from our initial pus, okay? Actually, I want to replace this keyframe with this one with the one where our motion or general motion is zero, so that for 2 seconds, we start with our initial puse, and then we just start increasing our motion 2-4, we going to make our general motion 100. And then we're going to make our work cycle, say 50 so that we don't start so far so that we start just slow slowly and then come to the next second like the fifth second and make our walk cycle 100. Okay. Then come to the sixth second. Or even the seven second just repeat this keyframe right here so that in the eighth second, we are going to make our work cycle C zero, make our work cycle zero. But by this time, I want our run cycle to have started. So we'll just come back and right here, I'm going to just increase our run cycle maybe to 10%. Okay. Well, I think what I'll do is actually bring this q frame here. And for here, I'll just click here to repeat the initial Q frame. So I run cycle will start from here. And then as it's reaching here, at this point, I want it to be say 40% so that in the next 2 seconds our run cycle will now be 100%. While our work cycle is zero, you get a point. So let's try playing this and see. Playing this might be a bit cumbersome, taking a lot of time. So I'll just go ahead and create more key frames before playing everything at the end. Now the next thing I want to do is just make sure our guy runs for a bit to maybe runs for for some seconds. So from the ninth second to maybe the 14th second, or the 15 second. So go to 15 seconds, and I want to actually repeat my Q frame for my run before finally slowing down my run to see ten. Yeah, and then from here on, we just want our work cycle to continue. So I'll just go ahead and create a keyframe for my work cycle here and then just continue working down here. So I'm going to start by increasing our work cycle to, let's say 50. And then we'll just come here and increase our work cycle to 100. Okay? And at this point, I'll just make my run cycle back to zero. Yeah, so that we get this. Perfect. Now we have gone ahead and created keyframes for both our work and run cycles. Now the next thing we're going to do is just go ahead and create keyframes for other aspects of our character. So now we are using the realistic work. Okay? Using the realistic, it's realistic. So before it starts running, I actually want to switch it to the dancing mood. So let's see here, okay? So you just click here to create a keyframe for realistic, and then you just come here and make this dancing. Now, let's see. Yeah, so he's dancing, and then he starts to run. So for running, I actually want as he starts to run or as she starts to run, actually want her to run in the realistic mood, not in the dancing mood. So let's just come here and take this back to actually create one more keyframe for dancing, then come right here and take this back to realistic. Get the point. Yeah, so we can see that our neck and head spins are actually looking funny as our character runs. So, of course, we don't want them to be we don't want them to be on while our character is running, right? So we just come down and and we want them to actually stop as our character starts to run. So we're just going to select all these keyframes first of all, and just bring them here and come to the next guy here and just make them zero. So this is our head swing, our next swing. So not really make them zero, but just reduce the swing, right? So let's make this less than three or 2.8, this should be C minus three. This should be plus one, this should be plus two, maybe this should be plus one. You get the point. Or just hit controls to see if my work, so she's running and then she stops running. So right here, I'll just click here to copy and paste my key frames, and I will now start creating my exaggerated looks. I'll come here and just make the head swing a bit more conspicuous and now go some frames forward and make the next swing a bit more conspicuous. Okay? So So when she starts working, the head and neck will start swinging, and the exaggeration will be much for the neck and head swing this time. Yeah, next, we want to actually just bring this keyframe forward because we want it to reach 100% work cycles before the end of our animation, right before the end of our time. I'm actually going to bring this forward. Okay, forward like this. And for my head swing, I'll make this. I'll take this keyframe backward, and for my next swing, I'm actually going to bring this forward, so that it starts after our head swing and then for these keyframes, I'm going to take them forward and have them activated at different times. You get the point so that when we come here, we are not going to create the next keyframe for our torso swing, which will be a bit exaggerated or a bit too exaggerated. So let's see, 27%, and that will be very exaggerated and I want that because I want our character to look really cartoonish and really dramatic. And then for the spine swing, I actually want this to be exaggerated as well. Maybe that's too much. So let's say 15 and seem also for our hips. Maybe 13. Yeah. And we actually want to change the type, the admission type, the work type, right? So right now, it's realistic, as you can see here. So I want to just come in time, maybe come here and create or come here around 17 seconds and create a Q film, change to dancing so that we can start dancing from here. You can start the dancing work type from here. It's going to be really dramatic because it's going to be dancing and it's going to have and she's going to have all these other fims that make really funny movements. You get. She's going to have a range of funny movements here and then as you can see, right here, I'll just come right here, create a keyframe for my general motion, come to the last fim and just make my general motion zero, so that we end our admission just on the last film, you get the point. Yeah, before the end here, I'll just create a keyframe for my head swing and my neck swing, and I will copy this keyframe. Yeah, I'll copy these keyframes. There's a way to copy these keyframes actually using our Duik Angela plugin. You have to come to the Admission tab or the admission section and just select the keyframes and click on Copy Admission and then go to where you want to pise them, which should be here and then piece Admission and pieced animision. It's going to piece our keyframes. Basically, we're going to have this and I think before the end, I should kind of change my admission type, my work type too realistic. Yeah, I don't want it to dance weirdly down to the end. Okay? So I just come here and create a new Q frame maybe here. Now, you don't need to follow everything I've done precisely because it's going to be really difficult for you, okay? It's going to be really difficult for you because I've just been going with the flow. So just go with the flow and create something cool. You get the point. So I'll come to my type and create a new keyframe here, and then come a bit forward and change this park to realistic. Incredible. Then we're going to end as realistic. Okay, at realistic. Now that's basically what we want to create for this example. Before I ran preview this, I will select my keyframes, how easy is my keyframes to seem with these ones under. So I'm not selecting the square Q frames, just these ones, just the linear q frames. So how easy is them. And now let's play and see what our animation looks like. Yes, so our round preview has completed. Now let's see what our admission looks like. And this is what our admission looks like. Incredible. And creating an animation like this manually is really a pin in the ***, okay? It's really difficult to create all these things by manual keyframing. So we can see how much help Duik does for us, okay? Duik is incredibly helpful. It simplifies all these process for us and in fact, it's just incredible. It's just incredible. If you had experience with admission or if you have past experience with admission, you definitely testify to the fact that it's not easy to pull this off within this very short time. So Duik makes it possible, and we thank Duik for that. Yeah, we just keep enjoying our admission. Just keep enjoying watching our admission and enjoying what we have been able to pull off. Incredible. Now the next thing I will do is, I'll just go ahead and render out my file, with a transparent background. So I'll enable transparency here, and I will just hide my controller so that it doesn't render out with my video, because I want to actually composite this on a new background in a subsequent video. Yeah, so I'll just go ahead and control. Or command them on the MAC to enable our render queue and go into the best settings. Make sure your settings are just best quality, full, and yeah, hit okay. And then the uproot module, you have to select your RGB plus Alpha. We first of all, have to select our format, which is the QuickTime in this case, and then now format our QuickTime format enables us to export RGB plus Alpha, which will in turn give us a transparent background. So select this and hit Okay. And now we want this render in full. And we can see that I rent that one before, so we are just going to replace this heat render. And yeah. So that's it for this video, guys. We will come to the end of our video on creating our run and walk cycle animations. Here in After Effects, we can see how incredibly amazing the Duik script is. Yeah. So go ahead and explore this script, go ahead and go crazy and do stuff, right? I love to see the things you create with it. And this will come to the end of our video, guys. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 8. 8 Facial Rigging with Duik Angela – Setting up facial rig: Here we come back in this video, we're going to learn how to do facial rigging here in After Effects using Duik Angela. So go into your folder and bring in your character, and we are going to be using this facial rigging EI file to select the facial rigging at the below root of file and click here and select composition retain layer sizes and hiding port. And I'll just going to my rigging composition, and now you see this is the character we're going to be using. I'll do Control K to go into my composition settings. And you can see that this is a three K character. So I've designed this character in three K resolution, and I'll just change the color here to a white color so we can see all our parts clearly. Yeah, so this is our character, very young boy, and we're going to be animating or rigging this character in this video. Now, here are my Adobe layers. As you can see, we have layers for every part, just like how we did for the body rigging. So for the nose, for the eyes, for the mouth, okay, left eyebrow, right, eyebrow, left eye, right eye, even the eyeballs, okay? The facial highlight this little detail here. Okay? And we have basically layers for everything. Now the body has just one layer because we are not going to be animating the body. So the body will be stagnant while the other parts are animittd. Yeah, so all we need to do next is select all the layers which are going to be involved in our animiion, select all of them, right, click on them and create shapes from vector layers. Create ships from vector layers. And yeah, now we have ships from vectores. I'm just going to select all my new ship layers and bring them on top of our layer stack. So that we have our ship outlines and then our vector layers. That's our Adobe files. So I'll select all of these now and just delete them because we do not need them any longer. And I have only my body layer as a vector file because we're not going to be animating our body because we're not going to be rigging our body, it's going to be stagnant, basically, okay? So let's go ahead and start working on this. Now, the first thing I need you to observe is when you have your if you select your layer, like the nose outline, we're going to see that the bounding box for this nose outline is big. Okay, the bounding box is the entire size of our composition, and we actually need the bounding box to be just the size of our sheep. That's our news in this case. And sometimes when we import our characters from Adobe ito, we usually get instances like this, errors like this. And the easiest way to just fix this is just to take your pen to and just have one of the ankle points selected. For that layer, that's for the nose outlines in this case, and just delete. Hit delete a couple of times to delete that particular outline. Now you're going to see that we have another one, second one, that's because we have multiple shapes in the nose. So all of these are shapes that make up the highlight and shadows of the nose. Okay? So all you need to do is just keep selecting and deleting those anchor points till you get your bounding box just in the shape or in the size of your part. So I'm just going to take my pen tool while having my news outline selected, click and delete two times, hit delete two times and just keep doing that till I see that my bounding box is now in the size of my ship layer. Now, as you can see now, my bonding box is just the size of our noose, and now we can work with our nos layer because our bounding box is now the size of our noose. Okay? Now, we just hide our nose and do the same thing with the mouth and all of the parts that have the bonding box, the size of our composition. So I'll select the mouth, take my pen to click on one of the anchor points here and just keep deleting, click and keep deleting. Okay. So I'll just hit a skip and select back my layer, take my pencil, select the ankle points, move it, delete, delete. Just keep doing that till I have my bonding box, the size of my mouth. Yeah, so we can see that the bonding box is now the size of my mouth, and this process needs to just be repeated for all the layers. The number of times you need to delete will actually depend on the number of shapes in the object that's in the mouth for this case. Okay, now you can see the mouth has a lot of drawings, a lot of shapes, a lot of complexity. So that's why we had to delete a lot of times. Okay? But parts like the eyebrow, which is just basically one ship, won't require so much of deleting. If I just select and move this guy and delete, now we're going to see that just with one deleting, we have our bounding box the size of our eyebrow. That's our right eyebrow here. All we need to do is just keep doing this for all remaining layers. I'm just going to speed up the video so that we don't spend all the deleting and cleaning up our shapes and when I'm done, I will return and we will continue. So we are done fixing our parts, and all our parts now have the bounding boxes, just the sizes of the parts. Now the next thing I'm going to do is just click here a new null object, and I'll renew my null object to facial parts. Okay? And then bring my null object on top of my layer stack. And I'll just go ahead and change the color of my null object so that it's visible on the face. So let's select yellow. Yeah, yellow would do, and then