Character Animation Fundamentals: Creating an Animated Loop

1. Introduction: Have you ever wanted to add character animation to your skillset, but had a bit of trouble getting the character design right, rigging it with the proper joints, or even creating an animation that feels lifelike. Well, you have come to the right place. My name is Oliver, and in this class I'll be teaching you the fundamentals of character animation and how to create an animated loop. We will start out in Illustrator making a character from scratch with animation in mind, making sure that all of the limbs are separated and ready for rigging. This next part will take place and after effects, where we will be using the free tool DUIK to create all of our joints and controllers. On top of that I'll show you some neat facial rigging tips so you can have even more life to your character. When the rig is ready, we'll start animating, exploring both idle animations, a run cycle and how to combine the two into a completed loop, speaking of the loop, this is going to be the class project and it will be a perfect fit for your showreel or an Instagram posts to attract some new clients. To complete this class, you don't need any prior experience with character illustration, rigging, or animation. But if you do have some, i'm still confident that you will learn something new through my process and the techniques that I provide. But let's not waste any more time, but rather start creating. I'll see you in class. 2. Picking the Colors: The character that we want to create is based on very geometric shapes. And therefore, I also think it's best to just start out in Illustrator and try and sort of do the sketching phase and there, instead of doing it on paper. So we'll start out by creating a new document, will make this 1920 by 1920 pixels. And it's also important that you choose the R2P setting instead of SNIC. Because maybe it's just for when you want to sort of print out graphic assets. And RGB is for digital work. So let's create the document. Once you choose a color palette vol, character, and there's a few places where you can find those. The first website I recommend is colors dot CO. And this is basically a color palette generator. So you can click Start the generator, then it gives you a random color palette. You can press Space to get new colors. And let's say that you liked this brown color. You can decide to lock it. And then when you press Space again, it will try and find colors that sort of match with this brown. And it will keep it in the pellet so it can keep on going and select the colors like this. So this is a way to get a more customized pellet. Now the second way to find kinda pellets is on websites such as Pinterest, you can search for color palette, and there will be tons of different ones to choose from. And one of the great things about this is that they are often picked from an image. So you can see right here, these six different colors are taken directly from this image. And that just means that usually the colors work really well together. So you can go through these and find a pellet that you like. So the third way to find color palettes is through Instagram pages such as colors Cafe. I've used this page quite a lot as the quite often post new color palettes. And a lot of my illustrations are based on these colors. And then I usually tweak them a bit or add a few different colors to really finish off the look for my character. I've picked out five different colors. I want to create sort of a fighter or also want him to only wear shorts. And therefore, I have the skin color than I have chosen the red color. That's just because I wanted to ask sort of a headband bandana type thing because I usually just relate that to a fighter. I have a yellow color that's just for his built. Then I have a white color for sort of wristbands and it's billed as well. And I have a dark color with sort of a pollutant and that's just for his hair, eyebrows, eyes, shorts, and so on. So you don't really need that many colors. And then we're going to take these colors and create variations of them to use for shading and highlights. So let's get started with creating the actual character. 3. Illustration: Playing Around With Proportions: One thing I want you to keep in mind is said, if you were creating, let's say, just a regular person for an explainer video that supposed to be a bit realistic, you would want to retain the proportions of a human. So that means that there is some relation between the size of the head, body, arms, legs, and so on. But when you are creating characters for games or more illustrative characters, you want to try and break those rules. You actually want to see, okay, what parts of this guy do I want to saturate? So maybe for my person, for my character, I want his head to be rather big. I wanted to have very beefy arms because it's sort of a fighter. And then I want his legs to be rather small. And that's just to create some contrast in the different proportions. And that way it just looks a lot more interesting, in my opinion. Now this character is going to be created in a three-quarter view that's very standard when you're doing character animation. This just means that it's somewhere in between during the character from the front, straight on and sort of you viewing it from the side. So it's somewhere in between, and it just adds a bit of depth to the character. Now one final color I want to add is just for the background. And I've chosen this blue color because it's just contrasts very well with the skin color, the sort of hair short and so on, as well as the red color. And you want to pick a background color that has good contrast in comparison to the other colors and that doesn't really interfere go against them. So let's start out by creating the head of the character. We want to go over to the eye dropper tool and just select the skin color. Then we can select the Rectangle tool by clicking and holding and finding that within the menu, we just write out a simple rectangle for the head. Now we can use the corner points to drag in and round the edges. So we get a bit of a rounder face. And when we have created that, we can actually use the same shape of our body. So we can just select it, copy and paste it, and just place it underneath our head. And then of course we want to adjust the proportions a bit, so a bit longer and a bit wider. And I have to keep in mind that we don't want this to be completely centered because it's a three-quarter view. And therefore the things that are the closest to us who will move those to the right. And then the things that are the farthest away will be moved to the left. And the body is somewhere in between. So the head needs to be moved a bit to the right for this to make sense. Now we need some sort of way to connect the head to the body. Because right now we don't really have any neck. So we can go in and create a new rectangle. We want to go a bit up on the head here and just strike out the neck like this. Then we can open up the layer and just make sure that it's behind everything. And right now it's quite difficult to see really what's the phase? What is the body, was the neck. So you want to create a bit of contrast. And we could do that by selecting the neck and the body then will go into the color. And we want to create a bit of a shadow, make it a bit dagger. And one way people usually do this is just take the color and just drag it down. But that doesn't really create an interesting shadow. You can see it doesn't really look like great. That's not a lot of contrast. So one thing I usually try to do. It's trying to also change the color value. So that's sort of the hue. And in this case I want to make it a bit more red so I can track it down a bit. And then I want to click diagonally. So instead of going straight down, I'll go diagonally. And that just makes the shadow a lot more interesting. So click OK. And you just see that looks a lot better than the sort of default shadow that a lot of people tend to crate. So this is fine. One thing I want to adjust is the actual head. Right now you can see that it's rounded equally on both sides. And usually your chin is a lot sharper over here to the side and then it gets smoother as it gets closer to sort of the neck. So we'll select the shape, then you can press a To get the direct selection tool. Just select a single point. You can drag that up. And we're made it round at this side because the face is looking towards the right. If the face was on the opposite side and was looking towards the left, then it would of course be rounder on the other side. And this is just a part of sort of the three quarter look. Now we can go ahead and create the arms. And because this is sort of a fighters of street fighter, I want the amps to be quite beefy. And one thing that's very smart to do in this case, when you want the sort of standard arms for a character Rick, where you have the, the rounded edges is just to create a path. Go up to the pen tool. Then you will click somewhere around sort of the shoulder area. And then you can just go all the way down and it should snap so it becomes straight. If it doesn't do that, you can just hold down shift and that should do it for you. And then you go down somewhere around here and just click. Right now you don't see much, but that's because we have the fill enabled. So you just want to swap this, so it becomes a stroke. And I wanted to find the settings for this stroke. So as you do this, you can actually go to window all the way down to stroke. And then you can see we have the weight and the different settings. If you don't see all of these settings, you'll click on the three lines appear. And you can see if it's hidden. There'll be a Show Options tab. So now we can basically go through and just increase the width of this arm. And to get those famous rounded edges will just enable the rounded cap. So these sums are quite small. I want them to be bigger. So just keep on going until I have sort of a width that I like. Surround here should be fine. Right now it looks like a sort of has a problem because it's shown us are up way high. And I think that that would give some shoulder problems in the long run. We roughly want the top of this stroke to line up with the top of the body. Now if you find it a bit difficult to see whether they line up or not, you can preset to get the Zoom tool and just drag to zoom in. Then we press control are and we get the rulers. And if you use these rulers, you can actually click and drag out a guide that should snap to this path. That way you can select this path over here, drag it down. You can even use the arrow keys to just make sure that it lines up like this. And if you can't quite see it, you can always zoom in even further and just make sure that it's perfect. So somewhere around there should be fine. We can go ahead and delete this guy and you can hold down the spacebar to sort of track around the canvas. So you can see that he has an arm. But really there's some sort of problem here. It's like someone has detached the arm and it actually looks like this guy doesn't even have a shoulder. So that's quite unfortunate and I think we should fix that. Before we create the shoulder though, we want suggests the positioning of the ion. So we'll just select it and drag it in a bit. So it looks sort of like it's in the position that we want it to be. So thing right around here could be fine. We also want to adjust the length of the arm. And maybe this arm is a bit too long. We don't want the arm to drag along the ground. So we can just press a To get the direct selection tool and just drag it up to the point where we want it to be right around here. And actually, I'm feeling generous. Disguise been hitting the gym lately. So I want to make it even beefier. And of course, it also means that I need to adjust it to the top here. Now, creating a shoulder is actually quite simple and we just wanted to line up with the arm. So we want to create a path by pressing p to get the pen tool. Then we want to find the top point of the arm, as you can see right here. Just go a bit out so you can see that creates a line, a sort of guide for us. And then we can just click, Go to the side and again, hold down shift if it doesn't create that straight line. And we can just click. And now we actually want the end of this path to line up with the end of this path. And it's quite difficult to see what's going on when you're in this sort of standard view. So one thing you could do is press control Y, and that gets into the outline mode. And then you can press a again to just select point of the stroke and drag it all the way over so it lines up with our other stroke. And the reason why we're doing it this way is because we want them to be separate, but line up in that corner, suppress control. Whites, get out of that again. And now we want to take this shoulder, we want to select the stroke and press i to get the eye dropper tool. And then want to select the color of this body. But if you just click on it, it will turn it into a fill. So let's undo that. And instead you can hold down shift and click. That should only change the color of the sub selected, either stroke or fill. So because the stroke is on top, it will change just the color of that stroke. So you can drag it down so it's just beneath everything. And you can see that it connects perfectly up here. If we were to take this arm and Chris are as enroute station and just click that ankle up here. And if we were to rotate that army can just see that it looks perfect. This is almost like sort of a Minecraft run cycle with the HMP flopping back and forth. So of course we're going to split them up into different sections later. For now, this arm looks great and we want to duplicate it and place it on the other side. So we just take the arm, copy it, and then we press control shift V to paste it in place. This just means that it's being pasted at the exact same position of the under copied. So we can take this and drag it all the way over to the other side. And then we just want it to be below everything. And I will have to remember that the things that are the closest to us will be moved a bit to the right because of the free quota view. And the things that are the farthest away will be moved a bit to the left. So we'll move this arm in a bit more. So one thing I'd like to do is just push this arm in quite a bit. So right around here. Again, you can see our guy has a bit of a shoulder problem, but we can easily fix that if we find the shoulder joint from our other arm. So you can press control y again. Just select that, copy it and control shift V to paste it in place. Then we can press a and just click and hold on to this outer point while holding down shift. And you can drag it all the way over, so it snaps to our other arm. Then when you press control y again, you can see that it looks a bit weird because it has the same color of the body, but it doesn't have the same color sits right on. So we actually want to match it to the arm. And we do that by pressing i again. And then having the stroke selected, holding down Shift and clicking on that arm. And then we just want to make sure that it's placed just above the arm. And that way you can see that we have that perfect shoulder. So it's sort of starting to look like a person, but a feeling very generous today. So I also think I am going to add some legs. Now the legs are created in the same way as the arms. So you can actually take an arm, copy it, and just pasted wherever. And then we want to hide this arm up here for now just so we can get the proper placement of the leg. So the Go into the layer and just hide it. And then we want to take our leg. Now this guy has very small arms, but he skips like day. So let's turn the weight of this all the way down. So they are quite skinny. Now this guy doesn't really have long legs. So we're going to press a, Just take the bottom point and drag that up so we can sort of get the length of our leg, right? So approximately somewhere around here. And now we want to line up the edge here to the edge of the body. So we want to drag it out. And again, we're gonna drag in a guide, Sue All the way in just to make sure that that is lined up perfectly and we can zoom out just to lead our guide. And now we have to think about how high one I would like to be up. So perhaps you want to drag it just a bit down. You can see we get a bit of an issue over here at the sort of rounded corner. One way to fix that is first of all, just I hold down shift and get the color of the body. Then we want to select the body, press a to select this point and just make sure that we are creating a sharp edge down here. Now we can enable the other arm again. And we need to take this lack, of course and have it just above our body. So we have to find out where the body place. It's right here. So just needs to go down by one. Then we can zoom out by using the zoom tool. And just sort of evaluate the scale of a buddy. Perhaps the arms are a bit too long so we can press a, just find that point, hold down, shift and fight the other one. And we can just drag it up a tiny bit. Then we can take this leg, copy it, control shift V to paste it in place. And we just want to drag it over. And we wanted to have a bit of a gap between these legs. So that's perhaps somewhere around here. That should be fine. And then we want this to be underneath our padding so we can select the body to see where it's positioned in the sort of layer sequence. Then we'd take the leg, drag it underneath the body. And now we want to add a bit of a shadow to it so we can select it, go in and again, use the same method. So add a bit more read through our color. Make it a bit darker like this. And also the arm that's behind the body, that of course also needs to be darker because it doesn't really make any sense that if the light hits from the front, that the pentagon would be brighter than the front DOM. So we want to select that. Then first of all, we just select the same color as the electron here by pressing I, holding down Shift and clicking it. And then we want to go in and make it a bit darker. So again, just sort of the same method right around here. And we also need to do that for the shoulder joint suppress control Y. And selected go out again that we can go and find that stroke and select the same column. So now we can see you have these sort of contrasts and the shading without having any details added. And we go in and change some of the proportions. I think this body should be perhaps just a bit longer, somewhere around there. And I also want to press a, and just round this corner in a bit more. And I think those propulsion should actually be fine. So right now we can go ahead and add some phi2 is Lex because I think, well, it's quite difficult for him to walk. But before we do that, we want a bit more of a thigh gap. So we'll just hide the arm, select D2 strokes and then just turn down the wait a bit. And then of course we want to zoom in and adjust the left leg here just to make sure that it lines up with that edge. You can go in as close as you want to make sure that you have that perfection like that. Zoom out again. And then we can create defeat by actually also using rectangles. So we want to start at sort of the bottom point of that leg. So right here you can see it snaps, click that and drag it out and line it up with the bottom. So you can see right here it lines up. Then we can just drag it out so it lines up over here as well. And create the feed somewhere around here. Then we can print a and select the Chop point, drag it down to the foot, becomes rounded, and you have a foot. So you can take that, copy it and paste it in place again, hold down shift and drag it over. And here we may want to zoom in just so we can line it up right here. Zoom out again. And of course we want to change this color. So select the fill, press I, hold down shift and click. So if we enable the arm again, we have one naked guy. So we may want to adjust the positioning of his feet. But for now, I think this should actually be fine. And I think this is sort of a good base for our character. Of course, we want to add a lot of details, some clothing because we can't have this guy running around naked. And of course the facial features with hair and everything like that. But I think it's very important to start out this way. So you sort of get a sense of the proportions of the character. And that way it's just very easy to adjust these things along the way. Then you don't have the issues of doing that when you have all of the details edits to the character. Because at that point, well, it could take a lot of time. 4. Illustration: Facial Features: Let's start with the most important thing, his luscious hair and beautiful facial features. So we'll zoom into the phase here. So I think we've come to a point where he can listen along and we can add an ear. So we'll go in and select the ellipse tool. So it's not just rectangles. At some point. You also need some circles. So you can just click and hold down shift to drag out an ear. I want this here to be rather large. Again, et cetera, is some of the things that were just feels a lot more interesting. So I want the ear to be sort of placed at the point where neck stops and the phase starts. So that somewhere around here. Then I can press i to select the color of the face, and then I can select it, copy it, paste it in place by pressing control shift V. Then I can click, hold down Alt and shift. And that way it just scales from the sensor. And this is just to create sort of the inner part of the ear in a very simple way. And I want this to be a bit dagger. So I think we can use the same color as we used for the arm down here. The way that we can get access to that is by pressing control y. That way you can see the path. And I just remember to hold down shift when you're selecting the color because again, you are taking it from a stroke and not a fill. So don't shift and click and go out of this again. And you can see that we have the year. So this is beautiful. And now he can listen in on our conversations for us her, I'll also use quite a simple shape, will start out by using a rectangle. So we just want to track this out. We wanted to have quite large hair. So sort of get the dimensions right. And then when we have this very simple shape on the top of his head, would go ahead and round some of the corners. So the first one I want to round is this bottom right corner. Suppress a click that and drag it in. And at this point I can see that I want to make it quite a bit wider. So it goes out like this. Then I want to round the top left corner. So again, press a correct that all the way in, right around here. And you can see at this point he has this very slick hair. Now we want to select a different color for this because we can't make everything from flesh suppress I and select the hair color, have it out here. Then we want some of the head to go underneath the year because we don't want to give him an undercut. So again, select the rectangle, just dragged out that shape. So it's a bit underneath, right around here. And perhaps we want the headset go out a bit further. That way we can just drag it out and also drag out the shape. Now we want the shape to be underneath the ear, so we just need to adjust that in the layers here. And there's a bit of a problem here. We don't really want the hair to sort of clash with the year. And that happens when they are at the exact same position or are very close to each other. So wait to fix this is either by making the IRR bigger or making the hack or further out. So I'm deciding to make the IRR bigger. We can just hold down, shift, drag that out a bit. Now, this isn't really a regular hairline. You will have. A bit of help going in right here and sort of a circular shape. So we can go in and select the ellipse tool, drag out a circle. I'll just hold down shift. And you can just select the color of the hair. And we also wanted to be underneath the year. So we can sort of get a sense. This looks good or not. So around here. And that way you can just see that it connects the two shapes a lot better. Can also take the hair down here, press a and just rounded in the sort of left edge. So now you can see here is at least gotten a haircut still naked, but we'll fix that in a minute. And now we can add some facial features, even at the sort of bandana that I was looking for. So creating the bandana is quite simple. We will again use a rectangle and we'll just go to the top of his hair. Track down this rectangle, just so it sort of covers everything up here. Then we want to select the red color. And of course we also want it to be just underneath the ear. Now I want to spend than it would be a bit further up, but also wanted to sort of match with the line of the hair and just select both. Push them up just a bit. And that's just to show a bit more of the hair sort of between the bandana In the year here. Again, we don't want these very small parts would be visible if it were all the way down here. These two parts are just way too small and we just want to make them a bit larger. And we can also take the EA, just break it up a bit further. And again, this is just to make it overlap a bit and add a bit of dimension to the illustration. Some just moving things around. And I think we're sort of getting to a point where everything works pretty great. Now one tip I can give you is that it looks a bit weird when you have sort of accessories or things like that, that line up perfectly with the face. Because you have to imagine that this Madonna, this headband, of course, has some width and therefore you can select it and hold down Alt. And when you click the side, you can just drag it out a bit. So you can see that, okay, this actually has some width. Then we can select it just round the corners a tiny bit. And then we can also select the hair up here. And if we want to, we can just write it out a bit more. So it has solved a smoother transition up here. So now he has a bandana, but of course we want to add a note at the end here and the sort of excess material, because that way when he moves around, we could just make it swing back and forth. And you just want to take every given opportunity to add something that can bring a bit of life to your character. So the way that we'll do that is quite simple. We'll start out with a circle. Just drag it out here. And this is just sort of the not. And we want that to be just underneath our bandanna. And we just wanted to have the same color. And then we want the x's fabric. And a smart way to create this is by using a rectangle. Just striking it down like this. And then we want to press a hold down shift while selecting out two sub points. Just make it a completely circular. So you want this to be underneath the nut. And therefore we also wanted to be shaded a bit darker. So we will make it a bit more red. Pit dagger. And then place it underneath the nut and just try and line it up here. You can see we actually wanted all the way underneath the hair. And because we're rounding the corners, we actually can't really adjust the width of it. So if you want to change that, you can just make them sharp again and then round the top corners. Then we can copy it and paste it in place. And then we can drag it up just a bit. And this has to be underneath all of the other things. So we want this to be even dagger. Drag it up a bit, make it dagger. And you just have to adjust this, maybe make it a bit bigger. That way. You also have to round the edges again. And you can just adjust the positioning of this and the length. Just so you see this off different parts of x's fabric. Now, let's add some facial features. We want to give some eyes so he can actually see a mouth so you can smile, eyebrows so he can show his emotions, not a nose, so he won't be able to smell, but he'll just have to live with that. So for the ice, we want to use the exact same color as the hair. Just want to draw out two circles, hold down shift while doing so. And then we can select the same color. And we just want to try and position the eyes again, because this is very close to us. We want to push it to the right, can click, hold down old and shift, and just drag it to the side. So we have two eyes. Now let's give him a mouth. And for this we'll use again a very simple shape and ellipse hold down shift while dragging it out. And we just want to use one-quarter of the ellipse. So we can actually just delete two of the points. So we just have this sort of half smile. And then we want to turn it into a stroke. And for this row we want to use the same color as the inner ear. So down shift, click on that. And we just want to add a bit of weight to this at a cap. And we want to make it a bit smaller. Right now you can see how that looks quite weird. It looks way too happy. So we just need to adjust the size now to get a more serious look on his face. We need some eyebrows and there needs to be quite thick. So we'll select the Pen tool, will just click and drought a line just above as I turned it into a stroke. And then we want to select the same color as the hair, hold down Shift and clicking that. And we want to make them quite a bit thicker. And of course we want the rounded cap. So we can drag this out. And also maybe they bit wide so we can always hold down old and change that. Yeah, I think this is about fine. And we can direct them up a bit so it doesn't look that Matt and duplicated by clicking, hold it down old and shift and dragging it so it aligns with the other eye. Now with all of the facial features done, I think it's about time to give this guy a pair of shorts. 5. Illustration: Adding Clothing: So before we start doing that, we should hide his arm just so we can actually see what's going on down here. And we can start out by just dragging out the sort of line of where the short should start. So selecting a rectangle tool and tracking out sort of shorts. And I think they should just go just a bit above the curve we have over here. So right here should be about fine. And now we want to cut out the shape so it fits within the shape of the body. Now to do that, we have to use the Pathfinder tool. So we can go to window all the way down to Pathfinder. And here you see you have a lot of different options. But before we do anything, we actually want to select the body, copy it, and paste it in place by pressing control shift v. Then we can select the two shapes and intersect them. So that way we just get this bottom part and it's cut out so it fits perfectly with the body. And now let's use the same color for the shorts as we did with the hair. And he now has a pair of shorts, but these are sort of looking like sparrows and that's not what we're going for. We want to extend them a bit down onto our legs. So a way that we can do this is actually by using a stroke. So if we press P and get the pen tool, we just want to start in the center of this stroke that were already created. Now to see probably we can press control y to go into the outlines. And we just wanted to start a bit up. Then we can press control why again. And we want the shorts to go roughly down to around here. Then we want to change it to a stroke. We impress I and we just click on the leg to get that exact same width. And now we just want to turn the caps back to PopCap. And then we want to hold down Shift while selecting the color of the trunks. So we get that perfect color. Now the thing that I mentioned up here with the sort of bandana, again, that things have a certain width. So we want to make this a bit wider. So it just doesn't line up perfectly with our leg. To do that, we can select it. And then we can just turn up the wait a bit and we can just press enter. And we also want the trunks to go out that far. So we can zoom in. And we just have to find the point here where we can track and just make sure that it lines up. So that way you can just see that we have a bit of width. And we of course also want a bit of width to the other side of the trunks. So somewhere around here. And now we can go ahead and copy this path and paste it in place, drag it all the way over to our other leg and just make sure that it lines up perfectly with our other stroke. Now we want this to be just on top of the leg and we wanted it to be a bit dagger. As you can see, this leg is behind and this leg is in front. So we find the positioning of the lack. You could see it's all the way down here. Therefore, we can select that path and drag it on top. And then we want to select it again, go in and just make sure that the color is a bit darker. So we have that sort of shadow. So this shadow looks fine. Now I can see there's a bit of an issue with the trunks here. Just because of the fact that the trunks and the body. The exact same position. So we can actually take the trunks and just make them a bit larger at the bottom. And we shouldn't have that problem anymore. Now these are swimming trunks. Let's just call them martial art trunks. So we want to make them a bit fancy and add a bill to them. So the way that we can do this is just by selecting the Rectangle tool, dragging out a rectangle for the built. And we just want to censor this with the buddy. And we want to select the white collar, as we can see over here. We just round the corners a bit. Let's make it look a bit fancy, if you may, as a final detail, we just want a perfect class in the center, made out of the purest gold. So we'll just select the ellipse tool, hold down old and shift while dragging that out. And just wanted to be a bit larger than the build itself. And select that yellow, golden color. And we can move it a bit to the right again because it's closer to us and we can copy it and paste it in place. And now again, we hold down Alt and shift to make it a bit smaller. And then we just take the larger version and make that a bit darker. So we just have a bit contrast between these two parts of it. And now one thing I wanted to make sure of is that it doesn't extend to fall on either sides because that way it doesn't look like it's tight. So down old and we just drag it in from both sides. And perhaps we can also track this in a bit. So sort of in the center between the belt and the body itself. So that just means that we have to select every single part of this leg and drag it in so it fits with our body, all the trunks right here. So that way he has a pair of trunks. And now we want to add some muscles to his buddy because this guy, well, it doesn't really look that Jack. So we want to add some pics as well as a bit of a six pack, or in his case, maybe just a 4-pack now depicts a quite simple. Then go in and select the rectangle tool. Just draw out a PIC, sort of this size and we just want to round the corners. I think we'd use the same colors as the arm. So press Control Y. Then I can just hold down shift while selecting that path. So we get that color and we can hold down olden shift to create a duplicate. And we just want to adjust the scale of the pigs so a bit larger, push them out to the right. So they are extending beneath the sort of main body part, password1. The costs would be a bit different from the arm so they don't get lost. So just make it eight sign a bit lighter. We can also go ahead and draw the six-pack underneath. That's actually quite simple. We just want to take a rectangle, drag it out, and align it here with the pegs. Then we want to p So we can add a point to the path appear at deleted. So it's opened up. Then we select it to bottom points here and just brown them. Like this. And then we can change it to a stroke. Make the caps rounded, and make that a bit larger. So for this part we just delete the top points. Then we compress p. And in this sensor here, can add another stroke. And they should sort of resemble a six pack and olden, olden shift to make a duplicate. And we just have to make sure that there's enough space for them. We can make them connect. And therefore, we may need to adjust the size of these pigs. So we just need to make sure that we align it. So we select everything here and we align it with the sensor of the pegs right here and we drag it down. And right now, we also need to take the Plasma of the built and also move that out a bit. Just so it's also approximately in the center. And you can see that our guys science look a lot more jack. We can maybe pushed down the built a bit further, so there's a bit more space we can make the depicts even bigger. So that way he just looks even stronger. That's what we want for this guy. So we can show the arm again. And now we of course want to take all of this we have just created right here and move it. So it's just on top of the body. So we can select everything here, move it on top of the body. And then we also want to move down the trunks. So let's select everything that needs to be moved. I think it's these objects. Again, click the body so we can place it right on top. And that way the entropy on top again. We can also adjust the length of these trunks as you see them right now, they could be tiny bit longer. So the final parts of this illustration is basically just details. So we need to add some details to the arms, as well as perhaps a bit of detail to the hair. So we can start out with this arm. I want to repeat the sort of red part and just add a band to the top of the arm so I can select the Rectangle tool and just roughly drought that band. If I zoom in a bit, can adjust the proportions. Just makes sure that it sort of fits. Again, this end go out a bit further than the arm itself. And then I can just select that red color from up here. Then for the bottom part of this n, I want to add this sort of boxing hand wrap in white just to show that he's ready to fight. So we can zoom in again and use the Rectangle tool to drought the shape. Just make sure that it aligns. Push it up a bit, and just try and get the proportions right here. Just round the corners a tiny bit. Then I want to select this white collar. And because of the fact that the build is the farthest away, I just want to make that a tiny bit dagger just so we can see, Spot the sort of difference between them like this. And then I just want to add some lines so we can see that it's been wrapped around a bunch of times. Again, we just use rectangles for this. Just drag out a simple rectangle, push it down a bit. Just want to hold on olden shift and create a bunch of duplicates. And it should make sure that that's the same distance between them. It will show that on the side here, like this, and we just select all of them. Push them up a bit. Perhaps even want them to be a bit dagger. Just because right now it's quite difficult to see the contrast between them. So another thing I think would be cool to add is just some hair on the arm. So we can just create two sort of wiggly lines. And this is just to add a bit of detail in the middle. So we also have that darker color. So we can press p to get our pen tool and just click and hold down shift to get a line. We just want to create a stroke and increase it. And then we want to select the color right here. And just make sure that we have the rounded caps on. We can go up into effect. We can go into the stores and transform and use the six sec. So in secrets is six sick Polo actually wanted to be rather smooth. So we can select that. And we just need to adjust the amount of riches, the size, and everything like that. I don't think I want the size to be that large. Perhaps a bit more riches. So right around here. And then we just need to press OK and adjust the weight. It's tiny bit. And that way you can see it's just a very simplified version of sort of hair on an arm. And we can try and center it up like this, hold down, shift and create a duplicate, can track it down and just have it on sort of the bottom half of the arm, which would be around here. I just think that solving cool diesel to add. And now we want to add some of these details to the other arm. We want to add the dependent and the sort of rep at the bottom, not the hair because that would be on the other side. But we can select the top band and hold down shift and select all of the bottom parts as well. Then we copy it, paste it in place, and drag it all the way over to the other arm. Here, we want to press control y, just to make sure that we are lining it up in the center. You can see right here, it should be in the center of that arm. Swing, go out of that again. And now we want to figure out where the arm is located so we can select everything, just drag it all the way down. And I think the arm should be somewhere at the bottom. This is the leg. So the arm is probably right here. So we can select them and just stack them on top. Now the shoulder sort of gets in the way, but that's actually a fixed for that. We can just go into object, path and outline stroke. And that way we can just delete this outer point. So the shoulder just connects up here and it doesn't really cover anything that's on top of the arm. Now I can go in and adjust the colors for the red. We want it to be quite a bit dagger. Select one of the reds up here for the white. I actually think we can use the sort of darker stripes. And then we of course need to select the darker stripes and make them even darker than before. So somewhere around here. And that way you can just see its dagger on that site. Now as a final touch, we can add just a bit of detail to the bandana p and just draw a stroke. Turned into a stroke at least and turn up the weight and enable the caps. And here we just want to make sort of a, some detailed pattern or something like that. You can drag this out a bit, make it a bit larger. And then I just want to make it lighter than the actual red color. So don't shift and click on that. Just a bit lighter. Somewhere around here. Then we could copy it and paste it. And we just want to take this duplicate and make it smaller. And we want that to go underneath the year. So you actually have to find the IRR. Should see right here and directed underneath. And we can select a darker color and holding down shift. Now follow the hair. It's a to clean for my liking. So it tiny bit of detail will help. And I just wanted to add a few strands of hair pointing out from the back. So again, select the Pen tool and we can just click and drag that out. Just hold down shift while selecting that color and just adjust the positioning may make it a bit thicker. Round here and copy it and paste it. And for this version, you just want to drag it up a bit. So just create two random strands, sort of pointing out from the back of the head. Just so everything isn't so clean. One thing I wanted to do just so the arm doesn't stand out that much is actually take it I and hold down shift, make it the same color of the body. And you can do that because it stands out because of all of the details that it has gotten. And one last thing is just select the arm here and then just make sure it's the same color as the pegs. And the reason why we can do that is also because we have the detail on the arm. And I will also need to find the shoulder and make it that same color. We should have our final character. We can actually start to set them up for breaking. Because as you can see right now, we have a bunch of different layers, but we want to group them accordingly. So you can make this character probably. 