I'll do control old home key or Command Option home key on the mac to bring my ankle point to the middle of my null object. And I'll just position my null object in the middle of the face and then go ahead and select all my facial parts, that's my nose, my mouth, my eyebrows, my eyeballs, and my eyes. Okay? And then parent them to the facial parts so that my official part down controls all of these. And I forgot to parent this as well that the facial highlights details. So parens to the facial parts, and now we can see that it controls all our official parts. Perfect. Now the next thing I'll do is just hit P for my official parts layer, right click on it, and separate dimensions. So now we want to create three extreme poses for our character, and these poses will be used to generate a rig for our face, okay? So for official parts, I actually want to zoom in here and just go down yeah, to where I see my frames, right? My first frame, my second frame, and so on and so forth. Now, I just want to create a keyframe on the position for X and for Y, and I'll go five frames to the right hand side. So I'll just do Control and my right are key. One, two, three, four, five, and create keyframes then do the same thing, one, two, three, four, five, and create keyframes. Yeah, so the middle key frames will be my neutral pose. And the first key frames will be my extreme pose to the right hand side and to the top. And these last two keyframes will be my extreme post to the left hand side and sorry to the right hand side and to the bottom. You get the point. Yeah, so this is the first thing I want to do. So I'll just come here while having my facial parts no selected, and I'll just move my facial parts to the top. So I'll just hold the shift and hit my keyboard arukey so my top u keys. So I'll just do that a couple of times. So this is three times and I'll hit that to the left hand side and I'll move them to the left hand side. Okay? Okay, just like this, maybe I'll go up a little bit more, something like this. So that's the first thing I want to do. So this is my first extreme pose. Maybe I should take it up a bit more. Yeah, so let's go back to our neutral pose, then our extreme pose. And now we want to go to the last two ki frames and take our facial parts to the bottom, to the bottom, and then to the right hand side. Yeah, so something like this. So we have our neutral pose, our first extreme pose and our second extreme pose. Yeah. Now the next thing I want to do is select my eye balls and hit P on them, select and separate dimensions. So right click and separate dimensions. And I want to just the same thing I did here, so I'll create keyframes for our neutral pose, keyframes for extreme poses. Okay? And now for our neutral pose, I want my eyes positions to be just this. And then I'll select the second eye, and then for our extreme poses, Okay, we actually have to create keyframes for this one, as well. Okay? I didn't do that. Yeah, so this is our neutral pose and of our extreme pose, we want to bring the position of our eyes just to the top left corner. Okay, we want our eyes to look to the top left. And for the neutral pose to the down side, we want the position of our eyes to be to the left or to the right, lower end, just like this. Okay. Zoom to see. And there, everything looks good. Yeah, everything looks good. Perfect. So we have our extreme pose, sorry, our neutral pose and then our extreme pose. Now, I just want to do the same thing to all other parts of our body. So for our ears, we just have to select them. Hit P, right click. And separate dimensions and separate dimensions and create our keyframes and create our key frames. Now, just do that. Create new keyframes. Come here, create new keyframes. Perfect. So for our neutral pose, our key frames, our position will be this, and then for our extreme post to the right hand side, we're just going to select our ears and move them up. Move them up, and now we just move them to the right hand side like this. Okay. Just like this. Yeah. And then we just come down, and here we are actually going to move them to the left hand side, and we are going to move them kind of up a bit as well, because this will be the position of our ears if we look down, right? So something like this. Good. To, perfect. Now the next thing we're going to do is fix our face our head. So for our head, we have to hit P for position or right click and separate dimensions, create keyframes. On the left hand side, create keyframes on the right hand side, create key frames. And we actually need to also create keyframes for the path options of our phase outline. So go into the path and create a keyframe here, create a keyframe here. And create a keyframe here, just close this and hit you to expose all our keyframes, and now let's start kind of repositioning our face. So now we want to reposition our face. So for our left hand side, we want our face to kind of go up a bit and then to the left hand side. Okay. And then we want to actually select these uncle points for ps these ones, and just move them to the right hand side. Sorry, we have to move them to the right hand side, okay? In the X axis. We have to be careful with this. We need to make them, or we need to adjust them in the X axis, not the Y axis. Okay? So in the X axis, that's your left and your right. And we want to create this perspective that we get when we look to the left hand side. Okay? So it means we have to also modify this ankle point here. So again, we are moving to the left hand side or to the right hand side, because for our parts, we have to edit only in the X axis. So let's move to the left hand side to create a better perspective. Okay? Again, only to the left hand side. If you move it up or bottom, just to that and move it only to the left hand side so that we have him looking like this. Perfect. Now, just go back and let's do the modifications for our second extreme pose. So for the position, we're just going to select a selection tool and select the pace and move the pace a bit downward and reposition it to the right hand side. Okay? Something like this. Yeah. And then take our pen to select ankle point, set the ankle point and just move our ankle point to the left hand side. And remember, we only need to move our ankle points either left or right because we only want to move our ankle points on the X axis, right? So this is what we get. And we can select this guy as well and move it to the left hand side so that we create a better perspective. Yeah. So this is our face when he looks down to the right hand side, okay? So this is our neutral pulls. H. Okay, I think I've made a mistake for our fs, because the neutral pus is supposed to be neutral and it's not neutral like this. The fist has changed, so I'm just going to undo the changes I've made to do Control Z a couple of times. And that's why we need to be really careful while doing this. Okay? Be a little mistake can mess things up a lot. Now, let's go back and see. Yeah, now we have maybe I need to undo a couple more times. Yeah, so this is our neutral. This is to the top left corner. And now we need to now create our admissions for our position to the lower right corner. So again, I'll move my position. Okay? Move my position to the lower right. Okay, just like this. So let's see what we have now. Yeah, so this is the neutral gain. This is to the top right corner. Yeah. So the next thing I want to do is take my parts of K. That's for my face. So click here, click here. And now let's move our uncle points to the left hand side. Yeah, and then for this one, let's move it also to the left hand side. Now, let's see if everything is working well this time. So everything's working well this time, as you can see, our neutral pose is intact. It didn't get distorted like before. So we have our neutral pose. We have this guy, and we have this guy. Perfect. Now the next thing I'm going to do is work on my hair, select the hair, hit P, separate dimensions. Create your new keyframes, create your extra keyframes, create your extra keyframes. And I also want to create keyframes for our parts. Okay? So open your parts and create a keyframe here. Come here, create a keyframe and come here, create a keyframe. So it hit you to expose only the keyframes. And now let's start repositioning our hair. So for the neutral pose, we have this. For the extreme to the left hand side, we need to bring our hair up. So just move your hair up like this and thick your hair to the left hand side like this. Okay. And I also want to work on my parts. So I'll just zoom in and remember we're only doing left or right. I'll just move this to the right hand side, the bit. Yeah, remember we're only moving to the left or to the right. Select your point, your ankle point and move to the right. Okay. Yeah, just this. I also want to select these points and move them just slightly to the right. Perfect. Now I will select these keyframes or these anchor points and move them to the right. Yeah, for this ear, I will just move this ear to cover rob this piece or move it to the top to cover rob this piece, so that we have this yeah, so this looks good. Okay? This our neutral pose, this is our extreme pose. Perfect. Everything looking good. So now let's modify our hair for the extreme pose to the left or to the right lower corner. Yeah, so select your hair. And for this, we actually want to bring our hair bid up, I think. No, actually bit down. Actually need to bring our hair down. Yeah, I think we need to modify our ears. Okay, I think we need to modify the potion of our ears for this extreme push for ears, I'll just select the two of them and just move them down a bit more. Yeah, so just down a bit slightly. Okay. Yeah. And then for hair, I think this position is probably okay. Zoom in and then take our pinto and just position this to the left hand side. The shift to make my movements faster or cover more space and do same with these points. So we are moving them to the left hand side. Yeah, perfect. And for these ones, we are moving them to the left hand side as well. Yeah, so the concept we're using for this kind of facial rigging is something we actually will cover in a subsequent module. Yeah. So when we get there, I will notify you of that particular concept. Now, that is T D. In the module on T D, we're actually going to learn that what we just did here is something we are going to cover. Yeah. So this is our extreme pose yeah, so these are our extreme pos. This is our neutral pose, and these our extreme poses. Nice. Now the next thing we have to edit or we have to animate is our neck or our head shadow. So our head shadow. So the first thing I'm going to do is just select my pento and kind of make this bigger like this. Okay, make this bigger. Perfect. I'll hit P for position in separate dimensions. And then I'll create my keyframes for all my poses, just like I have done for other parts to my neutral and my extremes. Then for my neutral, this will be the position. And then for this extreme, I'm just going to move this to the top to the left hand side. Okay? Yeah, this. And then now for this extreme pose, I'll move it down onto the right hand side. Okay? Just this. And what we need to do now is to use our neck outline as an alpha mat for our head shadow. So what I'll do is just click to expose, not this I just right click and make sure moods are enabled, right? And I will just click here to give me more room. I will just try to make more room here, and now we are working on our head shadow outline. And what we need to do is use our neck outline as an alphamat. So I'll just take the alphamat sorry the track mat pique button or to here and drag it to the neck outline to justice. And I'll just enable my neck outline so that it's visible, right? So can now see that everything is happening within the confines of our neck outline. Yeah. So we can just disable our moods one more time. Yeah, and now we have all our extreme poses perfectly done. Yeah, so now it's time for the magic. Now, all you need to do is come here under Duik, come to links and Constraints, open it up. And now the first thing we want to do, or the next thing we want to do is come to connectors. So just click on the Connector option button. And now what we want to create is actually a two D slider. A two D slider will enable us to create values for both X and YXs. So click on it right here and just kale it up, make it a bit bigger, and I will just bring it to the to the side of my face, okay? Just like this. Perfect. The next thing I'll do is just go ahead and select all my key frames for my X axis and my ship parts. I'll select all my key frames for X axis, this guy here, and Hulan Control or Command on MAC and select this guy here and this guy here, and this guy here and this guy here, all of them basically for my parts and my X axis or my position. Yeah. So the next thing we are going to do is just click here on properties. Click here on properties. And now we're going to see that we are able to edit the positioning of our face along the X axis llue. Yeah. So this is incredible. Now the next thing we're going to do is just click here, click out. And while having my C slider selected, just come back to Connectors, click on the gear icon button, and then this time, select Pick Control. Select Pick Control. And now instead of X axis, we're going to choose Y axis and then select all our keyframes for Y axis. So click and drag to make you select these keyframes, then Hulan Control I come under the mark and select the rest. Okay, only the Y axis keyframes, only the Y position keyframes. Yeah, and then the next thing we do is click on properties. Yeah. And the magic is done. So when we zoom in now and just maybe move this a bit closer to the fish and try to position this or move this, we're going to see that we are moving to the we are basically moving our fish. Our fish is moving perfectly. So we can rig our face with this. Yeah. So we can just go ahead and create a text and name the face or let's see the head rig or head movement. Yeah, we can name this head movement and just scale this up, hit us and scale this up. We actually need to enable this to be able to scale this up. Scale it just slightly. And reposition it under the controller here. Perfect. Now the next controller I want to create is one to control my eyes, only my eyes. So I'll select my eyes. So select my eyes, and these are my eyes, and I will just close this and come back to the gear icon button and click on to the slider. And then just bring it here. Okay, actually bring the entire box here, not the dot and then just scale this up. Yeah. And for this, I'll just control D to duplicate my text and bring this here, and I'll name this I movement. Is movement. And place it properly. Perfect. Now the next thing we're going to do is link our eyes or our eye movements to our controller right here. So just go ahead and select all your keyframes for the eye layer that are on the X axis. Okay, all your X axis keyframes. So this is our e ball Lyer, on your eyeball layers only select this and Clear control or command and select