6. Illustration: Getting the Character Ready for Rigging: To get him ready for wrecking, there's one thing we have to do before grouping all of the layers. And that is creating the pivot points. And the pivot points are basically the points where different parts of the body rotate around. So as an example, if we take the arm here and select everything on it, the shoulders pivot point would be at the top of the stroke. So if we press R and click there, you can see that the arm should rotate around that point. And we also want to split up the arm. So that's also a pivot point for the sort of elbow. The patent part of the arm also can rotate. There's also a pivot point for the body that's around here, that's one for the head. So if we were to select everything from the head, just de-select the neck, the pivot point would be right around here. So the head would rotate around that point. Therefore, it is important to start out by addressing these pivot points. So let's start with the arm. We already know that the shoulder has appeared point up here at the top of the stroke. So we can create a new layer and just call it pivot points and assembly one sort of a circle illustrating each and every point. So just drag out a tiny circle. And I'm just going to make it some color that we haven't used. So that could be a green. And now if I press control y, I can see the sort of corner of our arm here. So I can track it down and make it snap in place to make sure that it's perfect. You just have to zoom in. And if you select from the centre, it should snap to that point. Now the smart thing about creating your arms as a stroke is also that when you rotate them, as showed just before, it's rounded. So you don't really see any changes around the arm as it is being rotated. Now this is the same for the elbow if you also created with these rounded edges to figure out where the elbow is, we have to split it up into two. So if I take this path, just hold down, shift and drag it out, we just have to create half of it. So one way you can do this is by selecting the scale tool. If you don't see it, you can click and hold and just find it within this menu. Then you hold down old and click on the top point. You go to non-uniform and you can set the vertical scale 250%. So when you click OK, it will be half of the size of the entire arm. So this is one part. Now we want to create the lower part. So this is rather symbol. You can just press control y. Then you're gonna hold down Alt and shift. So create a duplicate. And when you have that a, Just hold on that point and drag it up so it snaps to our other line. So this way you can see that it's split up into two. And actually, if you were to take the bottom one, press and use that sort of pivot point. You can see that the rotation works perfectly. So now that we have created the arm, we just want to align it with our main arm over here so we can again go in and see the outlines Krakatoa and just make it snap. And now we just have to make sure that we delete the other arm so we can hide this for now. Find our arm. You can see it's right there and just deleted. Then we can show these again. And now it's quite easy to find our pivot point because you can see that's where the first path ends and the other path starts. But if you have difficulty finding it, you can always select the first path. Just track down a guide and make it snaps to that point. And that way, when you take this circle, you can hold down shift and just make it snap to that guide. So that way you can see that we have the perfect pivot points for our arm. And just to see if it works, let's say we were to rotate our lower arm. You can just select every single thing that's on top of it and rotate from that point. And you can see the arms rotation works perfectly. Right now the arm isn't completely on top. But again, this is just to show you how the arm would work when animating. So it's recreate this for the other arm. Just want to select the pivot points as well as the two paths fall. And then we can go and press control y so we can see the outlines. Click, hold down, shift and just drag it over. So it snaps to our other arms position. So right now we can see that it's not aligned properly, but we can just hide it for now. And we just want the pivot points to be on top. So that's fine. But we have to find the positioning of arm. So if we just click on one of layers associated with it, you see that the arm is all the way down here. So we just want to take the under, we'll split up and track it down. And I assume this is our arm is that this is going to delete that just enabled it to others. And now we just want to get the same color as the chest. So select the stroke, hold down, shift and click it. So that way we have the pivot points fall arms. Now let's do the same for our head. So right now, if I were to select the head, just de-select the neck and select the point right here, which would be our pivot point. You can see it doesn't really work. So the first fix is just to select the neck and the head. And then we can just find the hair over here and put it below our neck. And just to be sure, we can say get and just drag it in. So it doesn't really end just here. It ends behind the sort of head and neck. Then we also want to take the excess fabric from the bandana and put that just below our hair down here. Now, in terms of the neck, we want to make sure that it's wide enough. So when we actually rotate the head person and rotating it, it looks like a proper neck. And for this guy because he's quite strong, we also want a really wide neck. And then if we rotate it again, you can just see it looks a lot better. And we have found our pivot point. So we can take one of these points, Hold on, hold and drag, and just place it right here at the sort of intersection of the face, the neck, and the IEA should sort of be the point where you rotate the head from. If you don't rotate it very, extremely and rotated all the way up, all the way down. Now the pivot point for the body is very simple. It's placed in the hip, just between the legs. So again, we can hold down old just triggered down. This doesn't have to be very precise, but it's just somewhere in between the legs. So right here, I think that should be fine. And now we have to create the legs so they can actually rotate probably. Because if we select them now and rotate them from up here, you can see it's just the entire leg and we wanted to be split up into the foot, lower leg, and the upper leg. So to do this, we'll start out by hiding this arm again. So just have to find out where it's located right around here. And we just have to hide all of the different layers that's associated. So you can see also all of the details. We have to select those and just hide them for now. That way we get access to our leg and it's easier to sort of split it up. Finding the pivot point for our foot is actually the easiest. Because right here you can see that the path ends and it's rounded down here. So the top pivot point of our foot is actually just right here where the path ends. So hold on, hold and drag that down. Make it snap right here. And if you print are and try and rotate it, you can just see that it works, especially when you rotate in this direction. You get this perfect transition and that's what we want. So we have to decide how far up does our leg go? Right now you can see it goes up quite far. And we actually just wanted to be at the same height as our pivot point for the body. So it just prints a and select that point and drag it down. So we have it right here. And that means that we also have to select the trunks and do the same. Subtract it down right here. And we have to do that for both legs. But for this one, I actually think it's easier if we split up the left leg and then just duplicate it and place it over here with the right leg is supposed to be so we can drag out our pivot point. It can hold and shift right here. And for the right leg, that should be in the same place. So right here then to figure out where our knee is supposed to be, we again have to take this leg just duplicated, go up right here and fight the scale tool. All clicked, it's up and just make it 50% in the vertical. That way we have our halfway point. And we can again click and drag this down, then press control Y and a, so we can correct this up and just make it fit perfectly. So now we can drag our leg back in place. Just make it snap right here in the center. And we have to delete the old lake so we can just go down. And I assume it's this path? Yes, it is. And that way we have the new leg in place where it split up into two different sections. So the pivot point would be in the center of those sections, old and shift. And we can drag it down right here. And you can see that just fits perfectly. But we actually have a bit of a problem. If we select the leg and rotated from the hip. You can see that I'll trunks are missing a part. Also if we rotated from our knee, you see the trunks are only plays on the top part of the leg. So somehow we have to split these up. So there's a part for the button part and the part for the top. Now I'll start out by creating the bottom part. So it's actually just take the leg, copy it and control shift V to paste it in place. Then I have to make it the same width as the trunks. So I can actually just press IY and click on the trunks and the other side here. And then I want the rounded top. So turn on the round caps. And here we have a bit of a problem because we actually wanted cutoff and we only want the rounded edge on the top. So we have to go to object. Path and then outline stroke. That way it's no longer a stroke, but it's just an outline. So we can delete the bottom point, select these two points by pressing a and getting the direct selection tool, just tracking them all the way up. So the lineup here, we just press P and connect them. So if we now take this press I and just make it the same color as the trunks. So let's see bottom part. And now we want to create the top part so we can take this and hide it for now. Then we take the truck that we created initially, and we can just adjust the length of that so it matches up with our pivot right here. When that is done, we can turn it into a round cap. And for this part, we don't want it to be rounded at the bottom, only the top, which is not visible right now. So we can go into object again, path and outline strokes. Just delete the bottom one and the traditional line up perfectly with our pivot. And if we turn on the other part of the trunk again, we can try the hip pivot again, so that should now work out. You can see you have the rounded edge here. One thing that's a bit of a problem here. You can fix that if you just take the top part of the trunk and rounded a bit. And also if you just make sure that every single thing is lined up perfectly to the edge here. There shouldn't be a problem. And now if you take this again and try to pivot it, you shouldn't get that problem anymore and you have a perfect leg, can also test out the knee. So we just have to select the right parts down here. And you just have to imagine that this is supposed to be on top so you don't get that issue. But otherwise it moves perfectly. So we can duplicate this and place it on top of the other Lick by just selecting every single part of it, except for the top pivot point. We've already created that. Who down olden shift and just drag it over and it should snap in place. And now we can find the placement of this leg. And you can see it's already down here. So we want to select every single part and just drag it all the way down. You can see we have a lot of layers here. But just so we have the leg on top and then we just want to delete the old lake, including the foot. And you can see that we have the new one here. And for this one, we simply just have to create that darker color than the darker shade for the trunks. Such would be somewhere around here. And we also have to select the Direct cauliflower leg. That's the same as the pickup here for the foot, and that's the same color as well. So now you can see that we have all of our pivot points far legs or arms or head. Wind just turn on the other arm again so we can actually see it right now. You can see that the lake is actually on top. So simply just have to select all of these different layers. And just make sure that you, you track them all on top. You can see that the arm is actually below the other ones. So you can drag that up and just drag it all the way on top, like this band to peered points that we actually miss are the ones for our hands. It's just easier when you set up the bones in aftereffects for rigging that you have sort of illustrated where the hands are located. So this is just where the lower path ends right here. So we can just drag it all the way down. And if you're not sure if you're hitting it right, you can just go in here and select the path. And you can see that should be perfect. And then you can use that same one, drag it over to the other side. So just so long shift like that. And you can see that we actually have all of the different period points. And we can just select that layer and group them. So we have it as one group. 7. Illustration: Organizing the Layers: So the last thing that we need to do an illustrator is just placed all of the different parts, the head, so on, on different layers. So it's easier to Rick and animate when we get into After Effects. So just start out by creating a bunch of different layers that we will be naming. And we always start from the very top. So what is the top part of the character? In this case, it's going to be the arm. And actually because of the way that we're rotating the arm, the lower part of it will be on top. Because if we take this lower arm and want to rotate it from that pivot point, here, you can just see that it actually needs to be on top. So we have already selected all of these parts when just press Control X to cut it, and then control shift V to paste it in place. And we'll call this the arm under score lower on the score L, And that just refers to the left side. Then the next one will be the arpa, also left side. And we can just select those parts, Control X to cut it and paste it in place again. And each time you do this, you just need to make sure that you group it by pressing control key. So everything is neatly organized within the layers. Then we'll take a look at the face and the part that's on top is the eyebrows. So we'll just go eyebrow underscore L and I underscore r. So we'll start with the left eyebrow pasted on the layer and then the right eyebrow. Then we can actually group the eyes. Because you have to imagine that when he's blinking, both of the ISO blinking at the same time. So we'll just create a layer called eyes and cut those out, paste them and group them. Then we can take the mouth on its own layer. So just call this mouth. And after that we can say the entirety of the head. So this means sort of the shape of the head. We have the hair. We have the headband right here, and the hair right here. And then at last we have the knots, but we don't want to include the sort of excess fabric here, all the back of the hair because one that's replaced a lot further back. We also want these two nuts to be placed in their own layer so we can animate them individually. And we just need the hair to be behind the neck. And the neck is sort of attached to the body. So we have selected all of the parts that we need. We can cut them out. And he looks quite creepy now, but we can paste it in place, Group ID, and we can just call it the head. Now we can move on to sort of the body, but we actually want the left leg to be on top of the body so we can start out with the left leg. So it consists of three parts. We have the upper part, d psi, then the calf, and the foot. But we actually want them in opposite orders. We want the foot and then the calf, and then we want the thigh. And that's just so the foot and a half can move on top of the thigh. So we'll call the first one foot on the score L. Then cough, underscore L and thigh on score L and I, we may need to hide the arm. To get this right. We can just zoom in. And for the foot, that's quite easy. We'll just paste that for the CAF. We select that and then we select the bottom part of the trunks, cut that out and paste it, grouped together, and then we can hide the food and the CAF. So we actually see the thigh. And we also want to select the stroke underneath so we have both parts and can paste that in place. Now one problem you may have here is that it goes a bit at some of the belt, but there's quite an easy fix for that. You can either just make it shorter or you can just decide to move the legs down a bit. So we just move the legs down. So start out by just ungrouping the pivot points. And then we select the first leg, hold down shift and select the pivot point. Hold down shift and select the other leg and the pivot point so we can just push it down quite a bit. And then I also want to take the built and push that up like this, so it doesn't get too rounded at the edge here. But the thing that should be fine. And after that is done, we can go ahead and group all of our pivot points again, and we can go ahead and move on to our buddy. So we wanted our entire body to be grouped. That's the body, the shoulders and the neck. So we want to select every single part of it. But just holding down Shift and saves a bit of time to go through all of this. We have the shoulder here, we have to remember. We have the other shoulder here that you need to go into Outline mode to see. Select that, select the neck control x, and we just pasted on the slayer group it, call it the body. So after that we can just enable our arm again. And we want to paste in our hair. So we'll call the next layer up hair under scope back. Cut that and paste it in place. And then we can say to sort of not so the excess fabric, I'll just call it not underscore chop and not on a scope bottom. So we take the top 1 first and the bottom 1 second. And they have their own layers so we can animate them individually. After that will take the right leg. So again, we'll start with the foot on the scroll right, then the calf on a scroll, right? And at last, the thigh on the score, right? So cut the foot and paste it. Then we select all of the parts for the calf piece that prove it. Then we can hide the layers and just make sure that we select the last parts like this, cut them, and paste them, and then we can just show the other layers and we're close to being finished now, we actually only need our other arm. So again, we will take the bottom part of the arm first. So the arm underscore lower this time it's the right one. Then the arm on the score. Write one. And we can just hide the body so we can actually see the arm. For the lower part, I just want to select everything, cut it and paste it. And then the upper part, like so after that it's done going add one final thing which is a shadow. It's rather simple. We just select the pencil and draw out a shadow. And we want to adjust the weight of the stroke. And then we want the same colors background, but we just wanted a bit darker. So it actually works like a shadow. So something like this should be fine for our shadow. And we also want a layer for that. So just call it shadow, cut that and paste it like so. So now we have everything separated under their own layer. We have all of the different pivot points. So we actually know where we can rotate the different objects from. And that way it's just much easier to reckon after fixed and we will save a lot of time. Now is a perfect time to share your progress as a class project. So to export an image from this illustration, you'll simply go to File, Export and then export for screens. Here you can rename your outboard. I'll call this character. Then I can choose where to export it to, selecting the folder and simply clicking export outboard. Now when you have clicked a button to create a project, we'll start out by uploading a cover image. He'll just choose the image of the character and click open. Then you can crop it. And I'll just show the top of the character and click Submit. Then you can give the project a title. I'll just call it character. And for the project description, you can sort of describe what you went for, what your character, if it see fighter or something different, just type in a few words about that. And then you can upload the full image. So he'll just select the same image and click open. That way we have the entire character. And you can go ahead and publish the project and move on with the class. So without further ado, I think we should jump into after fixed and start the rigging process. 8. Getting Ready in After Effects: Now when we get into After Effects, we want to adjust our workspace. Often with character animation, at least you have a bunch of different layers. And you can really see all of them if you don't have a more vertical space. So what we're going to do is take our composition window, drag it all the way to the right. And that way we have a space where we can estimate our character over here. They want to take our timeline, drag it all the way to the left. So that way we have a bunch of vertical space for all of our different layers. And then we simply want to combine these two windows when just close down the ones that we don't use. But for the rest of them, we can simply combine them into this one sort of strip. And if we drag that in, it doesn't really need that much space. You can see that we have our workspace all set up. Now one thing you will need when rigging, This is a very standard tool which is called Bessel. Now I've already installed the plugin. So if I go to window, go down like a fight vessel right here, and I can docket right next to effects and presets. Now this is a completely free tool, and if you google download, you can find it right away. I'm currently using the vessel 0.2 version and you can go ahead and click the download link on their website. Then you scroll down and click Download. Now this completely free, but I would recommend donated to them so they can keep on developing this tool which is used by thousands of after fixed users. When you've downloaded it, you'd get a zip folder. And if you open the Read Me file, go down a bit, you will find instructions on how to install it. You can see that all of the files from the script UI panels folder should be copied into either this destination on Windows. Well, this destination on Mac, but if you're in doubt or there's a newer version of the script, you can always find a video on YouTube which will tell you how to install it. When you have installed to it, you can go ahead and find your Illustrator file and drag it straight into After Effects. Here, get the option to either imported as footage or composition. And you want to choose composition. So we'll get all of our different layers and click OK. Then we can open up that composition. Then I'll go to composition, composition settings, rename it to Rick Maine. And just make sure that the frame rate is set to 24 frames per second. And click OK. Now as you can see on our right side, we have the character split into all of our different layers. Now you don't really need to convert all of these layers to Shape layers. Because the only thing that we're actually going to adjust the path of cheap of is the mouth. And we'll work on that later. So as a start, we can just delete the layer with our colors and luck, the shadow and background so we don't accidentally move it. Then we can go ahead and color code some of the layers so it's easier to find out which is which body part for the arms. We can go ahead and make those, let's say red. And then for everything that has something to do with the hat, we can just highlight that. That's also the hair back. And we can just change the color of that to a blue for the foot calf. And phi will change that to a green. Then the body, we will change that to a purple. Then we have the two nuts, those can just become brown. And then again, we have something to do with a leg. And up here at screen, so we can just turn it green again. And for the arm, we can turn that read again. So this is just so know what corresponds to each other. And that way it's just easier to figure out which layer you are working with. 9. Rigging: Anchor Points: Now we can take a look at the anchor point of the different layers so the correspond with our pivot points. So we can start with the left arm and see I've selected the upper part of the left arm. And I just want this anchor point to correspond with the pivot point of our shoulder. So I'll go up, select the pen behind tool. So just our anchor point. Just zoom all the way in. And while holding down control, I can just line it up with our pivot point, like so. Then I can go ahead and select the lower part of the arm. And that should correspond with the pivot point of our elbow. So we'll go in, select the Pen tool again and just drag it up so it's at the center. So that should be r. We can simply tested just by selecting the different pieces and trying to drag it. And for the lower part, that should work fine as well. So we'll go ahead and do this far ahead as well. Depend behind tool. And just make sure that it's right in the center of that pivot point and follow the head. We want to take the hair. First of all, so the hab back, as you can see right here, and just parrot that to our head. And then we can adjust the anchor point for the knots we have here. We haven't made a pivot point, but really, it should just be somewhere up here in the main nought. So it will press W rotate around that point. And we can also do that for the other one. Just triggered up somewhere around here. I can press W and you can see how it rotates. Then we can see those two nuts and simply parent than to the head as well. So now if we take the eyebrows, the eye, the mouth, and also apparent that to the head, we should be able to take the head and rotate it around that pivot point and it should work fine. Next up, we'll set the anchor points for our other arm. So fine. First faulty lower part down here. You can drag that point right up to the circle. So it lines up. Then we take the upper part and do the exact same. So that should also be censored in the circle, like so. And again, we can try and test it. The upper part works fine, and the lower part works fine as well. Then we can move on to the legs. And these consist of three different parts. So we can start with the feet, and that should be right here at the sort of angled pivot point then the calf. And if you want to select it just from the composition of you, you need to lock the pivot points layer so you can actually select it because otherwise you pivot points are just on top. So when you have that selected, we can zoom in and adjust that as well. So right around here. And then at last we just do it with thigh. Drag that one up and we can try and see if that works out. First one looks fine. Then we have the calf. That's also works out. Great. And at last we have the foot. And you can also see that works. And that's just because we have made sure to have these very rounded joints and that way it just looks very smooth when you are rotating the different layers. So let's repeat that for the other leg will start out with the foot. Make sure that lines up the same sort of way. Then we select the calf. And just remember to zoom in so you get this perfect. And otherwise you can also press control are to drag out some guides if you really want to get that sensor, but this should work out fine. And then the last rule, just select the thigh and make sure that's lined up properly as well. Here in the center. We can just test that as well. The thigh works fine. Then we have the calf that also works fine. And the foot works out two. So now the last pivot point that we want to adjust is for the body. And that's quite simple. We have pointed it out down here. So we just need to zoom in and make sure that's positioned correctly. And we can also test that, but it doesn't really work out that great because we haven't set up any of the limbs with doing good. But that's the next step in this process. 10. Rigging: Limbs Using DUIK: So we're going to use to it to wreck the different limbs. We can start out with the arm over here. And just to make it easy, we can actually solo out the arm by clicking the solo buttons and also the background and the pivot point. So we know where to go. That way. You can just focus on one limb at a time. And to Rick with 2ac refers fall need to open the script. To do that by going to Window and finding Bessel after you have installed it. Then we'll go into bringing, and here we'll find the section called create structures. So in here we can create either an arm, leg, spine, or so on. But we want to start out by creating an arm. But before we do that, we have to select the different layers for the arm in the correct order. So you always have to start from the top, meaning that you go from the shoulder down to the elbow. And if you had a hand or something like that, you would select that last. So you can go in here underneath the settings of the arm. And you just have to disable the hand because we really don't have any external hand for this character. So now we can create the bones and it will just look them up. And you would see it matches it perfectly with the pivot points. And the only one we have suggest it's the bottom one because we didn't have a hand. So we can just check that. So it's in the sensor down here. And right now, this doesn't seem like much because it doesn't really adjust anything. So we have to parent the different parts of the arm to our bones. So if we go over to the layers panel, we can start with the lower arm and that should be presented to the farm. And the A-bomb should be parented to the arm itself. So that way if I take one of these bones, let's say I take this one and press W to rotate it. It's parented probably. And I can also take the lower one. And you can see that we have this animation. Now all we need to do is really create a control for this. And the way that you do that is by selecting all of these bones. Then within doing PESTLE, you just have to go to the links and constraints and click the auto Rick and i k. So this will automatically figure out that we're working with an arm. And when you click that, now we can move it around and it's all wrecked. Can also see that you can even stretch it out if you want to. And it's just a very simple way to break an arm and it's very efficient. So let's repeat this exact process, but just with the other arm. So we'll find it down here and just enable it. And if we go over to that arm, again, we select it in the right order. So from the top and down, go into the create structures. Just makes sure that the hand is disabled and we can create. Then we adjust the lower bone so it fits where our hand joint would be or the sort of pivot point for our hand. After that, we parent the different parts. 11. Rigging: Body and Head Controllers: So now we actually want to parent all of this to the body. So it can just turn off the solar layers for everything. So we can see our entire Rick. And we can just take our controllers right here and track them all the way up. So we want the shoulders and the sort of hip controllers to be connected to our body. So if we move the body, they will move with it. So the way that we do this is by finding all of the different bones that are not parented. So anything. So you can see that's the thigh, thigh, arm, and arm, which is the top bones, as you can see right here. And we just want to take those and go all the way down and present them to the body. So this way, if you take the body and move it around, you can see that all of our limbs move according to the body. But something I don't like about the way that this rig is set up is that you have to click on the body itself to move it. And you also have to click on the head itself to move that. So I think we should create some individual controllers for those two attributes. So I'll go up to layer a new null object. And you just see that we get this null. Just want to drag it to the side and I can press S and just scale that all the way up. This will be the control for our body and the way that we make sure that it controls the body. So we have to say that anchor point and place it at the pivot point. So select depend behind to drag it all the way down. And we can just zoom in and make sure that it connects right in the center. Then we can take the body and parented to the null object, and we'll just call this the body. That way you can see if we drag it around, the body follows, we can also rotate it. And it's just much easier to have the control out here instead of on the body itself. Now also wants to do that for the head. So we can go ahead and go to layer a new null object. This time I'll just make it green so we can differentiate them from each other. Drag it up, and perhaps just scale it up a bit again by pressing S. Just so we have something to grab onto places right around here. And then we want to take that anchor point and place it at the exact pivot off our head. So this is the exact same method that you can use. Right around there. Sake the head parallel to that null, and we can just call it the head. Then we can take the head null and parented to the body all the way down here. And that way when we move this body, the head will follow. And then we can also rotate the head up here. 12. Rigging: Facial Controls: Now the only thing that's really left to do is adding some facial controls and just generally cleaning up the layers. So we don't have to look at every single layer that we created in Illustrator. So first let's take a look at the face. Now we want some controls for the eyebrows. And we perhaps want to be able to blink with the eyes. Now the blink of the eye is quite simple. You will see the anchor point is already in the center. So the only thing we really need to do when we want them to blink, it's just press S, unlock the constraint proportions. And then you can just adjust the y scale to blink. So we don't really need a rubric for that. We'll just leave it as is. And for the mouth will be animating that manually. And that's just easier than trying to create some extensive Rick that you spend more time creating than you actually would have spent just animating it manually. For the eyebrows though, we want to try and connect them. Meaning that if I move one eyebrows, the other one will follow. And if I rotate this eyebrow in this direction, the other eyebrow will rotate in the opposite direction. So let's say that the left eyebrow is our main controller. Then we go to the right one and press P Shift R. And we can also do that on the left eyebrow. Then we can just take the right eyebrow, just make sure that the anchor point is set in the center, but it should be just a standard. So we can go ahead and old click the rotation. Then we link it up with the rotation of the left eyebrow. But instead of just being the same rotation, we want it to be negative. So this way, if we take the left eyebrow and rotated, you can see that the right eyebrow rooted in the other direction. The next step is linking the position, which is actually quite simple. You just have to remember that you should select both positions, right-click and separate d dimensions. And you can see that the y position is actually the exact same. So if you all click this y position and just link it up with the other one, you should be able to move them up and down, corresponding to each other and also rotate them. So this way it's just very easy to animate. And now let's clean up some of the layers so we don't have to look at this extreme mess when we're animating. 13. Rigging: Cleaning up the Rig: First we want to hide all of the layers that we don't want to see when we're animating. So this means all of the different bones here. Just go ahead and hide those layers because we don't really need them. Can also go ahead and hide the pivot points. And then we actually have all we need. Now we want to lock some of the layers because we don't want to accidentally move the head, move something else from the body. We only want to use the controllers, the eyebrows, and the things that we are actually going to animate. Other than that, we also want to hide all of the layers that we're not going to add keyframes to. So in, go ahead and figure out what layers are going to be hidden all the way down from the arm here, up to the head. Can actually hide that. Because you have to imagine that we have controllers for the body, the arms and the legs, and therefore we don't need them to be visible in the composition. So you can hide them by going into the shy layers here. And that way, when you shine the layers of the composition that just become invisible. So we want to be able to animate the mouth, eyes, and the left eye Brown, but we don't really need to animate the right eyebrow, the upper, lower arm, or the pivot points, so we can hide those as well. And we really don't need to animate either of these bones, so they can also be hidden on top of that, we just want to hide our background. And if we shy all of those layers, you can see that we're actually only going to be animating the head, body. Foot controllers on controllers, the left eye, brown eyes, mouth, and the shadow. So all of a sudden it isn't that many layers and it's a bit easier to overcome. But one problem, we still have a set. You can still select all of those layers and move them around. So we actually want to lock them so we can uncheck all of the layers. And then we just want to select every single one of the layers that are being hidden. So you can either hold down shift and select a whole bunch as I did here. And you can hold down control and just select the ones that you didn't get to select the first time around. So just go through the entire list. Then we'll lock the layers. And when we shine them now, you won't be able to move them. So that way you'll only be able to move whatever you're going to animate. And this is basically the most efficient way to set up the Rick. So let's take a look at what we have gotten so far to see if the records working probably just get a bit more space. Let's start out with the legs. You see they can move around, go on top of the body and the belt. You can also press W to rotate feet. And you can do that for both of the legs so they are working properly. Then for the arms. Can also move them around. You of course can routes it this because we don't have any hands. But they're working as they should. And they are working perfectly with the shown us. This also a bit of stretch in them. And that also works for both of the arms. Then we have the buddy. You can select the control out here. You can rotate it, the answer will follow. But you can also move it around as much as you'd like. Then we have the head controller and that's mostly used just to rotate the head up and down. But if you wanted to, you could sort of making shrunk by just moving the head down a bit and move the head up. Tonal, why you would do that? It looks bit crazy in my opinion. Then we have the AIS. And that's basically just the scale that you can control over here to make it blink. And if we select the left eyebrow, can move that up and down. So it moves with the right eyebrow. You can also rotate the eyebrows, make him quite angry. But one thing we've actually forgot over here, so we just have to unsheathe the layers and find the nuts and just make sure that they're not locked and turn them back on. Because that way we can also animate those. So they sort of react to the movement of his body. And this means that our character Rick is ready and we can start animating. 