this, and then properties. Okay? Now, let's try moving this t. Now, we see this is controlling our X position. Perfect. And while having this selected, we just close this and do the same thing. And this time, we're going to pick control. So pick control, and this time, we're going to change this to the X. And now let's pick our Y axis keyframes. Select this, n control, and select this and select properties. So we see our eyes can now move independently, okay, regardless of the position of our face. So it means our face can move here and our eyes can actually be leaking down. So you see we have more control over our facial features. Incredible. Let's go ahead and create one more or two more controllers. Now, one for our eyebrows. I'm just going to create one for eyebrows now. For eyebrows, we actually need to set our eyebrows and hit R for rotation. And now let's do the same thing. Let's create keyframes for rotation. Let's create three key frames just like we did with all the others. Okay. And then now for this guy, we want to come here, and this is our neutral pose, right? And then for extreme pose, we want our rotation to be this. So just go ahead and pick your rotation tool. This is our rotation tool. And for our first extreme pose, we want our rotation to be this. Okay? So we want to create this look, and we have our neutral pose, and then for second extreme pose, we want our rotation to be this That's for our right eyebrow, we're just going to do the same thing to our left eyebrow. So for this extreme pose, we want the rotation to be this. Then we want this for our neutral pose and for our second extreme pose, we want the rotian to be this. Yeah, so these are the ******* we want to create. I want to now create these controls for our individual eyebrows. So every eyebrow will have its control. Okay? So how do we do that? We just close out of this. And let's start with this left or right eyebrow. Okay? So how do we do that? We just come to connectors one more time and click on the connector option button. And this time we create an angle slider. So click on Angle, and we have our angle slider. This angle slider, I'm just going to hold down shift and scale this up evenly and move it to the left hand side. Maybe we will scale it even more, and just have it here. And while we have our slider selected, we are going to come here and select value, and now we are told to choose our minimum value, right? So we will just go to the first Keffem. And now let's look for our eyebrow. Now, we can see that we have lots and lots of layers. So it's a bit difficult to look for our eyebrows or to see our eyebrow, but this is it. Okay? So the minimum is -16.3. Now, just copy this and paste this here. -16.3. Let me just round this up to -16.3, and then the maximum so just come here to select the maximum, and the maximum rotation for the right is plus 26.3, okay? So plus 26 point let's see 0.4. Okay. Perfect. So these are what we want to have yeah, and now it's time to select our keyframes. Now where is it? Where is it? Eyebrow Outline. Let me see. Show I'm selecting the right thing. Yeah, so this is it. So all I need to do now is select my keyframes and click position. Yeah. And now we can go ahead and rotate our eyebrow and we can see that our eyebrow is rotating. Our slider is now controlling the rotation of our eyebrow. I'll go ahead and do the same thing to this other guy. So this is our left eyebrow. So we just need to click out of this and then click here and angle rotation or angle controller right there and then just make this bigger and position it properly. Yep. And then now for this one, we have our minimum as -29.1, -29.1, then our maximum as 15.3, soften 0.3. Okay. And now we need to select our frames to select our Q frames and click on property. Perfect. And now let's just try rotating and see. Perfect. Now we see our eyes are rotating or our eyebrows are rotating. Perfect. Incredible. Now, all we need to do is, of course, rename or label our controllers. So this should be the right eyebrow, right? Eyebrow eyebrow. C D, and this should be the left eyebrow. Now, just move this move this bit to the right hand side. Yeah, perfect. Now we have our controls our right eyebrow and our left eyebrow, our eye movements, and also our head movements. Now, the last control I want to create is one for blinking our eyes. For this eye will just zoom in and select my eye outlines, my left and right eye outlines. These are my two layers, and I will just hit S for scale, and I will create a keyframe on the first time and just come to ten frames and create the second pose. Now for this one, we don't want to have three poses. We just want to have two poses. That's the eye open pose and then I close pose, right? So now I'll select my right eye outline and then click here on link them. To link the dimensions for both X and Y, and I would just have this as my first pose, the eye open, and then I'll come to the second keyframe and just scale this like this and make sure it's let's see one. We don't want to completely close it, so let's see one. Yeah, and see also with this one. Okay, where is it? We're talking about this guy. Yeah, same also with this one. So we want this to be one. Perfect. Yeah. So the first step has been done. So we have it looking like this. Perfect. Now the next thing I'm going to do is actually duplicate these guys. Sorry, duplicate these guys and just kind of work on them a bit so Control D, duplicate them, and I'll just move them up. Sorry, I will just move them up, and I actually want to change their colors. So let's give them pink. Let's give the ones pink as well. Yeah, so this one half outline, too. Now, what I want to do is just come in, take my pent, and just start deleting some of these outlines because there are too many shapes inside, okay? So I'll select this one and delete it. I just want the major ship that covers the entire eye. So one major ship, okay? So I'll just go ahead and delete all of these other details. I can just solute them, so the layers, okay? Yeah, do the two of them and then just start deleting the ones that are not major. So we see this guy is not major. Yeah, and we have one more that is not major this one. So click here and delete him. So that we only have this guy here, which is the mijo, right? So I can even change the color. Perfect. And we're just going to do the same thing with the next guy. Yeah, so we can just come here, click here, bring him out and delete. Zoom in here, select this guy and delete. Perfect, and do same with this one. Perfect. Now we have the major, which is this guy. Incredible. And now they are, of course, animited just like these ones which we copied them from, right? Incredible. So the next thing would be to first of all, just bring our eyeball layers. So we have our eyeball right and we have our eye outline right. I just want to bring them next to each other, just like this and just close the eyeball layer, and also do the same thing for our eyeball left and our eye outline left. Yeah, so we have eyeballs right outline, and then I write outlines too, right? And then eyeball L outlines, and then I left outlines, too, right? So we just want to have them just position like this. I'll hit you to bring up my skill keyframe so that I'm seeing them very clearly. And now the next thing is, I want to use my eye outlines, the one I duplicated and simplified as a track mat for my eyeball layers, okay, so that our eyeballs are visible, okay? So first of all, I'll just on Solu D so that we can see everything happen in life. And I'll bring this, and I'll close the eyes so that we see the effect as soon as I apply them. So now I want to take my eyeball layers and enable my moods, first of all. Now we have too many things here. That's the problem working with this. We have too many things. So I just want to disable some features, maybe the parent feature as well. So we can just come here and disable parent and Link perfect so that we have our eyeballs. Now for my eyeball, I want to select this guy and click the Track Mat button or two and drop it here. We get so that it's now hiding our eyeball as it covers, as our eye covers gets covered or as our eye gets blinked. So we want to also do the same thing with this guy, click this guy and drag him and drop here, and that should affect our right or our left eyes, this guy. So see now our eyes are blinking perfectly. Our eyes are blinking perfectly incredible. So now we want to have our keyframe selected. Or our keyframes exposed. That's for this guy and for this guy because they are the ones we're going to be using to create our blink. Now the next thing we do is just click out of here, go into our connector options. And now we want to actually create a slider, that's a one D slider. So click here to create it. And now zoom in, select your one D slider. Where is it? This is a one slider. So select the entire thing, o and bring him here. Just go down shift and scale this manually. Yeah, scale this manually and position it here. Good. The next thing we do is make sure we have value selected here, minimum -100, maximum -100. Now let's go ahead and select our our skill values, right now, this IR outline to select the scale values and who down control or who down shift and select the skill value for this one. Okay? Select also the skill values for the IR outlines. That's the one we copied this one from and this one. So all of them are four layers all in all, select all your skill values and come and click on property. And perfect. Now, it has linked the property. So now when we do this, we are going to close. When we do this, we're going to open. We get the point. So now we have our blink controller. So next thing we do is select this guy Control D and position him properly and just type blink or eye Blink. Yeah. Incredible. And with this, we are basically done rigging our fish. We have all our controllers. We have the eyebrows, we have the eye blink. Okay? And we have our eye movements. And we have our head movements. Yeah, incredible. Now we have lots and lots of layers here. The whole thing looks messy. I would just select everything and close them so that they look less messy. And yeah, we can she some of these layers. So select the body, for example, select all these layers actually and just shy them. So enable your switches and she them. And click on the Shy switch so that we have the only. Perfect. Now we can just furthermore, reposition our controllers. Yeah, so just reposition your controllers. Okay, we're not doing a good job here. So just select the outlines and reposition your controllers. Perfect. Same also with this. Okay, I think I undid that. Yeah, so we have all our controllers looking clean and perfect. So the next thing we're going to be doing now is animating our character just by animating, of course, our controllers and doing all sorts of things. Yeah. So that's the next thing we have to do, okay? But we're not going to do that in this video. We are going to do that in a subsequent video, and we're actually going to learn how to lip sync, how to make our character talk. I think that's what we're going to learn next. After that, we would then animate our character. So that's it for how to completely rig your character's face realistically. And I knew this was long video, but this was necessary. I'm very sure you learned some really cool stuff here. Yeah, and that's it for this one. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 9. 9 Lip syncing with SF Caddy in After effects: So in the last video, we learned how to do facial rigging, and we created this amazing facial rig for our character here. Now in this video, we're going to learn how to syncing in After Effects using another After Effects plugin or script called the SF Caddy. So I have gone ahead and added this plugin or this script in your projects folder. This is the SF Caddy. You can as well search for it if you don't want to use this one, so you can just search your browser and get it downloaded, okay? Oh, I think you need to pay a fee for it, but there are free versions all around the Internet, which you can also access. This is actually a free version. So just go ahead and download it, extract it, go into your folder, and copy the script file. This is the script file, okay? So copy it and go to your cdt dot or your drive and just go ahead and paste it in your scripts folder, just like we did with Duik Angela. So going into script, going into script UI panels and just pieced it here, okay? So I have gone ahead and pieted mine so just do that and restart After Effects and come back here, so we continue. Perfect. So when you're done with that, you just need to come here and bring in the mouth shapes Adobe sido file. So select the file composition retain layer sizes and had in port. And this is how lip syncing actually works. So this is an Adobe Illustrator file, and this contains mouth ships with different alphabets or different sounds, okay? So this is something you can just look up online to see references of. So you can see references of how different mouth shapes are positioned, okay? Or when pronouncing these letters. So for F, we have this, F and V, for B, we have this and that. Yeah. So this is what we're going to be using to create our lip sync. So we can see that each of them has its own layer. We even have layers for this shock stated, disgusted, this fart, this thoughtful state, and all of these, right? So that's what you want to import, okay? So I've done all the work for you. I've provided this file. So just go in and bring in the file. And I have this layer, which is title Libel, you can see that it contains the libeling for each of these mouth ships. And each of these mouth ship is actually named according to the labeling. So I'm just going to delete this label layer. And the next thing I'll do is just go one frame. So I'll do Control and my right ARU key. So you can do command and your right Ruki and select all of them and Control Shift D and delete. So that we only have one frame for each mouth ship. Okay? So this is it. We only have one ship for each mouth ship. So the next thing I'll do is select all of them, right click, go to keyframe assistant and sequence layers. Now what this will do is, and just hit, okay? Now what this will do is, it's going to arrange our layers just like this, okay? From first to bottom, okay? And it actually did it in the wrong way. Okay? So I just want to undo this and select from here to here, right click. Sequences, okay? Yeah, so we have them from A to shock now, from the letters from the sounds to these other looks, right? So yeah, that's what you want to do now, go to the last frame. The end of the last stream, and I'll just hit on my keyboard to trim the work area to this point. And I'll just right click and trim come to work area. I'll select everything and go into my align tab and align everything just like this. Okay? Align them just like this. Perfect, so that they are all aligned to the middle of my composition and to the middle of each other. Yeah, so they are all on top of each other. So as I play through, you see that we have our mouth and meeting just like this. Perfect. And the next thing I'll do is just take my region of interest and just crop this out so that we have this only as our region of interest. Incredible and then I'll just go to composition and then crop composition to region of interest so that we have it looking just like this. Perfect. I'll just hit sieve Control S. And now we can go back to our official reading composition and now bring in our mouth shapes composition. Select it and bring it here. You just rescale it, hit S, and rescale it just to the shape of our mouth, can position it here. Perfect. Reposition it properly, move it up a bit. Yeah, and I think this is good. Now the next thing I'll do is just go ahead and unshy all my layers and just parent this. Okay? Not not track math, actually. We need to enable our parents two to parent and link, and we want to parent the mouth composition to parent it that's using this parent and link to the phase, right? Or to the null object of the facial part. Yeah, this null object, facial part to parent this so that it follows the null object. Now I can just hide my appearance and my track mouths and my mood, so that now as we move our fish after you do that, just go ahead and hide the outlines for the mouth. Where is the outline, this is the mouth and just hide it so that now the new mouth is our mouth shapes. You get the point. Now, if I move my head, you're going to see that our mouth shape is fully in it, right? Perfect. So this is what we want to create. Incredible. All the next thing I'll do is just go ahead and bring up my script. So go to Windows and just go down here and enable SF Caddy. Just go down. This SF Caddy, bring it in. And this is our SF Caddy. The next thing we're going to do is just shy back our ears and select our mouth shapes and click Load items. Now, it's going to load all our mouth shapes. Okay? Now, just make this bit bigger. Right here, if you click here, you're going to go to settings and you can actually adjust the size of the buttons. Now these are actually buttons. And what it does is it creates these togo h keyframes on a mouth shape composition. So if you just come here, for example, and just click one of these, it's going to write away create a togo frame which this mouth shape you get. So it's just more like a switch. So you see how easy now it is to switch between different mouth shapes. Yeah, I just delete the three extra ones I created. Now the next thing we're going to do is just go ahead and bring in our voice over and go into your folder and you see this voice over, hidden part. And I will just bring it to my composition. And now I can open the audio wave and see my voice over. Yeah, so I'm just going to play this so you see what so you hear what we're seeing. Hey, guys, it's really to you on this crap. Okay, let's start it from the beginning. Just use your spice bar to plead. Hey, guys, it's really amazing to work with you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rigging can be really frustrating to pull over times, but this course makes things incredibly easy. Keep learning. Keep creating and the stars will be your starting point. Yeah, so this is just a very simple voice over I did, and that's what we're going to be using in this video. Yeah. So I'll just come here and try to cool up some of this more so that we have more room, right, so that we have more room. Perfect. Now, I just want to have a neutral pose for everything, okay? So for my eyes, it should be neutral for my head position, it should be neutral. We can just hit P for this tough You can remove that HTP. Yeah. So now, all we need to do is just come and start playing. Just come and start playing through our audio. Okay? So if you hold on Control or command and use the time line, okay, you are going to be able to hear the voice as you scroll through, okay? But we can just do a simple play. So now we are saying, Hey, guys. So first of all, we want to have it in a neutral pause, okay? So we want to have a neutral pause closed mouth. So just scroll down in the closed mouth button here. So we have the first key frame as a closed mouth. So he's saying, Hey, guys. He guy. So from here, we're going to start with hey guys. So for hey guys, for hey, I want to use I want to use one of these, let check which one is most appropriate. So we want something, Hey, okay? So it's gonna be this guy, even though we don't have H here. So let's go with this. So, hey guys, So it's like, Hey. So for the ending part of the hey, we should use something that says I. You get the point. So, hey, so let's try this. Sorry. Let's try this. Yeah, so it's like, Hey. Okay. So let's take this guy a bit backwards. And let's do guys. So for guys, we're going to start with G, whereas G, guys. Okay, there's one thing you can do here. You can just hold down Alt and click. And what it's going to do is it's going to create a key frame and then move two frames in time, so that you can create the next one. So let's try play and see. Hey, guys. Hey, guys. Okay, so you want S S to complete the guys, okay? So this is basically how you want to do it gradually step by step till you complete, okay? So you just scroll down and look for S. Okay. Hey, guys. So we are talking about this shape. Yeah. So let's see. Hey, guys. Hey, guys. Yeah, so maybe we'll just move this a bit backwards and see. Hey, guys. Okay? Hey guys. Hey guys. Yeah. So it's really amazing, too. It's really amazing. So let's go ahead and use it's really amazing. So let's use It's let's go two frames in time. It's it's really amazing. It's really amazing. Yeah. Now, we don't need to be too precise with this. And yeah, if we wanted to be very precise with this, we could spend all day trying to get the best, right? So I'll just speed this up and show you my result at the end. You basically know the process now. So just go ahead and do yours as well. So then let's compare our results at the end, and if yours is not as good, then maybe you can go in and try to fix things. Okay? Yeah, so I'm just going to speed this up. Yes, guys, so I'm done with my lip syncing, and let me just play this so that I see what I have. And I'll just bring my time to here and just hit in to trim my timeline and trim come to work area. And let me just play this. So you see what I have created. Hey, guys, it's really really amazing to walk with you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rig can be really frustrating to pull over times. But this course makes things. Okay, so it seems we need to play it from the beginning again. So let me just play it from the beginning again. Should play better. It's really amazing to walk with you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rig can be really frustrating to pull over times, but this course makes things incredibly easy. Keep learning. Keep creating and the stars will be your starting point. Yes, guys. So that's it for this particular exercise. We can see that this takes a lot of time, and you don't need to be very precise, very perfect. And these mouth ship I have added. Sometimes it's hard to find the particular or the right mouth ship for some sounds, okay? So nothing is quick, clean, quicky, perfect here. Okay? Just try your best to achieve the best looks, and if you can create better mouth shapes or find better ones online, that's also welcomed. You can go ahead and use them so far as you get the best results, okay. But ultimately, your results should be nothing less than what I have created. I know mine is not perfect. There are lots and lots of arrows, but this can serve. Okay? This is to the lip syncing, so it's not supposed to be perfect anyways. Okay? Yeah. So basically, go ahead and try to achieve something that's quite decent. Yeah, so that's what I'm seeing. And yeah, so that's it for this one. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 10. 10 Exercise Finishing our walk cycle animation scene: Hey, welcome back. In this exercise, we are going to be finishing up our work cycle animations, which we created in the course of this mod, okay? So I'll go ahead and bring in my work cycle animions. I have exported them as MV. Okay, so they have transparent backgrounds. So this is the first one we worked on. If I play this, we're going to see our character working. Yeah, and then this is the second one we worked on. Yeah, this is the one we use Duik to create. Perfect. Now we're going to go ahead and finish them up, and we're going to be adding a background. We are going to add realistic, of course, to the Los del background, and we're going to add realistic movement, Okay, so that it appears that our character is actually moving in our background. So I'll go ahead and bring in my background right now. So I click go into my folder, and in my folder, I'm going to look for the subway background. Okay, so subway background, where are you? This is the subway background. It's an Illustrator file, select it and select composition retain layer sizes and hidden ports. Yeah. So when I go in, we're going to see that this is just a subway illustration, which I downloaded from freepik.com and modify a bit. Yeah, so we want our characters to work in the subway. Okay so we're going to do that for every one of our character. So the first thing I want to do now here is just Control K Okay. And I'm going to modify the sizes or the size of my background, the width in particular. So I want to make the width very long. Okay, we can see that the height is 26 pixels, and the width is 6,000. We can see that the height is 2006 pixels, and the width is 6,126 pixels. So we want our width to be 20,000 pixels. Yeah, 20,000 pixels and hit okay. So what we want to now do is actually modify or duplicate our illustration to cover for the remaining space. Okay? So I'll zoom in here, position this properly, even do Control K one more time, and change the background color to white so that I see what I'm doing clearly. Good. Then next thing I'll do is just Control D and bring this to the left hand side, and zoom in and reposition this well. Okay. Just like this. Of course, I'm pulling down shift so that I move this whole thing in a straight line. Yeah. Now, do control D one more time, bring it to the left hand side, position things properly. And control the one last time, zoom in and position things properly. I just want to select all my layers, my front column layers, and make sure they're in front. And as you can see here, they're in front. Yeah. So they have to be in front of our layers, even though I think we don't really need them to be exposed in this particular composition, and you'll see why. So instead of having them on, I would just maybe delete them. That's the duplicated one and just leave the first one and even off it. Okay. Yeah, we're going to see why I did this later on. Now the next thing we're going to do is create new compositions, which we put our character in. So we're going to start with this character. So click here to create a new composition, and I will just choose by normal 1920 by ten ATP and head ok. Yeah. So next thing I will do is bring in my character. This is my character, and you can see when I play this, our character is actually moving. Yeah, next thing I'll do is just trim my composition to my work area. So I'll come to the end of my animation. Okay. I'll come here. And just bring my timeline down and right click and trim come to work area so that we have this. Perfect. Now the next thing I'll do is, of course, you guessed it right, bring in my subway illustration. Bring my subway illustration, drop it here. You see that it's too big. I'll just hit this and re scale this down to the size of my composition, this and move my subway illustration just like this. Perfect. Yeah, the next thing I will do is just preposition and rescale my character in relation to my subway composition. Yeah, and we want to reposition high in the middle. Yeah, in the middle. And I'll just do this to see how my character compares to other parts of my subway composition. And I think the size is perfect. So I'll just do Control Z to bring my subway compositions my subway illustrations position back to the beginning like this. Okay? And just take note of the sizes. The girl character is 85%, and the subway composition is 54.2. Just have them positioned properly, and now it's time for the magic. Now it's time for the magic. Now, you can see that it's just an admission of our g working. She's working fast, she's walking really fast, right? So what we need to do now is just come here, select our subway background, hit P for position, create a key frame for position, and just bring sorry, and just come to the end of our admission of our time, which is around 20 seconds and four frames and just reposition our subway background. Accordingly. So let's take it to the end first and see. Okay? So if the movement of our subway wagon is too fast, we're just going to reduce the speed. So let's play this now and see. Yeah, so we can see now it appears as if she is working in the subway. You get the point. So let's zoom in and see this closely. So she's working in the subway. Let's just reduce the speed of our subway background and see. So when we come to our last frame, we just need to bring this back like this. Let's just here and try playing it back and see if we have something more realistic. Yeah. And I think I preferred the previous version, so I'll just undo to take back our subway background to the previous position. Yeah. And this kind of animation is basically us mimicking a camera, which is positioned on the character and moving along with the character. You get. So that's why she is always in the middle of the composition and the background is moving as she moves. So we're basically seeing that we have a camera and the camera follows her as she works, okay, making sure that she is framed in the middle of our composition. Yeah, so that's the first step and the most important step. The next step will be to go back into our background composition and copy our column layer. Okay? So our columns are actually in front of our character in between our character and the camera. So we have to select and Control C, o on our front columns and go back to composition one and Control V. Now we just have to come back here and disable the visibility and go back to our composition and just rescale our columns to the size of our composition. So our column to be columns have to be this big. They're actually less big Let me just rescale our column accordingly. Yeah, so this size looks good, looks perfect. Yeah, this size looks perfect. So what we need to do now is just duplicate our column a couple of times. So having my column positioned properly, what I will do now is Control D and reposition the next guy here since I'm seeing the outline of the previous guy, you get the point. I'll do this a couple of times. Control D again, and move it and move the next version and Control D, and move the next version just to the right hand side. Perfect. Now, after I'm done, all I would then do is select all my front column my front columns. All of these