14. Idle Animation: Key Poses: Now the first thing we're going to animate is an idle animation. And you just have to imagine sort of the Old Street Fighter games where you have the characters just bouncing back and forth with the hands up, ready to fight. And that's sort of the look that I'm going for. And that's an animation that I want to create for this character. So before we create the animation and mess up this entire wreck, I usually like to find the wreck, the composition in the Projects tab. Then our press Control D two duplicated. And I can just open up that conversation codes, composition, composition settings, and rename it. And this one will be the idle animation. Just click OK. That way you can always go back to the standard Rick that is in the standard position if you mess anything up or if you want to use the rig for another animation, and this is just a backup I make for safety and something else. So think you should always do with the rubric. So in Go into the island emission and we just want to add a keyframe to every single element that we want to animate. So I think I'm going to animate the rotation of the head and the body, suppress our click the rotation then also wants to animate the position of the body. So Shift P. And I actually want to right-click and separate the dimensions. So I have the separate x and y position. So at a keyframe, so both of those then I want to animate the arms. So just the position at once enemy defeat there'll be planted to the ground. But I do want to animate the deportation of the nut. And I think if we're going to animate the eyes, mouth, and eyebrows, we'll just do that later on. So start out by creating two posters. They one-way sort of leaned back and then one ways lean forward. Then we'll make some in-between. But those are just two key poses that are an animation will consist of. So we'll start out by spreading out the legs a bit. We want to make a bit of a wider stance, is a big guy. And we just want to move his body down a tiny bit. Then for the first pose, we want it to be lean back a bit. We can select the body control, just rotating back a bit and even push them down so both of the legs bend. Then we can take its head also give that a slight rotation upwards. Then we can take its arms, put them up So it seems like he's ready to fight. Also the other arm. Now we want the right arm here to be in front and the left arm to be pushed back a bit. And I actually think we could make him go down even a bit lower. And also the eyebrows, he doesn't look that serious right now. We'll fix that with w and just add a bit of rotation. And that should make him look serious and ready to fight. Now because this leaned back, you have to imagine that the nuts are sort of following him. So we also want them to be rotated backwards just a bit. And now we can create the second key pose. So I wanted to go ten frames ahead. I can press control shift and the right arrow key to do that. And I can just zoom in quite a bit so I can see what I'm actually working with here. So this will be the opposite pose and this would be where he's moved forward. So start by rotating its body forward. Maybe moving him a bit forward as well. And we don't want to adjust the y position just yet. We just add a keyframe and keep it as is. But just make sure that both of his legs append. And we take its head, move that down a bit. This arm, the left arm should then be moved forward and the right arm should be moved back. So we sort of have this positioning of his body. We can press J to move back to the previous key frames, and K to move forward to the next ones. So we can sort of go back and forth between them. Can also take the knots here, press W to rotate them in a bit. Maybe spot is rotated a bit too much. So we can just adjust that. And I think that should be fine for now. Helps position the body a bit more. So we have a bit of contrast when he moves back and forth and we want him to sort of bounce up and down. So this would be his town position. And then in between these key frames. So at the five key frame mark, we just want to push up his body a bit. We don't want to stretch his legs out all the way. So somewhere around here should be fine. This is just so he's down on the left leg, goes up and then moves this way to the right leg. Now you can see that its legs becomes quite straight. So perhaps we want to adjust all of these key frames so we can go into the graph editor. Then we can select the value graph, just select all of the keyframes. And if we think it goes a bit too far up, can simply drag it in the opposite direction, get a bit more bending his knees. And this is the first part of the animation. It sort of goes from the left leg to the right leg. Then we want to reverse it, so-called ten frames ahead again. And then we can copy and paste all of the first key frames that we had. And when we've done that, we can also copy this middle keyframe and posted somewhere here in the middle. So when we go to the end, we can press N to trim the work area. Just drag it in one frame and we should have a perfect loop. Right now this looks quite robotic. And the reasoning behind that is that we have an offset anything yet. It's like every single muscle in his body is moving at the exact same time. And if you try and move yourself, you can imagine that. That's not really how it happens. Let's say you were to throw a punch. First. You anticipate the punch by moving your shoulder back, then the elbow than the rest, and then you go in the same order. So I have to imagine that the motion starts from the shoulder, moves to the elbow out through the worst and that sort of this chain. And that's why you create the follow-through. 15. Idle Animation: Offsetting & Follow Through: In this case, the motion is in his hips. He's doing this bouncing motion back and forth. So the position of his hip is sort of the main factor and that's what's going to happen first. Then it moves up into the body, the shoulders, and that's the rotation of the body. So we can take this rotation, hold down Alt and click the right arrow key to move it one frame to the right. So that's a bit behind. Next we have the head. You have to imagine that the neck is moving the head, and that comes after the rotation of the body. So we can take that rotation and move it to frames to the right. After that we have the headband or the bandana and the two nuts. So these are loose and they will also be a bit behind. If you have something loose tied to a head and you move very quickly. You can also see that it moves just a bit behind. And therefore, we'll take all of these keyframes and just move them free frames ahead. And for the bottom note, we just want to move that an additional two frames ahead, just so they are a bit delayed from each other and they just move a bit behind the rest of the body. You will see there sort of swinging. And that's what we want. And I also have to imagine that the shoulders are attached to the body. And because the motion is coming from the shoulder all the way down to the elbow and then the hand itself. We actually have to offset this quite a bit. So we can take both of these arms and just hold down All and click free times. So this way we have quite a bit of offset in both of the hands and we should now have everything offset. One problem is that you can see we are lacking some of the key frames here at the very start. And we solve wants to fill them out. So we want, let's say for the arm, when it stops right here. If we were to add a keyframe here, we want this section to actually be placed at the start. So we can do this by not adding any more keyframes. All we have to do is all click the stopwatch to add an expression. And then we simply type in loop. That makes it loop in, so it fills out the start gap. And then we just add a semicolon. Click out. And we can right-click that position. Copy expression only. And now we just have to find every single property where we have this sort of gap at the start. So the rotation for both of the nuts, the arm, we have the relation for the body and the head. And then we can just press control V to paste it all. And we should have movement even in the first keyframes. So you can try and play that back. And you can see that we have this island emission. The guy sort of moving back and forth. Now you can adjust all of the different parameters. May be you think his head wobble is a bit extreme. You could always go in and adjust that. So maybe right around here, you want to decrease this just a tiny bit. You may also want to adjust si pounds of his body. So that's in the Y position. Let's say when is down. So that's the first ones here. Maybe want to adjust that, make him go up a bit further. And now we can go ahead and add some punches to this idle animation. 16. Punch Animation: Extending the Loop: So one problem we have with this loop in expression is that if I were to extend the animation, he would completely stop. There wouldn't be any movement beyond the sort of key frames here because we are only looping in and not looping Out. So a way to fix this is actually by combining the two expressions. So we'll go in and after the loop in expression and we type in plus loop out at the parenthesis. And then because we have added the two expressions, we need to subtract the value and add a semicolon. So this way you can see that the arm keeps looping and it also loops in here from the start. So we can right-click this position and copy the expression only. And then we can select every single one that already has the old expression on it and simply paste it. And for the x and y position, if you pasted on both at the same time, it will combine to one position again. So we just want to paste it individually. And now we can see that it should basically loop on forever. And you can see that it sort of cuts right here. But that's because you have to imagine that it loops every 20 frames. So we can go to the Start, press control shift, click the rider of kids move ten frames at a time. So two times it will loop, four times, it would loop six times that will loop, and eight times it will loop. So we can just go to the eight times, press N and drag it in one frame so it should look perfectly. So now you can see you have an extended loop and we didn't even need to add any more keyframes. 17. Punch Animation: The First Jab: Now adding the punches is a little bit complicated because as you can see, we have already estimated the hands, which means that we can't just all of a sudden in the middle of the loop, move it because then you can just see that will sort of get messed up quite a bit. So figured out a way to sort of bypass this and add an animation on top of another emission. And this is by using null objects. So we simply wants to go to layer new null object. Then we can place that on top of the hand. And then we just have to find the hand controller. So this is the tip. Let's see the left one here. And before we parent that to the null, we can see that this is already parented to something. It's parented to layer number 33, the buddy. So you just have to find the same parent up here. Let's see the buddy and then we can parent it to the other one without moving or anything like that. So we can call this the hand underscore ill. And then whenever we move this, you can see that the head moves as well. But we still have that idle animation on top of it. So we can repeat this. For the other hand, go to layer a new null object. Please set also in sort of the hand here. Then we select the body again, that's number 34. And we can find that other hand right here and parallel to that null object. And we can call this the hand underscore r. So again, move the hand wherever you want and we have the idle animation on top. But when you're throwing a punch, you don't just move your hand and your arm. You actually move your entire body forward to sort of put in all the energy that you can. But the body's already being animated. So how can we move it as well? Now one way we can do this is by unchecking all of the layers. Then we can go all the way down and find our body, as you can see right here, unloaded and unshared. So when we shine the layers again, we can actually control our body. And you can see that we can actually control the rotation and the position if we wanted to. And that just adds on top of the other animation. So you can see that now it's moved a bit forward. So we can undo that action and you set to animate the punch as well. So let's figure out where we want the punch to happen. So first of all, we want him to idle a bit. And then shortly after we want him to throw the first punch, which is a left jab. So a quick lift Jaap, and then quickly after we'll write Jaap and a left Jaap. And you have to imagine that, yes, of course this, if you were to think of the hands as that actual positioning, this would be the right-hand and this will be the left-hand. But we're just thinking in terms of which side it's placed on when we look directly at it. So we'll start with this hand. And it has to sort of happen when he's already moving forward. Because otherwise it just doesn't really match up with the idle animation. Right here when it's about to move forward, we will take the left hand and we'll go into the position and edit keyframe and will also go down to the body and add a rotation keyframe. Now, this punch will only say three or four frames. Because if you make it quite long, the punch will just seem very weak. So we can go for frames ahead by hold down control and clicking the right arrow key four times. And then we will just rotate his body a bit. So you can see right here, just add a bit of rotation and then we'd say it's left hand. You just have to make sure that you are selecting the null and move it forward quite a bit. We may even want to stretch this out just to really act saturated. And you have to imagine that when you throw a punch with one hand, use usually counteract with the other one. So if your left-hand moves forward, your right-hand moves backwards a bit. So we can also add a position keyframe right-hand. Just drag it behind, and then at this point we just move it a bit backwards. Then we can go a bit ahead. Let's see, perhaps five or six frames. So Control and click the right arrow key. And then we just want it back at the regular position so we can just copy and paste those keyframes, like so. And then we can select all of the keyframes and press F9 to ease Ysom. So we go to the graph editor and here we just want to work with the speed graph and we just really want to saturate the punch. So it's slow from the start, and then it speeds up and accelerates towards this end. And then it accelerates as it's moving back again. So we'll take the first part and just drag it in a bit. Take the last part and also drag that in. Now we want to adjust the timing of this a tiny bit because it's happening rather quickly. So we just fall down old and maybe go to frames ahead with the keyframes. Then give a bit more time here at the end, especially for the body. And you can see that just works a bit better. And you really just want to time it with the island emission. So play around with the point of time where it happens. So thing right here should be fine. It's sort of moved all the way back. And then he froze the punch and move forward. Now you can see the legs become completely straight at 1, and that's indicated by the line underneath the foot here. So we want to sort of avoid that. And we could do that by adjusting the position of the body. So hold down shift and press P net a keyframe. Then when we get to this point, we just want to move them down a tiny bit. At the end here, we can just move him back. And again, we can press F9 to assert and just try to zoom in to sort of add the async to the start and the end and zoom out to see if that works. There, that definitely works. So we can see you have the island emission, then we have a quick punch. And we may even want a bit more theorization in the body. And again, we can just adjust the positioning so it works out. 18. Punch Animation: Facial Expressions: And of course we need to breathe in some sort of air to do this punch. And maybe he will also blink and his eyebrows move a bit. So I think we should first of all start by animating his eyebrows. So right here, when he's about to do the punch, will press p and r. And then we will add a keyframe to the y position and the rotation. Then move ahead. And we can just move his eyebrows down a bit and press W to just, just the rotation skin a bit more angry. And then we want to go a bit further ahead, maybe a bit further than the body animation and just copy and paste the first keyframes. We can try an easy set to see how that looks. So you can see there's a bit of emotion, not really that much. So go in and adjust this even more. We'll move it down to the eye actually. And we can also add a bit more rotation. And really it's allowed to exaggerate this a bit if you'd like. You can see sort of fusing all of his energy for the punch and move it up a bit more. And we also want to blink point so we can go to the ice and press S, S in scale at a keyframe, be sure that the constraint proportions is unlocked. And then we can go, let's say five frames ahead. So 1-2-3-4-5 set the y scale all the way down to 0, and then just one frame ahead. Copy and paste the keyframe just so we have a whole frame and then go six or seven frames ahead, somewhere around that point and set it back to 100. So we want to eSet and we want to exaggerate the blink a bit at the start here, want to drag that all the way in, just get the right handle. And at the end we also want to check that all the way in like so. So his blink is rather fast and take a look. And you can just see that he really quickly blinks. Then we can go ahead and add some animation to his mouth. So 1t is mouth to sort of become a circle and then become larger. Because when you're sort of punching you, blowing out air just at that point of time. And that's what we want to portray in the animation. So we'll go to the mouth and right-click, go to Create and create shapes from vector layers. And this just makes it into a shape layer. So we can delete the other one and just rename this and delete the outline part. And this just makes it possible to adjust that sort of path. So we'll open it up, go to Add and add a trim pulse animator. And we just had a keyframes to the start and the end. Then right here, as he's in the middle of the punch, we want to set the start to 50 and the end to 51. And that one just means that we have it's high in circle. If you were to set it to 50, it would just completely disappear. And then we also wanted to go in the group and stroke. And at the start here, we'll just add a keyframe to the stroke width. And right here we can just make it quite a bit larger. So it seems like he's sort of making this O'Shea with his mouth and blowing out the air. And then again a bit after the body animation, we just copy and paste the start. And we can add some EECS. This one, I don't want to make it as extreme, but again, I just want to add a bit of easing to the end here, as well as a bit of easing to the start. So we just see when that animation happens, sort of blows out the air. You could even add a bit of position animation, suppress P, that keyframe and pursue. We get to this point. We can move the mouth in a bit. And at the very end here we can just make it back to the standard mouth. And again, we just need to adjust the easing within the graph editor. Like so. You can go out, just see how that looks and see if that file's alright. And maybe it ends a bit too fast. So we can drag this in a bit, track this out. He could also hold it for a tiny bit. I actually think that will work better if we copy these keyframes. Just move a few frames ahead and paste it again. So he holds that exact mouth. And again, move this out a tiny bit and we just want to find some sort of middle ground. We can also delay some of the animation. You could take the stroke width as an example, may be delayed by one frame. Just to see if that works out. I think that should actually be fine. And now we can add the sort of right-left Jap. So we have the left jab here at the start. And then shortly after we have the right-left jump. 19. Punch Animation: The Double Jab: So actually wants to make this happen right after. So when he's moved back again, that's right here. We can add the animation. So the animation for the mouth and the body will be approximately the same. So we can just copy and paste those and we can adjust it in a bit. Then we have the animation for the right arm. We can add a keyframe. Then we can go ahead and make that jump. So move it all the way front like this and add just a tiny bit of stretch to it. And then let's see over here with it, 1-2-3, 4-5-6 frames. So we can also do that here, 123456, and then pull it all the way back again. So with that being done, we perhaps want to adjust the timing of this just a bit so it matches with the overall positioning of the body. So think right around, there should be fine. We have that movement. And one thing we can actually do is adjust this movement right here. So if we select the first keyframe here, can make the motion path just a bit more curved. So the movement is a bit more natural. Can also do that for the other part here. Well, that movement is so tiny that doesn't really matter. But for the other hand, you can also make that curved animation like so. So we just have a bit of a curve in it. So for this other hand, we want that to happen shortly after the first one. So we can just copy this and go a few frames ahead and pasted. So in C right after each other. So maybe a bit before this starts to sort of drag back. So you can see we have that movement. We want to delay the end here. So it's all the way past the last one. And we perhaps also wants to go in and adjust keyframes and dissolve graph a bit just so there's time for that second