ones I dubgated and just parent them to my background image, or my subway background. So I would just come here and make sure my appearance and links is enabled, and then I will just parent them to our subway background and bring our character behind them. Now when we play this, we're going to see that our character appears in front of them, and we are basically having them fully in our subway background. But I feel that this second column has a bit of problems, this one. So you know what? I'll just come back here. And at this point, I'll just disable the visibility for these ones. And just see how this one is. I think the problem I have is with the sizing, so we can see that this is bigger and this is smaller. So the only thing I'm going to do now is just make sure I don't have this one side by side with this one, so that we don't see the sizes in contrast to each other. So I'll do this. I'll just come here and then position this one here. Okay, so that it appears after that one gets disappeared and I'll delete the next one after it and then for this last one, we are going to just move it to the right hand side while down shift so that we have this, basically. Let's just zoom in and play our admission, maybe make this bigger and play our admission and see what we've got. Yeah, incredible. And then the final thing I would do is actually select my girl M movie layer, maybe not even select it, but just come here and create an ellipse. I will not select it because if I select it, we are going to be if I make a selection, we are going to be creating a mask instead. So I want to create a ship for shadow and reduce the opacity for this ship and then bring the ship behind our character. Yeah. And finally, just parent the shape to our character. Okay, we don't need to parent because our character is not moving. So it's going to stay stagnant and still follow our character anyway. So what I would do now is just maybe rescale our shape. Okay, to this, hit We need to pass it one more time. Now let's see how everything plays out. Yeah. So we can see our shadow is fully in our character. But, in essence, our character is not moving, actually. It's just the background that's moving. So that's the first way to finish our animation, our work cycle animation. Incredible. And that was incredible. So the next now will do is, maybe just we name our composition. Girl animation one. And we just create a new composition for the next one, mit girl animation two, and hit okay. For this next one, we bring in Angela animation. And this will be a bit more complex compared to the previous one. So we just go ahead and bring in our subway background composition, hits and rescale our subway background composition to the side of our composition. And for this one, we're going to start here. Okay, we're going to start here. And first thing we're going to do for this one is select our Angela and reposition her properly, and we're going to reposition her here. Okay? So if we play our admission, we are going to see that let me just zoom this in. In fact, let me just trim my composition to work area. We can hit for this. Just right click Trim Comp to Work area. Okay, I deleted my layer mistakenly. So cream come to work area. Now let's play this and see what she does. So she starts by working. So from a stagnant position, she works, and I want her to walk down to the middle of our composition. Here. Okay? Then she starts running. Yeah, what we're going to do is select our Angela, hit P for position, create a keyframe here. Just come in time to where she starts working. I'll bring my keyframe here and come to where she starts running. Okay. And just before she starts running, I want her to work till this place. Okay? So I've moved her way hooli down shift to the middle of my composition. Now let me play this and see. Okay, you get the point. So I'll just select everything here and easy ease them so that she doesn't start abruptly. She just starts slowly and you get the point. Yeah, you get the point. Now, it's looking more realistic. Yeah. And then probably before she gets here, so maybe I'll just take her back a bit back a bit. And then after she gets here, she will now start running. So from this point forward down till this point where she stops running. So she stops running right here. So down to this point, I want my subway background to move. So hit P for position, create a que frame here. So she stops running here, right? So I want to bring my Q frame down here to the point where she starts running, okay? And then reposition my background to this place when she stops running. So I'll play this now to see what I have created. So she walks and then starts running. And then continues walking. So we just write in and try to fix things because, of course, it's not looking realistic, right? So she starts running from here. We want our movement to start from here, we want our subway background to start moving from here. Let's see. So we actually want to select the key frames for our subway background and easy them. Okay. And I think we actually need to extend these keyframes a bit more in time. This one's on her position, okay? Bit more in time. You get the point. So that the keyframes intersect with the movement of our subway background. Okay. And then just extend our swi background to move or to stop here. Yeah, so let's play everything from beginning and see what we've got. So she starts by being stagnant and then moves walks to the middle and starts to run starts to run. Um, and then stops. Okay? Yeah, then she stops. And what we want to do is just till she stops walking, we're just going to admit our subway background to just follow her. So the camera is now following her. You get the point. So she's going to be at the center of the camera till the end here. So we just want to now move our subway station background a bit. You know, she's not going to cover a lot of distance since she's not running. She's not walking fast. So now let's play and see. Yeah. Okay, so let's just even reposition this further to increase the speed of our background. O. She starts her funny dance here. Yeah, I think everything looks just perfect. Everything looks just perfect. So this is what we want to go with. The final thing I'll do is just add her shadow to her shadow has to be admitted unlike the previous one. So her shadow is going to be admitted. So from here, we're going to have a shadow brought behind her, hit T for opacity and reduce the opacity of her shadow. And move her shadow just behind her. Okay, now we position my ankle point from my shadow by holding down Control old home to reposition the ankle point, squash my shadow more like this. And now let's see. I think our shadow needs to be bigger. Yeah, just this big. Okay? So select our shadow, sell our shadow hit P, and create the keyframe for position. And as she moves, you come here, move our keyframe here, and as she moves, Down here, we want our shadow to follow her. You get the point. And also, we want our shadow to be easy east, just like her position keyframes. Zoom in. Yeah, now let's play and see. We actually want to move this keyframe here and let's play now and see. A Yeah, everything looking sweet and perfect. Yeah, this is good. The next thing I will do, of course, is just bring in my columns, my front columns to go back to this first animation, select my column, select all of them, and I'll just Control C and Control V to paste them. And for these ones, I will actually bring them here so that they start here. Perfect. Then parent them to my sobe background. Now let's play and see what we've got. She starts walking and walks down to the middle and then starts running. Then finally comes to a stop and continues walking. And then those have funny dance and complete till the end. So I'll just make this full size and play this in full resolution so we see how everything plays out. Let's wait for it to finish around previewing. Yeah, now everything's plain. Well, you can see. Incredible. Incredible. This is so incredible. Yeah, so that's it, guys for this. This will come to the end of our video of our exercise. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 11. 11 Exercise – Adding facial expressions & finishing our facial rigging: Hey, welcome back. So in this exercise, we're going to be finishing our official rigging in project. So go ahead and open the project, go to file, open project, and facial rigging. So this is a project it open. Yeah, so this is our official rigging in project. Let me just go ahead and play this so you see what we've done from the past video. Hey, guys, it's really, really amazing to walk to you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rigging can be really frustrating to pull over at times, but this case makes things Incredible Okay, let's play from the beginning again. Hey, guys, it's really amazing to work with you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rigging can be really frustrating to pull over at times, but this course makes things incredibly easy. Chip learning. Chip grating and the stars will be your starting point. Yeah, that was our lip syncing, and we handled this the last time we opened. Oh, we worked on this file, yeah. So now we're going to be adding facial expressions to our admission. So first thing I'll do is just select my slider. So we see that I'm selecting this as well, that the outline. So what I'll do is I'll first of all, close this, and then shy all my layers. And now I want to actually log these outlines. These outlines, I'll lock them so that I'm not able to select them. So I'll just lock them for each of these controls. So log them. Yeah, so that we're not able to select them, we should only be able to select these controls, the main controls. Yeah. So first thing we're going to do is just hit R on this and make sure my switches are on, and I'll just take my rotation to zero for all of these, for the boots eyebrows and close them. So this one, I will lock him. So just lock it so that you only able to select this, for the eye blinks. And then for this one as well, we should lock this Okay. Lock this. And for this one, we can see that this layer is actually shed, so we need to unshide this layer and bring the layer above and then go ahead and lock this. And we also need to just shide the ones we locked so that they are also hidden. Since we are not going to be selecting them, Yeah, so just click the Shy switch, and now we have only the ones that we need to animate, right? Perfect. So we're going to start with our head movement. And I also want to just shy this mouth composition so that we are not able to select it. I'll also kind of just lock it so that we are not able to select it and we are not able to see it. And same also with all of these, actually, or maybe not. Let me just allow them so that we don't spend all the time trying to clean up the scene. So let's go ahead and start an meeting. Now we're going to start with the head layer, o or the head control. So let's play this and see. So we have him saying Hey, guys, it's really really amazing to talk to you on this incredible after effect. Yeah, so I want to just come here, zoom in a bit and then create a keyframe for position. Okay? So we have Hey guys. Hey, guys. So I want him to look away a bit. So I'll just go three frames in time. One, two, three, that's control and the right okey. Make him look this way, okay? Yeah I make him look this way and then go three frames in time and copy this and paste. So let's play and see what we've done. Hey, guys, it's Hey guys. Okay, so what I'll do now is just copy this keyframe and paste so that we spend three frames while in this position, okay? And I want to select everything that's all these keyframes and just move them bit forward, and let's play and see what we've got. Hey, guys, it's really Hey, guys, it's really. Hey guys, it's really. Hi guys, it's wet. Okay, so this looks better now, sweet. Hey, guys, it's really amazing. Good. Amazing, W with you on this. And then at this point, I just want to create a new key frame or repeat the previous keyframe. So just click here and then go three frames in time. So one, two, three, that's okay. I'll just do that. I'll just redo that. So create my keyframe and Control and write Ruki three times. Then I want him to kind of look down. Okay. So you should look down so that we have this. Then to whoop it to you on this incredible After Effects Wop it to you on this incredible after effect Good. And then I want him to spend some frames while in this position, so I'll click here to repeat this. Then go three frames in time and copy this guy and piece so that he heads back to the same position. So we have, guys. It's really amazing to wop it to you on this incredible After Effects project. Yeah. Quality character. So we're just going to click it to repeat this keyframe, good three frames in time. And I will just make him look here or take his head position to this side, okay? And I will just turn his head to the top right corner, like this. So let's see what we've got. Quality character rig can be read. So as you say, really, I just want to kind of bring his face down like this, and then go some frames in time and repeat the same frame and then go three frames and make him look to the neutral position, okay? So contro C, contro V. So let's see what we've got. O you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character region. Then, can be Quality character region. Can be real Okay, okay, okay. So we actually need to repeat this keyframe. Here, so contro C, contro V, so that we spend all this time here. So let's play and see. Quality character rig can be really frustrating to pull up. Perfect. So this is the look I want to go for. So let's play from begin and see. What we've got. Hey, guys, it's Really amazing to watch to you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character region can be really frustrating to pull over at times. But this case mixing he falls straight into pull over times. But this course makes things. Yeah, so we just create a new key frame, then go three frames in time. But this course makes things incredibly easy. I want to shake my head or his head while saying that. This course makes things incredibly. So I want to do this incredibly easy. Then we go three frames. Then go through frames. And then go three frames, and then copy our first frame here, which is our neutral puse Condo C, Contra V. Let's see what this gives us. This course makes things incredibly easy. Okay. You see? It's looking good. But this course makes things incredibly easy. Things incredibly easy. Perfect. Keep learning. Keep learning. So keep learning for keep learning. Cos mixs incredibly easy. Yeah, I think I will just unshy this and unshy my mouth shapes so that I hit you to expose my key frames so that I see where these keyframes are positioned, right? That will help me in animting the movement of my head even better. You get the point. Cost mix things incredibly easy easy. Keep learning. So keep learning, we're just going to repeat our key frame and then go three frames in