punch, and I think that's actually fine. But before this second punch happens, we actually just want the app to track back a bit so we can copy this key frame. And then right here as it's about to start, we wanted it to be dragged back just like this so you can see it directs back and then it punches. And we may need to go into the craft itself and sort of edit this. And see right here, want some ys, ys, and just want to add a tiny bit of easing in-between here. And then of course, with the sort of drag right here. And we also want to make sure that it doesn't move right here. You can see that we have the sort of speed graph. This is actually at the point where it shouldn't be moving. And this is most likely because of the curves on the graph editor. You can see that it's moving because of that. So we want to find out, yeah, you can see right here, this is sort of loop. You just want to drag that in and you just have to make sure that all of those curves, so it isn't, it's rotted by that. Right here you can see that curve becomes a bit strange, but you just have to go and find the other one. So it can be a bit tedious to find the right curves. But the important thing is that it doesn't move the oldest, oldest move in between here, you can see it moves a bit, but that's because of the island emissions. We see the null stays in place. That's fine. And see it tracks back just a tiny bit here. Perhaps we want that to happen a bit before. So you'll see when we play the entire thing, that looks fine and once adjusts the mouth a bit. So right here, when it becomes large, it should become just a bit smaller, but not go all the way back. So let's delay everything except for the stroke width. And then we simply wanted to become large. You can just delete this key frame and become a bit smaller and a key frame. And then we want it to become large again right here. So you can see we sort of get that movement and we can just offset that last key frame. And, and this is just to show that he's sort of blowing out air twice. I'm gonna just see if that even works. That's just an idea that I got. Yeah, you can see it sort of works. We just need to play around with the timing. You can see the first punch comes here and the second one here. So perhaps we wanted to happen a bit quicker. Like so. See if that works out. And I think that should actually work. If we have the idle animation, we punches, then purchase Twice. Yeah, that actually works out fine. And then we can take the eyebrow animation and also add it to the second part. And we can also just extend that a bit towards the end. And that should work out fine. So you can see that it's eyebrows just stay down a bit here. Then he moves on so you can try and preview the entire thing. See idle, one punch through punches. And we have the facial expressions and everything like that. And this is really just to add a bit of interest to the island emission. And this is an easy way to add animations on top of other animations. Because I find it quite difficult sometimes if you have an island emission and all of a sudden, you have to interrupt it and do something else. Really hard to sort of make the transition between it. And just feel like the null objects really help with this. And that where you can just add something on top of the idle animation. 20. Punch Animation: Eye Darts: One final search I want to add is some i dots, which is basically just the eyes looking around rather quickly, just sort of looking around the room and trying to spot whatever was going on. And this is just to add a bit of movement to the ice. You see that we have the ice right here at the start, we just press p, another keyframe, so the position, go few frames ahead, like three or four frames. And then we just want to move them bit so we can look maybe a bit down. Then we go just a bit ahead. Copy and paste that key frame over here, just a few frames ahead. And then he can perhaps look up. And this is just to create a bit of movement. We can just see how this looks. And you can see that even seems a bit too slow. So we can ease the keyframes by pressing F9 and then just drag it in a bit so it moves a bit quicker towards the start. And that way you can just see that we have some very quick I dots and it's just a minor detail, but I really like it. And you can add as many as you'd like right in between. We want another one. We can add a keyframe. Just go a few frames ahead. So here he perhaps wants to look down again a bit and maybe a bit forward. And we just want to make sure that the easing is proper for this one. Yeah, it should be. So if we zoom out, you can just see that sort of looks down punches again. And then we just want him to go back to the regular positioning of his eyes so he can look perfectly. So at a keyframe. Go a few frames ahead and just copy and paste that first keyframe. Now for this one it, yeah, it messed up the easing, so just track it in a bit. Zoom out, and we can try and preview the entire thing. So you can see it just adds a lot to the old animation that is sort of looking around, scouting the room. And I just think that's kind of nice. Animations like this, and it just adds a bit of personality. Now you could spend some more time and sort of think about ways actually looking and not make it so random. But for now, I think this is fine. It sort of looks forward a bit down towards his enemy. And then he looks back as you, the sort of viewer, and it starts all over. So now we have this loop, we have the island emission, the punching, and we have this sort of I dots. So that works out great. The last thing I want to add is a run cycle. And then I wanted to sort of show you how you can combine the island emission With that run cycle and make it seamless in the transition between the two. 21. Run Cycle: Setting up the Character: Now the run cycle may seem a bit more complex, but stay with me, we'll get through it together. So for the start of the run cycle, actually wanted to start in the position of our island emission. So what I can do is take the island mission and press control D to duplicate it. Coincide the composition goes composition, composition settings. And I can just call this the run animation. Now, I want to add a keyframe to every single part of the character at the very start. So he keeps this position so I can go in and select all of the layers and just pursue. So I can see all of my keyframes. Now that's the bit of a problem. Whenever the keyframes are pushed a bit forward. You can see that if I were to delete those keyframes, the value would change because there's not actually a keyframe at this exact position. So what we want to do is edit keyframe to every single property. Now we can start here at the bottom, you would see it's 1.4 degrees. So we all click that stopwatch and then disable all of the key frames, and we simply type in 1.4. Then we can add a new key flip so that, so we have to do that for every single parameter. Here in the precision, it's 1.7. All click Disable, type in 1.7, add edit keyframe. And we'll just keep on doing that. You can see that whenever there is no expression, we can simply just delete the keyframes and add new ones, and it will be at the exact same position. So for the mouth here, that's exact same. Just edit keyframe. Here the scale, we can do it before the eyebrow. And here you can see there's an expression again. So we have to remember 4.5 and negative five. So 4.5, negative five, exact same appear. Minus 5.82.9 minus 5.8 to 0.9. And I think you sort of get the gist of it. So I'll just do it for the rest of the values. Now because we're animating the run cycle, we don't want to add any additional animations. And therefore we can actually delete the hand controllers. And we can also just turn off the keyframes for the body down here and uncheck the layout or so we can shy and lock the body layer. So now our character set up in a starting position exactly the same as the idle admission. 22. Run Cycle: Animating the Legs: So we want to go a bit ahead to start or run cycle can just press control shift and right arrow key to go send frames ahead. And we can just press B to trim our work area here. So the run cycle is going to be 16 Frames and total. And we can just start by animating the body's rotation and position. So we'll go ahead and add keyframes to the y position of the body and the rotation. And the first post we wanted all the way up in the air. So we can drag it all the way up like this. And you have to think of a run cycle, sort of like small jumps. So that's a point of time and the run cycle where there's actually nothing touching the ground. And this is that point of time. And then we also want to rotate the body back a bit because you're sort of pushing a body back when you are jumping. So that's our first pose. And because I'll run cycle is going to be 16 frames, we can go 16 frames ahead. So press control shift and writer key one time, that's ten frames. And then just hold down control and press the right arrow key six times. And here we can just add a keyframe so the y position and the rotation again, just so we know when the run cycle will end. Because you have to imagine that it's looping. So it will end at the same point that it started with. And then present to trim the work area and just drag it in one frame. Now we can copy these frames and cut it in half. So that will be at eight frames. And then every fourth frame the body will have to go down. So at this point, we can push the body down and we want a bit of a bend in the legs. So think it's probably going to be somewhere around here. And then we can rotate the body forward again. So we can copy those frames and paste them in the middle of the other part as well. So you can just see that it sort of pounds is up and down. And it looks rather strange right now. But that's because we haven't committed any of the other elements and really we haven't offset anything. So this is just the base of our run cycle. So let's animate the legs will start with the right leg over here. And if we press P, hold down, shift and press are just want to add the starting keyframes and they can be pushed all the way to the start. So we have that starting point. And then we can go ahead and make the first post. So you have to imagine that this is sort of the oppose is up in the air. And we want this to lead. So we'll push that all the way up here, drag it out quite a bit, and add a bit of rotation. Somewhere around here should be fine. For our first post for the leg. Then we can go for frames ahead. And this is sort of the contact pose is all the way down. So we can zoom in. We want to drag it all the way down. And for the concept, we want to construct the ground with the heel. So we can add quite a bit of rotation, just make sure it's approximately in the center of that sort of shadow, the hill. So we just want to be at a point where it's stretched out, but it's very close to being bent again. So that's right around here. We can even exaggerate that sort of He'll again, so it really hits at an angle. Then we want to go for frames ahead. And here we are up again and we wanted to push the leg all the way back, like so and really just rotate this. And you just want to push that up a bit as well. So you can see it's really pushed back. And then we just want to go all the way to the end and copy and paste the first keyframes. So now this looks rather weird and there's two reasons behind this. The first is that we haven't really add any extra keyframes to the rotation of the foot. And also we have an adjusted the motion path. But the first thing we can do is just select every single key frame here, press F9 to ease Ysom. Then we can go to the point where the wheel touches the ground. Go one frame ahead. And this is where we have this sort of impact. So we can set the foot to 0 degrees. And now we want it to be underground, but you can see it's quite a bit above it. But the way we fix that is by adjusting the motion path here. So we just click one of the points and we can simply track that out. We can take this keyframe, track it down a bit, so we can get it to match with the ground. And this just takes a bit of adjusting. You can see that if we go one frame before that, we want to get in sort of a middle ground where he was not too low. Also, the next frame, the foot also needs to be in the sense of that ground. So we may need to push this up a bit, push this a bit to the side, and then track this even further down. And this is just about spending a bit of time. So you have to make sort of a compromise in this exact animation. So if we move a few frames ahead, you can see that it's already been rotated. We don't want that, so we'll just keep it at 0 degrees. Then as it goes up, it rotates. And here we want to adjust the motion path again. Because as you can see, it moves in a straight line and the NEA is way too far up. So we can select the last key frame here. And we get this handle that we can track down as far as we'd like. And also we can go up underneath the pen tool and select the convert vertex tool. So we can add a bit of curves to this sort of point. And that way we can just get the leg to move down quite a bit before it actually moves up. So you can see such as the ground moves back up. And then right here and solve the sensor. We want to take the foot and we want to rotate that back quite a bit. So it's sort of dragging behind. And that way you can see it moves up, drags behind. And we really want that food to be just a bit behind. And the motion can also see here's touches the ground, sets the frame behind, drags a bit up. And I think this should be about fine. We can try and play that back. And you can see that sort of running animation hand right now. Of course it doesn't work that great with the other leg. But that's just because we haven't added any animation to that yet. And one thing I may want to do is just take the foot at the point where it's all the way back and maybe exaggerate that a bit. So move it a bit further back right around here. But before we copy anything from one foot to another, we may want to adjust the 0s in just a bit. So we also apply that to the other foot. So we can select the foot and we can go into the graph editor. Here we only want to select the position. We just zoom in a bit. So the parts that I want six saturate is first of all, the foot when it is about to move down here, I wanted to speed up and accelerate. And then when it's from the spec point and it moves forward, I also want to make it accelerate towards the end of this motion. So as you can see right here, that's just a bit more acceleration and it just exaggerates emotion a bit. Then I want to take the buddy, just take the y position, go into the graph editor. So here's simply wants to have a bit more hang time in the air. So this is right here, and then it gets down and right here again. So at this first, I want to drag it in a bit, so it accelerates as it moves towards the ground. And then here I wanted to de accelerate as he moves upwards. Subtract that in a bit. And then here at the end again, I just wanted to de accelerate as he moves upwards. So you can see it's a bit more at saturated the motion itself. And that's what I'm looking for. So now we can go ahead and take all of the key frames from the foot, copy them, and just paste them at the very end here. Now you may see that something happens to the motion path here, but we can fix that. We just have to find the point of time where the issue is going on. So you can see here at the start, it's actually the first part of the animation. And the key from that questioning is actually this one. So we can directly handle down to align it with the other motion path. Then you can see it gets extremely over here. So again, we just select the convert vertex tool. Select that part and just drag it down so it fits. Now before we copy anything from the right foot to the left foot, we need to press P, hold down, shift and press. That way we can just add keyframes to the start. So we have these sort of starting position. Then we can select everything and copy it. And now we have to imagine that this needs to be offset. We don't want the character to run with both feet at the same time. So flaky, a horse or something like that, that would look rather strange. So what we want to do is offset it by half of the iteration of the animation so that it's eight frames. So when go to the very start, and then we can hold down control and click the left arrow key a times. And we can paste it onto the other foot. Now this moves that way too far ahead. But we can fix this. We just go to the start of the animation here. Then we select all of the position keyframes. And we can just make them all the way back. Sort of like this. And we just have to make sure that works for all of the sessions. And yes, it does. And then we can simply go ahead and delete the first part of the animation here. So you can see it just transitions. And then we have that run cycle. Now with the legs being done, we can move on to the arms as well as the head. 23. Run Cycle: Animating the Arms: Let's start with the arms. You have to imagine that when you're running, the arm is opposite to the leg. So when the legs all the way back, the arm is all the way in front. So I want to start out by just adding a position keyframe to both of the arms and moving that all the way back. Then here at the first pose, wants to move the left-hand forward and the right arm back. And then eight frames ahead when we're at the exact same position, you want the left arm to be moved all the way back and the right arm to be moved all the way to the front. And we can copy the first frame and paste it at the end here. Then we can just press F9 to EECS at all. And then we can go in and adjust the motion path because right now it's linear. And you almost always move in sort of a curve on Arch. So we can go up here and select the convert vertex tool and just make the arm go to solve a middle point. And we can try and track out these curves. So you just want to adjust it. So this first one isn't that extreme. And also just the curve down here. And you just want them to line up here at the end. So you just have to find the right keyframe to do so. And that should just make the arm move a lot smoother. Now we can also do that for the other arm. Just go in, go somewhere in between here. And simply adjust those keyframes, all those motion paths you could say. Somewhere around here. Again, select the last key frame. Also get that moved along. And perhaps we want to move this up a bit further. Let's see how it all looks. Perhaps we want the arms to actually go even further up. So at this point will push it even further up. And for the other arm will do the same, copy that and paste it to the start. You can see that messes with the motion path. So we just need to go in again and adjust that using the vertex tool. That should add a bit more movement to the arms. And I think this is fine for all run cycle. 