time, one, two, three. And for keep learning, I will make this guy go down, keep learning. So one, two, three, and repeat our key frame and then one, two, three, and copy this guy and paste. So keep learning. Yeah. Keep learning. Hit, great. Then keep creating. I think we just copy all of these and paste them here. So keep learning. Keep learning. Hit, creating. Okay, okay, keep creating has to come actually at this point. So let's play and see. Keep learning. Chi Actually, it has to come here. Not here. So Keeparningreting. In the stars. Chip grating and the stars. So we're just going to do one last movement before the end. And the stars will be one, two, three, repeat our que frame, go one, two, three, and maybe come here or come here, go down. Then one, two, three, and repeat this. Then one, two, three, it is piece. So let's see. And the stars B, your start starting point. Yeah, this looks good. So Hey guys. It's really amazing to wp it to you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rig can be really for. Yeah, so we can see that we actually did good here. So let's close this guy and let's go ahead and maybe not close him, hit P so that we see the keyframes and all our other admissions will be in relation to all the work we've done already. So the next one will be the eyebrows. So let's select the eyebrows Okay, and hit R for rotation, create a frame here. And now let's start animating now for first librar, we can see that this guy, one of them needs to actually get a little bit rotated. So let's see. Take your rotation to, and let's move this guy just like this. So this is more like the neutral, okay? So Hey, guys, it's really T when he's saying it's really amazing. I actually want to create one keyframe and just go three fims in time and make our eyebrows do this. Okay? Yeah, and then go three films in time. We can repeat our films. So copy and paste, copy and paste. Hey, guys. So we just need to select all of these and bring them forward. Let's play and see. Hey, guys, it's really amazing. Whoop. Okay, I think one of them should, wait. Okay. This guy. No, this guy. Need to chill a bit, okay? So I think we need to bring this iframe. Yeah, we need to bring this first iframe we created so that it's positioned just at this point, right? So let's see. Hey, guys, it's really really amazing. Walk with you on this incredible After. Yeah, so the effect. So at this point, we just want to repeat these iframes. Then go three frames in time and copy these first que frames and piece them so that we go back to our neutral polls. Perfect. Hey, guys, it's really amaze whopping to you on this incredible After Effects project. Perfect. Quality character rig can be really So when he's seem really frustrating, I actually want to create another pose. So select your two sliders your key frames. Good three frames in time, one, two, three, and we just want to zoom in here and actually make the guy look I make our eyebrows look like this, okay? So like he's kind of disgusted, because it's really frustrating to pull of character animation at times. Character rig can be really for straight into pivot. Yeah, you get the point. Can be really for straight into pull off at times. Yeah, and then we just repeat our key frames, go three frames in time. Copy this and pieced. Copy this and piece. Riding can be really frustrating to pull over times. But this course incredibly. So for incredibly easy, we are just going to kind of repeat our key frames times. But this course makes things incredibly. Okay, we're just going to repeat our key frames. So click here, click here, good three frames in time. And we want him to and we want our eyebrows to go this way. Okay. And stayed out for three frames. And after three frames. Okay. After three frames, we just copy the neutral polls and paste. Good. So let's see. Things incredibly easy. But this course makes things incredibly easy. Keep learning. Hit Graton. And then for this last part, I will just copy this Contra C Contrave, Contra C Controv. Hip Graton in the stars. As. Okay, and maybe I want to just stay a bit longer in this post. And maybe move them bit forward. And the stars Ub. And the stars ob? Yeah, just move this bit forward so that we spend more time in this pos. And the stars Ub Your starting point for you. Incredible. So I like this, and we just go ahead and work on the other ones. So let's work on the eye movement. So Hey, guys. So when he's saying, Hey, guys, when he's looking this way, I want our eyes to actually look that way. Okay, so I, select him, hit P, create the keyframe, go three frames in time. And let's move him here. Select the keyframe, take this backward, and I will just repeat this keyframe and go three frames in time. Copy this guy and paste so that we have him look this way. Hey, guys, it's really. Okay. Hey, guys, it's maybe he should spend more time there. Hey, guys, it's Really amazing to quit you on this incredible. Yeah, so at this point, we want to create another pose for our eyes go three frames in time and yeah, and do this. Then just come here and repeat the keyframe and go three frames in time. Just come here and repeat the keyframes and go three frames in time and copy the initial and paste. Incredible After Effects project. Yeah, this looks good. Hey, guys, it's really amazing. Copy to you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rig. Yeah, so at this point, we just want to repeat this keyframe and then go three frames in time and move our guy here, then go three frames in time, repeat our key frame. And then stay here for a bit. Repeat our keyframe, good three frames in time and bring back our eye. Okay? Quality character rig can be real really forcing to pull over times. Okay, we can see that the eye is actually not in the middle. So we just repeat this frame and then go and pick this first Q frame, which we show is the neutral push and contro V. You get the point. Okay, we actually need to repeat this guy first. So Control C, contro V. Perfect. To pull over times. But this case makes the mired mix things incredibly full of at times. But this cure makes things incredibly easy. Keep learning. Keep, so for keep learning, maybe we should make him look a bit downward. Okay, and then repeat key frame and copy this guy and pies. Keep learning. Keep learning. Keep learning. Keep keep creating. I'll just copy this and paste here. Okay? And the stars B. For the stars, I actually don't want him to look down. I want him to look up. Okay? So he should be looking up. So bring your time here to that key frame and make him look up B we're talking about the stars. You get to control C and come here and contro V. Let's play everything and see what we've got. Hey, guys, it's really amazing to put you on this incredible After Effects project. Yeah, it's looking good. So I'll just go ahead and do the blinks to select the blink, Controller, hit P, create a keyframe. Now we just want to just bring our frame to our time, go to three frames forward and do this. Go to three frames forward, Control C, Country V, go to three frames forward, and copy this guy and piece. So that's our blink. Hey, guys, it's really amazing. Yeah, it's really amazing, too. So we just need to reposition this well Hey, guys, it's really Good. So we just copy this and piece in different places. Retrovi Controv Controve. Okay? And controve. Yeah, now let's play and see what we've got. Hey, guys, it's really really amazing to work with you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rig Quality character rigging can be really frustrating to pull over at times, but this cure makes things incredibly easy. Keep learning. Keep grating and the stars grating and the stars B. B, your starting point. Yes, guy, so you can see that we have basically admitted all our controllers. Now the next thing we do is just finish this up. So we're going to add the background, and we're going to hide all our controllers. So just hide all your controllers right now. I just on Chides and basically hide all the things I need to hide, including our texts and these as well. And you can see that I actually hit my mouth. You can see that I hid my mouth composition, which I should not have. So I'll just ible it here. So we have our mouth composition back. Maybe I lock the layer so that we can select it. I will also lock my null object layer or hide the layer. This is my null object that official parts, I just hide it. And yeah, now we have only our character animated. So I'll just go into my composition, sorry my folder now in my folder, I have this room Illustrator JPEG image, so import it. And we're just going to bring this into our composition and at a for scale and we scale this down. You just want to scale this and position it so that it appears as if our character here is in a room, right? Yeah, you just want to position this realistically. Okay. So something like this looks good. Yeah, good. And I just want to select the image, hit T for transparency or opacity and make our opacity 85% so that it's not taking too much attention or 80%, it's a bit faint and we have our character or our subject as the main subject of our admission. Now, I'm just going to play this. Hey, guys. Hey, guys, it's really amazing to walk with you on this incredible After Effects. Object. Quality character rig can be Really for sure. Can be really frustrating to pull off a shru. This cause makes things incredibly fit this to the screen and make this full screen incredibly easy. Keep learning. Keep creating and the stars B B. Chip Greton and the stars Rs B, you're starting point. Okay, let's play this now since the Run preview is done. Hey, guys, it's really amazing to walk with you on this incredible After Effects project. Quality character rigging can be really frustrating to pull over at times. But this course makes things incredibly easy. Keep learning. Keep creating, and the stars will be your starting point. Yeah, and that's it for this exercise. Everything has been admitted. We have our background. Everything looks perfect, okay? So the next thing we do is just, of course, just render this out. So best settings, hit okay. This, we're going to use the P four formats, just hit, okay. And then Fisher begin P four. Perfect, and just hit render. And yeah, so this will come to the end of our video or exercise. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 12. 186 Cycling Character Animation: Hey, welcome back. And this exercise, we're going to be recreating the cycling animation here in After Effects. And I promise it's going to be packed with so much goodies. Okay? So let's go ahead and start a new project. So I'm just going to come to file new project. Yeah, so let's do this in a new project entirely. Yeah. And then go into your folder for this module, which is final project module and bring in this illustrator file, this cycling admission Illustrator file, select it. Go and select composition retain layer sizes and hiding pot. And this is the file in Illustrator. Okay? You can see the file. You can see all the layers looking clean and divided. You can see that we have a lot of layers here. We have the background layer with our buildings in the back and we have our character layers, bicycle layers, our joint layers. Yeah, so this is a character animation exercise. Yeah, so let's go ahead and start working on it too. All we need to do now is just click Auto clicker and go into character and select this guy. And just hide him for now and then select our joints guide and right click, convert or create shapes from vectoria so that we have our guides as vector layers, as ship layers, so that we can snap our anclepoint to the middle of our ships. We can just delete this one. Next thing I'm going to do is just come to my windows and enable my Duik Angular rigging interface, workspace. I'll go to workspace and then go to my **** Ange Rigging workpiece and it's just going to load everything up so that we have our workspace and we can start creating our rig here's our workspace. And now, I'm just going to select this part. First of all, I'll just lock this guy because it's going to be getting in our way. Lock this guy, which is our guides and then we can select this guy, which is this flying dress a and we want to hide it. But before then, I think we should just move the ankle point to where it's meant to be. I'll just hit T for transparency and reduce this and we see that we need to bring our ankle point around here. Around here and then just take a opacity back to 100 and just hide all here. Yeah, so that we can see how main layers. Now, let's go ahead and start repositioning our ankle points. Okay? So just go in and start with the right foot here. So I can isolate this if I want. I can isolate it and I can also isolate my right leg so that I see both of them, and maybe enable this guy so that we know that our right foot has its ankle point right here. Now control to snap to the middle of our ship here and just hide this or maybe not and take the next guy, which is our right leg. This our right leg and we just bring down a point here, the middle here. Yeah. Perfect. Now we can just hide them if we want or not. Okay? Yeah, but hiding them will actually make things cleaner. So we can hide them, and then we know we are done with them for now. And then we have the pedal front, but this is the bicycle parts, and we are not dealing with them for now. So let's just go up and start from up. We have our eyebrow and our eyes and our mouth. What we want to do here is just kind of parent this to our head. So we have them linked to our head and we just off them. We don't need them. Then now we can enable our head for head, we need to bring the ankle point here. But we can also enable our neck so that we see the head in alignment with the neck. The head has to be here and the neck has to be around here. Okay, so we're done with the head and the neck. Let's look at got the right arm. So isolate the right arm, and for the right arm, we need to bring our ankle point here, you guessed it. Bring it here. Perfect. Next, the right forearm. For the right forearm, we need to bring our ankle point here. So click and drag whole down Control to snap to the middle of our point right here, perfect. And then the right hand. Enable the right hand and for the right hand, it has to be here to click and reposition it here. Perfect. Then next, we have the bicycle handle, and we don't need that for now. I'm just going to hide back right forearm and our right hand. Now let's go to the right thigh. So enable the right thigh and for right thigh, we need to bring our angle point, I think, here, bullets. I getting a bit confusing because of the overlapping joints. So for our right thigh, it has to be here around here. Now we can enable our layer now and then know that it's supposed to be here, perfect. Yeah. Okay. And then for hips, for our hips, we just need to bring it around here in between these two, because this is for the right thigh and this for the left thigh. Okay? So that's for hips and then for torso needs to just be brought to about here. Just about here. Okay? Yeah, just about