24. Run Cycle: Animating the Extra Elements: Now with the arms being animated, we can go ahead and animate the head as well. So we just want to select the head controller at a keyframe. So the rotation here and assets up, we want to drag it back a bit. And as it's down, we just want to move it down a bit so we can copy the first keyframe and paste it over here, copy all free and paste them again. That where we can just press F9 to ease all of the keyframes. And we should also have some head movement. Now it's quite hard to see because it's not offset yet, but we will do that in a moment. We just need to add a bit of motion to the knots so we can find them right here at the start. You can see where all the way up. So we actually want them to be rotated back a bit like so. And then when we're all the way down, we want to rotate them back inwards. And you can exaggerate this a bit because you have to imagine that running is quite a big motion and the big movement of the head, and therefore they'll also be wiggling back and forth quite a bit. So last but not least, we can animate the Shuttle. We just take that, go to the start here. So we can press S doesn't scale a key frame and go to the very start. And then if we go for frames ahead, this is the point where it will actually be the size. So we can add a keyframe. And then here at the start, it will be a bit smaller because he's up in the air. So if we go a bit ahead again, just copy and paste that keyframe KVL free and paste them again at some EECS. And we want to ease it sort of like we ease the y position of the body, which means that he needs some hang time in the air. And therefore, right here, we will just make him accelerate as it moves towards the ground. Then de accelerate as he moves upwards. And then the accelerated at the end again as he moves upwards. So we can try and play the spec, just see that the shadow moves accordingly and its motions look quiet, robotic as of now. But that's because we have an offset anything yet. So let's go ahead and do that. 25. Run Cycle: Offsetting & Follow Through: We'll start with the body. Again. The body drives the motion here. So we have the body as the main motion, the y position, then we have the rotation afterwards. So down old and click the right arrow key one time. After that we have the head because of the neck and we'll just give that to not just to the right. We also have the arms which are attached to the body. So they will also be offset by one frame. And then we have the Nazi's, which we also need to finish the animation for. We can just go four frames ahead from this point. Copy and paste the first part, then copy and paste the entire thing. And simply just Ysom. So for the nuts, we want to offset them by two frames and then the bottom one by two more frames. So this way the run cycle should look a lot more natural. Right now it's sort of cuts at the start because we haven't looked anything. But for this example, we don't want any looping because we're actually going to try and make him run for a bit and then go back to the starting position. So go ahead and copy and paste these keyframes a bit. We'll start out with the right foot, copy that, and paste it one time here. And I think that duration is fine for the entire run cycle. So after that, we will do the same for the left foot. The only thing here is that we have to copy and paste from the right place. So you can see that it actually ends at this position where its forward. So we have to find the other point where it's forward. So that's right here. So we have to copy and paste this part and not this other part because otherwise it will mess it up. So copy that, go to the end and pasted. And we may need to do this a couple of times, so one or two more times. And then we can just delete the end here. So now we have to make sure that our motion path is messed up and it actually looks like it's completely fine. So that's great. And I can go ahead and copy and paste some of the other stuff. So we'll do it for the head. Just copy everything, pasted a few times until we get to the end over here. To the same for the body. Copy and pasted a few times. Then we can do the arms like so. And you just want to do this for every single thing. So you sort of extend the animation and just need to make sure that the thing you're copying needs to end and start with the same position. So then we get to the nut, which is the end, and paste that. And copy the bottom node. And just do the same thing. So it's a bit repetitive, but really it just needs to be done. And last but not least, we need to do the same for the shadow. So like this. And this should actually be the last part. So we try and see if that works out. And yes, does we have our entire run animation. And now we can go ahead and add a bit of facial animation. So we want the mouth to sort of be breathing in and out as he's running. And we also just want him to maybe playing a few times. 26. Run Cycle: Facial Animation: Let's start with the mouth and go to the very start here. And we want him to breathe in when it's up in the air and without as he touches the ground. So we can start out by setting the start and end point. So 50%, 51 percent to get the circle. Then we set the stroke width so the scale, and as he's up in the air, he speeding in. So we want to make it quite large. Like so. And then four frames ahead. We want him to breathe out. So we just make the stroke with a bit smaller. And then we will fall frames ahead. And we can just copy and paste that stroke width plus F9 to easy set and just copy and pasted until we are at the end. Go ahead and select all of these. Just copy and paste them again, just to make it a bit quicker. And then we can delete these last two key frames. So if we play that back here and see that he's actually breathing in and out. That's great. And perhaps we also want to estimate the position a bit so we can add a keyframe here. And as he is breathing in, this position should be fine. Then we can go to the point where he's breathing out and were perhaps just want to move it in a tiny bit. Because you have to imagine that when you're bringing out your mouth sort of extensive bit, you sort of extended. So we just illustrate that by pushing it a bit forward. Who four frames ahead. Copy and paste the first keyframe, F9 to ECE set. And then we can go ahead and copy and paste again. So just do this a few times until we at the very end right here. And we can just see that it's moving a bit, it's maybe a bit hard to see. We can also sort this by one frame. So just one frame to the right. And really it's just very minimal. We can also upset by two frames, maybe go into the graph editor. Here we need to adjust the value graph and we can right-click and just separate the dimensions because we only want to work with the exposition here. And we may need to press F9, all these keyframes again. And we just have to figure out, okay, if it goes up, it moves to the left. So we want to push these points at the top, just enable the transform box here. Push them up quite a bit. And that way it just moves a bit more and go out and we can just disable the y position here. So we only have the exposition. It's very subtle, but that's fine. It doesn't need to be any more than that. So let's add a blink right here. We can select the eyes. We can actually go to the idle animation and we just find the ice right here and press S, copy that blink animation and just paste it right here. So we sort of steal it, but let's, that's alright. Now we can go ahead and do some minor adjustments. I want the head to pop a bit more up and down. So I could just select every single keyframe. Just select the top points here, push them up a bit, and the lower points push them down a bit. So that way we should have the head moving a bit more as you can see. And now the last things I can do to this is maybe just adjusting the movement of the arms. So going in and adjusting the easing and just adding some quick I dots. So for the easing of the arms, we can just go ahead and select both of them would go in and select the speed graph. We simply just want to increase the easier bit overall. So we can drag it from both sides just so it moves the arms a bit quicker. That's a bit more sort of punch that movement. And then we can go in and do some quick I dots. So we can actually just use the same idea as in the island mission if we'd like. Just pursue and we can copy those, go into the run animation. And we can just paste them somewhere in here. Move them around a bit just to see how that looks. And really it's, it's quite hard to see most of these. I think let's just keep sort of the, the first move right here. Then the last move. So we need to copy this last keyframe and paste it to the first one over here. So we can go in and we just have to make sure the e-cigarettes. All right, so that's actually our entire run animation. And now all that's left to do is really make the transition from this starting pose to the running and then back to the starting posts again. 27. Transitioning From Running to Idling: So to do that, we will just extend the work area so we can see what we're actually working with here at the start. And you can see it's almost as if he just floats up in slow motion. It's like he's being abducted by aliens. And we don't really want that. So let's select all of these key frames. And we can just zoom in, just make it a bit quicker. So let's see if that's better. We actually wanted even quicker than that. So like that, it's a rather quick move. But one thing we want them to do is just move down a little bit before you actually moves up. And we can also ease these first key frames. And then somewhere in the middle here, we simply just want to find its body. Swing go one frame back. And here we can push his body down a bit. And we can also rotate him a bit forward. Just push that rotation keyframe. So that way he just moves down a little bit. It's not much, but it's sort of enough to be noticeable. And it's just to anticipate the movement so it doesn't just jump out of nowhere. So it jumps up. And then here at the end, we want it to end at those exact same keyframes. So the way we're going to do that is first of all, we'll go to the end and then we'll just copy and paste starting keyframes for all of these layers, all the way down. So we just have the sort of end. And I think for the ice here, that doesn't really make a difference now, not really. And just do the NOT and the shadow. So now our job is to make the smoothest transition from the run cycle right here to that idle pose. And the way we do that is, first of all, by looking at the lex, let's take the right leg. And you can see that ends sort of at this bottom position. And we need to find a post that sort of matches with this. So if we go back, see, we need to go back a bit further. Right here, it lands down. And then right around here, that should actually be about the same pose. So we can maybe replace it with this one. Therefore, we can delete these keyframes and just drag these two in. That way. You can see it just sort of goes back here. And that's a bit of an issue because of the motion path. But we can easily resolve that. Just needs to go back a bit here and see what's going on. So we need to track both of these in. So we have a smooth transition. And also, you can see right here with the rotation of the foot, we also want that to be zeroed out all the way through. So the way we do this is by zooming in. You see it's just one frame where it's not 0. So we can just add a keyframe here. And it's 0 all along. And he ends at that position. That's fine. Then we just need to sort of end the motion of the other leg. We need to do that in sort of the same frame so we can just delete these last key frames. So we just have the ending pose, drag it in. And then we just have sort of a slick moving down here. And it's sort of fine. Maybe needs a bit of fine tuning. But other than that, I think it should work out because it's a rather quick movement. So if we just adjust the motion path, go in here, just make sure that it's, it's sort of a smooth move. I think that should work out. Yeah, that should be fine. And then we can do the same for the rest of them. So we just want to take the key frames that are the closest to the endpoint of the feed. So you can see for the body it's these two. So we delete rest and just go in and place these keyframes for the head. It's this one. Another place that as well. And you just need to go all the way through and sort of adjust them. So you, you get that final positioning all the way through and it takes a little bit of time, but I guess that's all right. But it's just something that needs to be done. So let's see. The not here, I think will go for this one. And then we will go for this later one here. So just direct them in. And for the shadow you can see the body ends right here. So we'll also make the shadow into. So we could just take a look and see if that. So he stops right there. And we also need the ice to sort of finish that movement a bit before. And you can see the mouth here's just slowly getting back into the original shape. Of course we don't want that. So we can push these keyframes up here. And then we need to copy these first ones and just paste them somewhere around here. So if we select, you can just see that it gets back to that regular shape. So I think this should actually be fine. Now we just need to test it out to see if that actually works or not. And the way that we do that is by creating a new composition. So I'll go to composition position and I'll just call this the main comp. And this is just where we combine the island emission with the run animation. So we'll start out with the run animation will just place that underneath. And we just need to double-click and find out where that approximately ends. Somewhere right around here. And then we can go back into the main composition and start the island emission. And if we double click on that, we can pick out, but that ends, go back into the main composition and we just want to trim the work area. So press M. And here we just want to record in one frame. So let's take a look. First of all, let's see how the sort of first part is. So the idol goes into the run animation. We just zoom out. You can see that that works out quite well. Perhaps we want to give it a bit more time for that transition and just make it duck down a bit Ball. Now let's see for the second part when it's done running. Yeah, that's actually really smooth. So you can see how, how it stops here at the end and it goes back to idling. And perhaps we want to fix the knots here. I think they sort of snap a bit here at the end because it just takes a bit longer than the rest. So if we go into the run animation, we just want to take the nuts and Let's see if we can make it happen a bit quicker. So at the end here, maybe just direct them in by a few frames. I think that should, that should probably work out, go into the main composition. So take a look at that. Yeah, that's sort of fine. We can do a bit of fine tuning. So here at the end, we just don't want the value to be that extreme. So we can just adjusted towards the end. So you can see it slowly, sort of the case and the overall value. So the jump right here is that extreme can also do that for the other one. Just stick them in here towards the end. So a bit of a slow decay and that should make it a bit smoother. Yeah, that's perfect. You can see that's very smooth with the transition. So let's see if we can take a look at, at this last part or who will decide if the run animation. And just try and give that a bit more time. So if we just select all of these keyframes, just make sure we haven't selected any of the first ones. And just give it maybe one or two frames Mall. Which also means that in the main composition, we have to track the idle, come to frames ahead. And we also have to trim the work area two frames later. So let's just see how that works out. So let's maybe just give it one more frame here for the run animation at the start. So we'll zoom out and try and select every single keyframe, except for the ones at the very start. So let's zoom in and see if that worked out foss. Yeah, thanks. So just give it one more frame. Maybe push it down a bit further, make it rotate a bit more forward. And then we also have to remember to give one more frame here for the run animation. And also give the inside work area one more frame. So we can just try and take a look at that. Yeah, I think that's actually a bit smoother and in the end, that works out a bit better. So all that's how you combine different animations. And it just really has this sort of game vibe of field to it. Where if you play a game, you standing in an idle animation. And then when you press the arrow keys, you all of a sudden have to run. And this is sort of what it looks like. So we have gone through the idle animation, the punches you've run, and now how to combine them. 28. Illustration: Punching Bag: So you may be wondering, why the heck are we pack in Illustrator? Well, that's good reasoning behind this because one thing is animating the character running, punching, everything like that. But most of the time you want to tell a story and you want some more action. You want the character to interact with something. And I thought to myself, what better way of doing this than animating a punching bag? So we already have our character punching. Now we just want him punching something. So let's get started with this illustration. We'll create a new layer. We'll just call this the punching bag. So now it's time to draw the back. And we want to keep the same sort of geometric style as we have used for our entire character. But we start out by selecting or color. I think let's go for a yellow punching bag just so we have a bit of contrast with the red headband and armband, everything like that. So we'll press pie and select the yellow color or whatever color you want for your punching bag. Then will go up and select the Rectangle tool and just draw out the shape of a punching bag. So let's solve adjusted so it fits with his body size. And now our illustration of course isn't sensor, but that's something we're going to fix it when we are animating this. So let's round these corners with just direct them in a bit. So get a bit of a better shape for a punching bag. Now with the main shape done, we can go ahead and create the change. So the robe that's holding up the punching bag and that's attached to the ceiling. So I think for this we could go for a light blue color. So it sort of contrasts with the background, but it doesn't stand out too much. Press I and just select the background color. Then we'll swap it to a stroke. Double-click that. And we could just go and select a light blue color, a little bit lighter. Think this okay. Then we will select the Pen tool. And we'll just start out by creating a point and going through the sensor of the punching bag. Just split up like this. And then we'll see if we can roughly match the other side over here. And now we can see we have that sort of rope. So we'll just give it a bit more weight. So it's a bit easier to see. And then we will enable the cap. So we have the rounded cap and we'll actually also enabled the rounded joint, so the trapeze rounded as well. Now to create a bit more dimensionality, we're going to create one more rope in the back. And that way just seems like it's more three-dimensional than it actually is. So we'll press P again. We'll just start out at the top here and then just go mostly towards the right. Then we want to go in and just place them behind the punching bag. And we can just make it quite a bit darker. So that way we can see that it's actually in the background. Now we want some sort of attachment that sort of holds all of the ropes together. I think a simple rectangle should work out in this case. So we'll just swap the collides with Phil. And this time let's make it quite a bit darker. Somewhere around here, just select the Rectangle tool and we can drag out a rectangle, covers the rope and just drag it up so it's censored. Now we may want it to be a bit darker, so we'll just go in and sure it is. And then we can click it, press a and just round some of these corners. Just a pit. We can also take the rope and maybe make it a bit thinner. So somewhere around here. That way we can also adjust the size of this accordingly. Now when that is done, we want the last row at the top here. So we can just press the Spacebar and go over bit pressed p to get the pencil. And we'll just draw all the rope and just make sure that you have enough length. Because we may want to use a bit of frame and I, and just select the same colors as other stroke. Just make sure it's behind this rectangle. So with this pattern, we can maybe do a bit of adjusting, just zoom in and adjust some of the dimensions of this illustration. And maybe adjust the weight a tiny bit more. I think that should be fine. And now as a final touch, I think we can just add a bit of a shadow to the punching bag. Also again, to add a bit of dimensionality to the illustration. So to do that, I'll just take the punching bag, Copy it, and press control shift V to paste it in place. Then I'll take this Covey and just offset it a bit to the left. So you can see we have this sort of gap. That's where our shadow is going to be. And then I'll take the regular punching bag again, copied and pasted it in place. And then if I select these two shapes, I can go over and select the insect mode. And that way you can see that we are left with this shape. And therefore we can select the back layer, press I, and just select this darker color we also use on the build here. And you sell as a shadow. So now you can see this is actually in front and we can see the entirety of the row peer. So just selected from the layer panel, drag it down. So you can see that we have our entire punching bag. Now before we export this into After Effects, you can just adjust the positioning of it. So maybe you wanted a bit higher. And we'll go ahead and click the layer, press Control G to group it. And that way we have our punching back. So now let's import it into After Effects. 