here. Yeah, and then we have our food. Our right foot. Yeah, our right foot has been done. We are done with our torso, our right foot, our hips, our right thigh. Let's go. We also done with our right leg. Let's go down the list. For now, we're not handling the tires. We're not handling the pedal ring, the pedal road, the pedal med, the bicycle body, the pedal rod, B, and the pedal bag. Then now let's go ahead and handle the left thigh. For the left thigh, it starts to be brought here. Okay, perfect. Then the left foot. For the left foot, it has to be brought you guessed it here. And then the left leg, for the left leg, it has to be brought here, perfect. Then for the left arm, left arm has to be brought here and the left forearm has to be brought you guessed it here. Then the left hand enable the left hand and it has to be brought here. With that we've come to the end of our repositioning our anchor points. Now we can select all and basically enable them. Okay. And now let's go ahead and hide our joint layer. Just hide this layer. Now we can go ahead and start rigging our character and start creating our bones, right? Yeah, so you know how we do it. We have to select from the root to the tip, okay? So we can start with our right hand, okay? So we can start with the right arm and then select the right arm and we see we have to open this up. And close this panel. We have to open this up to enable our Duke Angela plugin or script. Select the right arm and then select the right forearm and then select the right hand in that order and then go to bones. This is bones. So go to bones and go to hominoid and click here and then click here and just bring this. And now we have to select, we have to enable the hand, the forearm, the disabled shoulder, we have to make it right. So click here to make it right, and then it's in the front, you hold on Control or command on the mac and click here to create our bone structure and automatically parent our bone structure to our parts. Okay? So I'll just bring this tip here. Now we can select our bone here, take our rotation tool and basically rotate our arm very easily. Perfect. So that's the first thing. Now let's go ahead and do same thing to the other parts, select the left arm, hold down shift and select the left forearm and then select the left hand. Just in that order and then come here and click here, bring it here. This will be at the back, and then this will be the left. So we hold down Control or command and click here. And just reposition our tip like this. Perfect. Now, let's go ahead and do that for the leg, click on the right thigh, and then next click on the right leg and the right foot. In that other click here, this time we're selecting the leg. So click here, and this is the right leg. So click here to make this right and it's going to be in the front, okay? Perfect. And then we want to enable the tools as well. So click here for the toes, and we can see that we have to redo that. So just click A. Let's basically redo that. It's in the front. It's okay. Finding it hard moving this sometimes. So it's in the front, it's the right. Okay, and we want all this so hold on Control and click and it's creating our bone structures. Perfect. Now we just need to reposition things, we just come in and select this guy, select this guy and bring him here, and then select this guy and bring him here to the tip to the tip. And then for this little joint here, we just need to bring it to the heel. Okay. Yeah, just to the heel like this. Perfect. This is what we want to have for right leg. Let me try this. Yeah, we can see that everything's working perfectly and do that. Go back to my move tool or my selection tool and let's go ahead and work on the other parts. Okay. So I'm trying to select this one, but it seems it's far behind, so I was just going to do that here. So let's start with the left thigh, select the left thigh and then the left leg, then the left foot. You come here and click here, bring this here. This is the left and it's at the back. Okay? We on control or command and click here to parent everything. Perfect. Okay. Let's try this. Let's see. Yeah, so we're moving our leg perfect. Now let's do that to the hip to our spine, let's create our spine. So we're going to start with the hip. There's the hip and then the torso. There's a torso and then our neck. Maybe we need to select from here, so our neck and then our head. Then click here, go to spine. For spine, we want just one layer. We want to enable the head and we want to hold on control or command and click here. Yeah, so we have our spine, and all we need to do now is just bring our head, the tip out like this. Perfect. And let's just go through everything to make sure everything is looking perfect. Now, we see that this guy is not perfect. The one behind, we didn't fix it. We didn't reposition things properly. I'll just do that quickly. Select this guy, bring him here, select this guy, bring him to the tip, and select this joint and bring him here. Perfect. Yeah, now we're done with creating the bone structures for our character. We're going to go ahead and rig our character right now. So just select all the bones so you can click here and select Libel Group to select all the bones, and then come to bones. We're already in bones, so click on bones and then just click on Auto Rig. It's going to tell you to hide layer controls. Just click on Hide layer Controls and Illustrator or Duke is going to do its magic and rig our character, and we'll be back when it's done reagin our character. A Yeah, so our gin has been completed, and I'll just go ahead and clean up my scene. First of all, I will select my bones. So I'll just use this to select my bones. Okay? And I will just hide my bones. I'll hide my bones, and then I will lock my bones, and then I will just shy my bones. Okay? So all the lock layers, I am going to shy them. I'll just shy my bones one after the other. This kets the bone. Okay. Yeah, let's hry that. Okay, we don't need to shi the controllers. We don't want to shide the controllers. So be careful and make sure you're shining only the bones. Yeah. Now let's just go ahead and clean up our controllers a bit. I'll select the head controller and then go to icons and then just move it to the left hand side, position into the left hand side, just like this. I'll take it up a bit. I'll do that to this one as well. Go to icons or icon and then move it and move it up. And then you take the rib or the torso, the torso controller, and then also do that. I'm just going to go ahead and do this for all these controllers. Here I'll just go ahead and move them out of our character. I'll do that quickly. I Yeah, so I've moved my controllers out of the way. The next thing I'm going to do now is just select all of them, all my controllers, and I will just come here and type size. And I want to go into my ankle size for my controllers and make sure I just turn them to zero so that the ankle points are brought to the middle, for all of them. I'll just close them back. Now let's go ahead and try them and see if they are actually working well. I'll select this guy now and just take this and see if my rig is working well. Okay. I'm actually selecting, I actually select that. I'm actually selecting the hand. We actually need to log all of these parts. We don't need to select them. We just need to select our controllers. So let's try the hand controller, and we can see that our hand controller is working perfectly for right hand, also for left hand. And for leg controllers, it's working perfectly. For both legs, and also for all these other ones. I really don't need all of these controllers, so I'll just hide some of them. Okay? I'll hide this guy. I'll lock him. Okay, and also shy the layer. I'll do that for the hip as well. We don't really need this. Let me try rotating it and see if it's going to be of any use to us. Not really. We can use the body for our rotation as you can see. We don't need the hip. Select the heap and then we just hide it and lock it and sh it. Same also with the neck and the head. Or the shoulder rather, select the shoulder and just lock it and hide it and sht. Also with the head, let me see. For the head, I think we want to just create a bit of rotation. Maybe we leave the head and leave the body and the hands and the legs. Perfect. We're done with this and now we just want to clean up our sin further by hiding or shining all the layers we don't need here. I'm just going to select this. Just hide them or first of all, lock them, and then sh them. So I'll first of all lock the ones I need to lock. Key lock this, Lock all of these except for the bike handle. Okay. And then lock the thigh, the torso, except for the bike paths, which is the pedal. So sorry lock this and then then go on to from here from the left thigh down to this please, okay, down to this please. So just lock them and just shy all the lock layers. Yeah. So now the next thing I'm going to do is just go ahead and rig my bike. So rigging my bike will actually be very easy. All I need to do is pint the tire the front tire and the back tire to the body of my bike, okay? Now, that's the bike body. This is the bicycle body. So I'll just parent them to the bicycle body so that it controls them, and then I will parent my pedal. So I want to select this pedal and actually parent it to to this part, we have them separate. We have this guy, which is the pedal back and then we have this guy, which is the pedal back road. The pedal back will be parented to the pedal back road. Then the pedal back road will be parented to the pedal med. This is the pedal med. Yeah, so the pedal. The pedal back rod will be parented to the pedal med. Okay. The pedal med will be parented to the bicycle body. So bicycle, yeah. And then the pedal ring is this little cycle we have here. So the pedal ring will be parented to the pedal med, then the pedal bike handle, we parented to the bike body bicycle body. Pedal front, let's see, the pedal front to the pedal front, we parented to the pedal road front. That's this one. So pedal front parented to pedal road front. And then pedal road front, we parent it to pedal ring ring, right? Yeah, the pedal ring. And we actually need to reposition our ankle points for some of this. So for this one, our ankle point is just perfect here. But for this guy, we need to reposition our ankle point here down here. So it has to be in the middle of this pedal ring, okay? Yeah. So that's for this one. And then for this one as well, where is it? Some of these names are confusing. So for this one, it also has to be here. Yeah, and then for this one, it has to be here, okay, because it's going to be rotating from this point. What else is left? I don't think anything else is left on our bike. Okay, our bicycle body is controlling everything. So it means we can now rig our bike. Okay, we can now rig our bike. So for our bike, we want to actually have this guy nibold. Okay? So we want to have him exposed, and then we want to have these guys as well. So this and this. So we're actually creating keyframes for them. We just hit R for them right away and create a Q frame, because we are going to be rotating them. Yeah. So every other thing can be hidden for now. So we can just lock them and shi them. Okay? Yeah, lock them and she them. Don't lock this one. So just lock them and try them. The ones we don't need. Yeah, and also the Be handle. Do you have to first and then shy. Yeah. So now we can go ahead and start animiting our character. We want to animit our character riding the bicycle just go ahead and make more room here. I'll just squash this bit to make more room here and I'll just zoom in zoom in to my fimes, okay? Yeah, now we have our first key frames for our pedal meat and then our pedal front and our pedal back. We want to now select our leg. Now I'm going to start with this guy, okay? So I'm going to start here and I'm also going to hit P for position, create frame for position so that I move my leg, apart from P, I also hit R to create a rotation qframe then hit to expose all my qframes I'll do that to this guy as well. So hit R, create a Q frame, hit P, create a Q frame, and then hit to show all your q frames. Perfect. Now we're going to start immediately. So for this one, you want him to be here, and then you want to go let's see let's go five frames for now. One, two, three, four, five, I'm doing control right key, right Okey. You can do Command write k on the MAC to move five frames forward. I want to bring this guy here. And then maybe just bring him down and then go five frames forward, one, two, three, four, five, and then bring him here. Then go five frames for one, two, three, four, five, then bring him here. We want to create this look, as you can see, even though we are going to further adjust every other thing or further adjust the way it looks as we rotate our pedal. We're just doing this for basic look. One, two, three, four, five, and we want to bring him back here. Now we have our key frames, and I think I should just disable some of these features here. Maybe I'll disable the link and perent perfect so that we have more room. Yeah. Now I'll just select my pedal front, my pedal mead, my pedal back, or maybe let's start with the pedal front, and the pedal med. We'll go to the next film and I just want to teat my pedal mead, take my rotation to the rotat my pedal med gradually. And make sure my pedal meat is aligning on a straight line with our led like this, okay? And then I want to rotate my pedal my pedal front. I want to rotate it to look like this. Okay? So let's see what we've done. So we're going from here. Okay, it's actually wrong. So you see some of these things can be confusing at times. So the rotation here is wrong. The rotation on my pedal front, I'm just going to undo that. And the rotation actually something like this. So just go over it and make sure you are doing the right thing. This is what we've got. Now, it has to be like this. You see? Perfect. And I'll just take this opportunity to reposition my leg or reposition this Perfect. Then let's go ahead and work on the next guy. On the next guy, we have our leg here and our pedal needs to be rotated. So our pedal needs to go round like this. Okay, I'm doing this gradually so that I don't overdo it. I'm using control while clicking and dragging to adjust the rotation value, okay? Yeah. So we can see that our leg is going too far. Yeah, so we just take our leg and take our leg up up to around this point for now, and then we just take the opportunity to rotate our pedal. So let's see what we did previously. So previously we were here. Now we want to actually do this. Okay? So let's see if it's working well. Come here and then yeah, perfect. So we obviously need to move our leg, move our leg on top of our pedal. I'll go to the next guy. And for the next guy, we need to rotate our pedal. Rotate our pedal make line here straight with the leg with the bis of the leg just like this. Perfect, and then take our pedal front, and this time, let's see, we were like this. We need to Okay, I think we need to do this. Well, let's see. Okay, so we like this. Yeah, this makes sense. So we came here. Yeah, it makes sense. So now we're going to go ahead and come back here. And for this, we need to take our pedal med and route our pedal med to be straight at this and then take our pedal front. And let's see. I think this would make sense or not. I actually did make sense. Yeah, but of course, we need to reposition our leg. So we just go over all the key frames for leg or for foot and reposition it, okay? In fact, we can of course rotate our foot because we actually did create keyframes for rotation. You can further rotate your foot to make things look more real of course our pedal as well. Now let's go through everything. Right here, we see that we actually need to move our foot up on top of our pedal. We just rotate it slightly to actually balance on our pedal. Okay. Yeah, so we have this. Then we have this Then we have this. Then we have this. Then we have this perfect. Now what we want to do now is we actually want to edit our admission path, this line, you've seen. So we actually want this to be cove. Okay? So you have to come here, take the convert vertex tool, and we have to just click and drag and basically convert our admission path to a curve. We want a cove. So now we need to just go over our Q frames one after the other so that we make sure everything aligns with our curved path now. Okay? So you see it's aligning better now. Yeah, so this is good. This is good. I think I will just move our leg bit up. Yeah, so you've seen the process for this. I'm just going to go ahead and do this same thing I did for the right leg to the left leg, okay? So I'll just speed up the video so that it doesn't get too long and I'll be back when everything looks perfect. So go ahead and follow the same process you followed here to achieve the same animation for the left leg. So see you when I'm done. I have successfully created my key frames for my pedals and my legs and my feet. I just hit the right leg right here to enable me to see the left or the back leg. That's the left leg. I will just go ahead and enable it shy and look for my right leg where is it? This is it. Yeah, my right leg is back. So now let's play our mission and see. So I'll just bring my time here to the last key frame, and we'll just hit and to trim my work area. Okay, so that we can play in a loop as we can see now, our admission is playing very well, perfectly. That's for our legs and our pedals. Perfect. So the next thing we're going to work on is actually making our character touching our bike, okay? So I will just select my body handle here and take my rotation to just rotate my body. Tell my body a bit. Okay, and then take this hand and extend it here, and we can see that the hand is behind our biehdle which is not supposed to be Okay, so we want to bring the hand above our bike handle, just like how we have this one looking, okay? So for this one, we position it properly. Okay? Just like this. And for this one, I will reposition it like this and just go ahead and fix this. Now our bike handle, this is our bike handle. We just unlock it and bring it really behind behind our layers. It has to be behind our layers, but our right leg has to be behind it as well, okay? So it has to be in front of our right leg. Okay? I'll just undo this to see what I had before. Yeah, so we can see that it has to be in front of our right leg. So I'll just go ahead and select our right leg, whereas our right leg. Th should be our right leg, right? Yeah, so I just undid that, and I think I have a better way of handling this, instead of taking a bike handle behind our layers, what I'll do is I'll select my left hand, okay, which is actually here. Okay, now, this is the right hand. Let's go down a bit. I can't find my left arm, okay? Left arm left forearm, left hand. This is my left hand. For some weird reasons, I get confused with latrine. What I want to do now is I just want to actually duplicate my left hand because I just want this part of the left hand to be on top of my pedal. I'll just do Control D on my left hand and I will select my pen and just come and create a mask on my left hand. Just like this. Yeah, just like this on my left hand, I want to bring this layer on top of most of my layers on top of my bike handle layer, most importantly, yeah, just like this. Yeah. This is just what I want to do to make it seem as my bike hand is in front of my bike handle. So just this. Yeah, this looks perfect. So we want to have it looking like this and we want to just admit our body a bit. Let's admit our body and also our head. We're actually going to be creating a loop admission. Let's see. For our body, we just want our body to first of all, first of all, we want to hit R for body, and then create a Q frame. Then come some frames in time and maybe go down bit. I think we also need to create a keyframe for position or just don't do this. To create a keyframe for rotation, hit P, and also for position, hit two times. Then go biding time and maybe for your rotation, just tick this and just do this. Okay. And for my position, maybe I'll just take her a bit forward slightly. Let's see how everything, please. Okay, so what we want to do now is we actually want to copy these key frames back. Control C contro V, Control C, Control C contro V. Now let's see what we've got. Okay. It's just spread these keyframes and see what we get. By doing that, I'll just reduce my resolution to half and then So this might work. We might change things later on, but let's work with this for now. And then for our head, let's see for our head, you might just come here and maybe hit R for rotation, create a bit of rotation. Where is our head, controller, this is it. And then just come in time and maybe do this. We just want to have some movement basically, okay? Maybe copy this guy in Piest. Okay, so for now, let's work with this. For now, let's work with this. Yeah. So the next thing I'm going to do is just rotate my tires. So I'll go down, look for my tires. I think I locked them. So my front and back tires to select them, select both of them, hit R, and side them, and we want to create a keyframe for rotation, and then come here. Okay. And then let's make this say seven. And let's play and see. I actually meant seven revolutions, not seven rotations, okay? So let's make this zero, and let's make this seven actually seven revolutions. Yeah. And now we see that she's riding her bicycle. Let's zoom in and see. Maybe we want to just make our bicycle go faster. So let's see 11. Let's try something bigger and see if it's going to work better. Let's see t three. Yeah, I think tile three works better. I like how the rotation is right now. Tie three works better. I feel her movement that the movement of her body is a bit too exaggerated. So let's see. Maybe we could do something about it. So this is the initial and she goes this way and goes back. To maybe this one could be less rotated. Okay, so I'm just trying to do things very slightly so that the changes are not too much. And also for the head, it's too obvious, select the head and to your rotation and just maybe slightly bring this down. Let's see. At least she's moving her body. It mustn't look like this. You can make yours a bit more exaggerated or a bit more reactive. This is just for you to see the process, yours can definitely be better. I'm just going to hide my controllers and let's finish this up quickly because the video has taken so long. Hide all these controllers and now we can go on to the next thing. Now for the next thing, all I need to do now is just go back to my default workspace. Here in my default workspace, I'm just going to go ahead and enable my background layer this guy I shy him and then I'll shy all other ones so that we have layers to work with. I'll also shy my controllers or my controls. I'll sh them so that we only have this layer to work with and I'll just unlock it and I'll do Control K to go into my composition settings, and I will make my composition white. Idaho. Next, I will select him, right click and precompose and move all attributes into the new composition ik and now going into the new composition. What I want to do is do Control K for my composition settings, and I want to make my width 12,000. I want to make sure they are not linked. 12,000 seems good. I'll bring this guy here and I will just do Control D to duplicate this and bring the next guy here, and then another Control D to bring one more version here and finally, another Control D to complete it. Yeah. What we want to do is come back here and we just want to select our background, bring our background here. And then just do, first of all, we want to make our admission just as long as S 12 seconds. Hit N. Then we want to select our background, hit P for position, click here to create a new qframe actually here on zero second. Then come here to 12 seconds and just bring your guy here. Just do this. I'm holy down shift to move it in a straight line. One thing we actually need to do is we actually need to add a loop expression to all our keyframes, apart from this guy. I'll just close this and shy all my layers and basically all my layers that have keyframes. I'll select everything can be selected and hit you to expose my keyframes and I hope I have all my fs all my layers with key films selected, so that we don't leave some out. Yeah, I want to create key frames or I want to add expressions to all these layers. So I'll I'll just Hullt or option on the MAC and click here to add on expression and I'll just come here and go to properties and go to LoopOut this particular loopOut click on it, and we're just going to do that for all other properties. Hold Alt click and come here and loop out. Now just peed up the video so that we don't spend all the Yeah, so I've added my loop out expression to all my animitd layers or all my layers with keyframes, and I'll just play this down to see what we have. Yeah, and as you can see, everything is playing perfectly. Everything is looping out perfectly. And our background is also animating perfectly so that she seems to be walking or she seemed to be moving in relation to the background. So that's what we want to have here. Looking incredible, looking perfect. So the next thing I'm just going to do is just select everything in close them, maybe sh them, and create a new ship layer. And for this new ship layer, I just want to take my pen to and I want to draw a little heel. Okay, I want to draw out a little hell Okay, this. Yeah. For my little heel, I want to admit my little heel from here, so I'm just going to select hit P on my keyboard and bring my little heel here and create a key frame and come maybe 1.5 seconds and bring my little heel while holding down shift out of my fime, so that we have this admission so that it seems as if she's passing in front of a heel. You get the point. Let's play this and see if the speed is okay. Yeah, of course, the speed for the heel will be faster because the camera is closer to the heel. You get the point. So I'll just do that one more time. I'll create another one, new ship leer. For this one, the heel is going to be a bit steeper, kind of, something like this. And as you can see, I'm using a green heel. So it's just more of a lawn, but a hilly lawn, kind of. Yeah, so that's the concept we want to be using here. So for here, we are just going to hit P for position with the keyframe, bring our position here, then come some frames or some seconds in time and bring our position here while holding down shift and just pred our keyframes out a bit and play our mission and marvel at our awesomeness. Incredible. Yeah, so I love this. I love this. The final touch to this would be actually to enable our flying dress to our flying dress, unshy things and go and look for a flan dress. This is our flying dress. Yeah. This is it. Our flying dress. This is our flying dress and we just unlock it and unshy it and shy every other thing else. And for flan dress, I just want to select the flanre and I want to add the wave wrap animation. So you just type w on your effects and preset and just select the wave wrap animation. And we want our rotation to be this, I think minus about -100 towards this side, just towards this direction. And we want to make sure we are using the type, the sine with type. And for our height, I will just give this minus nine minus nine. And then for our wavewidth I just increase this to see 59. Okay. Yeah, 59 looks good. I will just reposition this to be on our shirt or on our character. Yeah, just like this. Perfect. And we just want to come here where it says spinning and we want to select top edge. So it pins it to this point, to the anchor point to this edge. Yeah. And basically, that's it. Let's play and see. Yeah. So that's it for animation, as you can see, everything looks perfect. We could boost up the resolution. Let's boost up the resolution so that we preview everything in perfect resolution. Okay? So you can go in and maybe animate the eyes, animate the mouth, okay, create more character, okay, add more expression to her character to make her more expressive, okay? And that will make the animision even better. But you know the basics now. You know the process of doing this, this is the process of doing this process. But yours can of course be better and yours should definitely be better. I love to see what you achieve, I love to see what you come up with. Kindly share your results with me, and that's it for this one. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 13. 13 Conclusion: Congratulations on completing the class. You just explore one of the most exciting and creative areas of after effects, character and mission, and that is a big step forward in your motion design journey. In this class, you learn how to prepare characters for admission, set up your workspace, install a used dic angel, create wound structures, work with auto regain, clean up your rig, and build practical character admission projects. You also explore facial regain, facial expression, leap syncing with SF Cardi, work around cycle and mission, and cycling and mission. These are powerful skills that can help you create more expressive admissions for explaner videos, social media content, storytelling projects, motion graphics, and even more advanced character scenes. Before you move on, make sure you complete your class projects and upload them to the project section. I'll love to see what you create and sharing your work will also help you build confidence as an animator. Remember, this class is part of a larger Skillshare series based on my complete Adobe After facts class. So if you haven't taken the previous classes yet, I encourage you to go back and explore them because each class is designed to help you build your skills step by step. And if you're ready, continue. I'd love to see you in the next class in the series where we keep building on everything you've learned and take your after effect skills even further. Keep practicing, keep experimenting, and keep bringing your ideas to life through motion.