29. Importing the Punching Bag: Instead of after fix where in the main composition where we both have the R1 and emission as well as the island mission. And we just wanted to find our Illustrator file again, drag it into the project tab. And when you can decide whether you want to import a composition of footage, just wants to choose footage. And that way we can choose the exact layer, which is the punching bag. So just click OK. And now we contract the punching bag inside of this composition. And one thing you may notice right away is set, it's cut off at the top, but that's because of the size of the illustrated outboard. One way we can fix this is just by right-clicking the layer, go to Create and then create shipped from vec cilia. So this way we just convert the vector layer, the Illustrator file to shape layer in After Effects. Now if we just delete that file and go into the shape layer, and we can just find that rope. So in this case its group number two. And if we open that up, we get the path. And that way we can just select the point from the path, drag it up as far as we'd like, and we have the punching bag. So let's reposition this. We have our character here ready to punch, and we want it to be just in front of him. Somewhere around here. We'd see when is idling, we should be able to see most of his body. But again, we want a bit of overlap because that just looks way more interesting in comparison to placing it all the way out here also characterizes a limited reach because it's in a three-quarter view. Since these left-hand actually has a very hard time getting in contact with the punching back here when he starts punching. It's actually not that close, but we're going to fix that in a second for now. We just want to position it so it looks good visually. And I think that somewhere around here. And that should look good. Both one is idling and when he's punching. Now because of the fact that our character was centered at the start, you can see that the entirety of the animation looks quite off censored, but that's easily fixed for that, we just select all three layers. The drag them in. Soviet approximately becomes centered with the punching bag. Now can see that the background layer is offset. We can fix that by going into one of the compositions. Then we'll unsheathe the layers. Then we will go all the way down to the background, just unlock the layer. Then we can go to composition, composition settings and simply pick whip that background color. And that way I'll composition will show that as the background colour, but it won't be rendered. So we can click ok. Then we can select the background and press Control X. That way it just cuts the backgrounds. We can paste it again. And you can see that if we disable the composition background, it's actually transparent. Now we'll do the same in the island emission in here will untie the layers, go to composition, composition settings, just selected background-color, click OK, unlikely background and deleted. Now let's shyly layers again, can also do that in our run animation. And when we go into the main composition and we paste that background layer, you can see that all of a sudden we have the background all over the composition. Now there's one issue with this. You can see that the characters actually double right now, but that's just because both of the competition's not have a background. So to fix this will go to the point where we go from one position to another. Then we'll select the Run animation press control shift and d to split the layer and just delete the second part. So that way it just fully transitions from one composition to another. And we shouldn't have a problem with the background anymore. 30. Extending His Reach: Now as we spoke about before, his left arm doesn't quite have the reach to touch the punching bag. And there's two ways we can fix this. The first is to make sure that the punching bag is actually swinging towards him as he's going to punch with his left hand. And that way it will also be closer to the hand. The other things we can do is by actually adjusting his stance and the stretch of his arm. So let's go into the island emission and take a look at that. We'll just start out by pressing control a, and then you see all of the different key frames. And then we can find the left-hand, which is the controller that we're going to adjust. So let's zoom in. And we can see this is the first punch and the first position keyframe. And we just wanted to go to the sense of that. And we can simply just extended a bit further. So we have a bit more stretch in the punch. You'd see it starts to break a little bit up here, but it's not really that noticeable. So I think it should be fine for this quick punch. And you just see that we have a bit more reach. Now this is the first thing that we can do. The second thing is that we can go down to the body and actually adjust the positioning of fat. So you can see right here, it's actually possible to move in a bit more to the right. We can also rotate as body a little bit. Now of course, we don't want the need to snap and the left leg to go completely straight. So we could just push it down a bit. And as you can see here, now has a bit more fun reach. And if we go into the main composition, is very close to being able to hit the punching bag. And if we just make sure that with the first punch, the punching bag is swinging towards him. But it's a bit of another story when it comes to the double-check right after you can see the first punches with right-hand. Therefore, it will hit the punching bag and it will go swinging towards the right and right after we have the left-hand. And if the punching bag is swinging towards the right, how is the left-hand going? So hit. Now this is where you need to change the stands quite a bit and not make him so stable on the ground. So one thing you could actually do is first of all, stretched the arm out a bit and then also making Take a step with this right foot so he could move his body quite a bit. And that way because the punches come so quickly after each other, you will actually be able to also hit with the left-hand. So let's open up the idle animation and we'll take a look at the double jump. So the first punches, alright, we don't need to extend that, but we do need to extend the second one. So we'll select the hand controller and just drag it out. So we have that extension. Then we'll go down to, you can just see right here is the first extension. And I actually think this is fine. But then we just want him to take this step afterwards. So we'll go Just a bit ahead as his come to the point where it's supposed to hit the punching bag. And then we'll push the body forward quite a bit. Also push down again. So we have a bit of a bend in the left leg. Can also rotate him a bit sort of adjusted. And that way you can just see that he moves forward quite a bit. And this wouldn't make any sense if it doesn't take a step because you can see that he would completely lose balance. Likewise, the way it's supposed to be placed, it would be placed on the front leg and therefore he will actually tip over. This is something you have to keep in mind and make sure that there's a certain balance in your character when you're animating it. And that's also why it's necessary for him to take a step. So you can see that it balances out his pose and is actually able to keep that balance and stay upright. Now to estimate the step, we're going to estimate the right leg, which also means that we're going to use the right foot controller. Will start the animation just as he's about to punch and he's about to move his buddy. And I'll just press p to get the position and shift an art, get the rotation. So I right-click the position and just separate the dimensions. I usually do this when it's just a single-step because it gives you a lot more control over the tiny bit of animation. So will add a keyframe to all free. Then we'll go to the point where it's extended out the furthest. We can just zoom in and drag it out. So you can see he's sort of stable in this position. So that's where the food should be. And then we'll go ahead just as he's moving back. And we'll just copy and paste the first keyframes. Now to make this realistic, you can see that of course his leg wouldn't be sliding. That's quite tough to do a move like that. So we need to lift it up a bit and we need to do that in between the keyframes. So in between the first pair of key frames, we'll just take the foot and push it up a bit. And that way you can just see that we get sort of a triangle here. Then we can copy that keyframe and just paste it in the middle of the last ones. Now we may want a bit of a pause here in the middle, because right now you can see it just takes a step and goes back right away. So to do that, we will just move the last keyframes bit to the right, copy the middle key frames, and just paste them a few frames to the right. And that way you can just see that we have this slight pause. And this just makes a movement a bit firmer. You can also move it one more frame to the right, just so we have a bit more for pores. And now we can go ahead and animate the rotation of the foot. So if we zoom in, we can go to the start. You can imagine that it would be flat on the ground. Then as he lifts it up, it would actually track just a tiny bit behind. And then as he's about to hit the ground, it would be in the opposite direction because you hit the ground with your heel first. And then one frame after the toes would actually hit the ground and it would be 0 again. Now because this is such a quick motion, you may want to just take the keyframe whereas seals touching the ground and move it one frame to the left. So that way you can just see there's a bit more time for that. And then right before he lifts his foot again, it will be 0 degrees, will go to the middle and it will just read a bit behind right before it hits the ground. We can also see one frame before it will again hit with the heel first, two frames ahead, and it will be 0 degrees. So if we preview that, you can see it moves rather quickly. Also, we need to adjust the motion curve of the movement. And the way you do that when you have split the x and y position, is that you go and add a bit of easing to the y position suppressive line and go into the graph editor. Hey, we want to select the value graph and we just want to zoom in. And here we have to think about when the movement is accelerating and accelerating, right? When the movement is about to start, it will be accelerating. So we'll drag up the curve. And then we're going to just zoom in a bit. When the food is in the air, it will de accelerate, so we'll give it a bit more easing. And then as it hits the ground, it will again accelerate. And you just see we get this much nicer curve for this arch, which is what we're going for. And the same will happen on the other side. So again, start out with some acceleration. You accelerate as it lifts, and then accelerate towards the ground again. And you can see that it's a very quick step. We may need to get the entire picture of the body so we can see if it makes sense over all, you'd see idols first punch and then the double punch on the step. And you just see that the poses a lot more balanced because of that step. And it makes a lot more sense because we get that extra reach. So when we go into the main composition now and take a look at this, we see the first punch, then the double punch. And I think we should be able to make that work. So it actually hits the punching bag two times here at the double-tap. 31. Punching Bag: Rotation: Now let's add some animation to the punching bag. First of all, so it swing back and forth. But also so that's an impact when he actually hits it. Now will go to the very start, and you don't have to worry about the run animation. Later on, we'll do some additional stuff so it doesn't look like it's actually just running right where he's standing. So at the very start of the composition, we'll just select the punching bag. Here. We'll select the pant behind tool and we just want to take our anchor point, place it somewhere up here. We'll press R to get the rotation and add a keyframe and set the first value to 2.5. So you can see that's rotating towards the left. And then let's say it will take 16 frames to move all the way to the right in the opposite direction. So just go ahead to 16 frames, as you can see down here, inside bn minus 2.5. Then we can go 16 Frames, head again, copy and paste the first keyframe, and just add some movable easing by pressing F9 coming into the graph editor. And here we'll just add a bit of easing to both sides. Like so. And we're just using the value graph here. And now, if we copy and paste that at the end, we can do that a few times. Somewhere around here should be fine. And we can just take a look at that. And you can just see that swinging back and forth. And that's fine for sort of the starting animation. Just before he's about to do the first punch. Let's just go ahead and select does is first punch. You can see right here, it actually matches perfectly. And if it didn't match perfectly, you could always just take the keyframes, move them around so we have that perfect positioning. So you can see right here as perfect point of time for me. So we'll just go to the rotation and add a keyframe just at the point where he hits it. Then we will delete the next one because this impact will be a lot stronger than, than the standard rotation here. This will rotate a lot more. So because of the big impact, it will also happen a lot quicker. So let's say that we give this five frames. So go ahead, five frames, 12345. And then I can just press W and rotated all the way out. So it's almost at the edge of the composition. That's as far as I'd like it to be. And let's just say it takes 13 frames for it to move all the way back. So 10111213. And then we will just take it and rotate in the opposite direction. So we don't want it to be ten degrees completely. We can perhaps make it eight degrees or so. So you just see punch and moves back. And I want to go in and adjust the easing of this. You can see right here when he does his punch, we want that to be quite extreme. And therefore we also want the easing to show this. So just take this handle and drag it all the way over here. So you can see it's very quick from the start. And then we wanted to solve de accelerate towards the end. And then we just want to add a bit of general easing here to the other animation. Let's take a look at this impact. You can see it's almost perfect. It just seems like it hits something right here when it's extended the furthest. And that's because we haven't Eastern enough. So if we just give this a bit more easing and try again, it should look a lot smoother. Yeah, you can just see that it sort of slows down quite a bit as it gets towards the end here and actually goes to a complete stop in the sort of speed. Now here at the end you may be able to notice that he's actually about to punch with his other arm. If we just shift and tea and turned down the opacity a bit, we can just find the impact. So it's right here. And maybe we don't want it to be rotated so much towards them. So we can set this at maybe 6.5 degrees. And then this is the point where he actually hits it. So we'll just go from this keyframe. Otherwise, if it was at this point, we would just add a keyframe and just delete this last one and move from there. But this works out. And therefore we'll go five frames ahead. 12345, and we'll add some notation. But in this case, you can see that we actually need to line it up with his other hand. So he's able to do that second punch because if we just were to throw it all the way to the right, you wouldn't be able to lend it. So let's just place it right there. It could also be because this point right here is a bit weaker. And we'll just go for that. So you can see right here, as it hits, we just want to extend it even further, so-called five frames ahead again. And then we want the entire punch with all of the power, so it moves all the way to the edge here. And we go the 13 frames ahead again and just pull it back. So let's say seven degrees should be about 5.96. That's okay. And let's just adjust the easing. So if we go in here, we want to take a look at where he's about to impact the punch. So the first one is here. Therefore, we will just make it move really quickly at the start. And then e sound a bit, but not all the way. We actually wanted to maintain some of the speed. And then at the second punch, we wanted to be extreme at the start again, E, So quite a bit at the end. And then we do the standard easing over here, but we just drag it in a bit. And we just wanted to sort of take a look and see if that's alright or if we need to adjust it anymore. So let's play it. That's one thing I would like to change about this. Actually think the impact is a bit too extreme. It jumps a bit too fast. And therefore I can zoom in and just reduce that a bit for all of the different punches. So this one included and also this one. So that way it doesn't hit S heart but, but it also has to look realistic. So that's sort of what I'm going for. You can see right here, we still need just a tiny bit of easing here. We could perhaps give it one more frame. So just hold on old and click the right arrow key one time. Yeah, I actually think that's quite good. And now we just want the punching bag to sort of slowly settle. So it, it sort of decays exponentially over time and it should approximately stand still towards the end. You see our admission actually ends here, but we just need that last part so we can actually have a repeating here at the start. So let's create that animation. We may need to just mark the time of when the emission is supposed to loop. So we could do that by right-clicking island emission Margo's and just add a marker. That way we can extend the work area, but we still know where it's actually supposed to end. So let's see. We can go in here, and this is 13 frames. So it should decay both in the amount of frames that it takes, but also the amount in the rotation. So if that's 13, let's go for 11. Next. We'll press control shift right arrow key, and then just controlling radio key one time it's got 11 frames, the total, then it's supposed to be opposite. So now it's 6.9. We also wanted to decay, and we wanted to decay exponentially, will go negative here. Let's just say negative four. Then we can go eight frames ahead. We'll go positive. And because it's exponential decay, it's going to be quite a low number. So maybe somewhere like 1.2. Then we can go six frames. Go negative 0.2, and we can go for frames. And we can just put it at 0. So we want to adjust the ease in here. We'll just zoom in and you can turn on the autosome graph height. So you can actually work with the individual graphs. And just at the bit of easing. So all of them. And it should zoom out when you scroll through or scrub through the timeline. So think this should be the last one. And we have already east that one. So let's take a look. You can see what I mean by the exponential decay is that if you were to go from this point, so that point, which sort of creates an exponential curve. You can adjust it so it looks more like it. And it will also create an exponential curve in the other direction. So you'll see exponential, exponential, and that's what we're going for. So we can try and play that back. And we may want to give it just a bit more time here at the end you can see it ends rather quickly. This is where the double-tap happens. Then we can go, let's say select these keyframes, the last ones here down old, just drag them out a bit. That way we just extend the time between them and it decays should look a lot better. So this is something that you have to play around with, but I think that's actually perfect. You can see it's a lot smoother when it comes to a complete stop because there are some more time for it before there weren't enough frames and therefore just looked a bit Jeonghye. And you could also say that here at the start. Of course it wouldn't keep on oscillating like this because there is some loss of energy over time, and therefore it will also decay. But this is actually not going to be visible most of the time. Because we're going to do sort of a parallax where when he's running, that's going to be moving. So it actually seems like the background is moving. So it starts by standing right next to it. That is supposed to run away from it. So it moves to the left. And then when he's done running, it will come in from the right again. So that way it's just a continuous loop and therefore will also just keep it oscillating back and forth without any decay or loss of energy. 32. Punching Bag: CC Bend It: Now to be completely honest, most punching bags aren't this Richard. Meaning that there would be a bit of Ben Dennett when you were punching it. Otherwise, this could just be a prick because it's not deforming it all. It stays intact. And therefore we just want to add a bit of bend. And you can decide how much Bengio London it depending on sort of how rigid it is. Some punching bags are very rigid and they only deform a little bit when you punch them. And it sort of depends on how heavy they are. So if it's a very heavy punching bag, it will also be very rigid. If it slider, it will not be that Richard and there will be a lot more bended. So this is all up to personal preference. Now let's select the punching bag will go to effects and presets. And if you don't have it, you can go to Window and find it right here. Will just search for the CSI bended effect and drag it onto our punching back. Now you can see that we get these two points so we can adjust. And if they're not pleased, probably it actually just sort of makes the punching bag go away. So when I move this around, you can see that the end point is moving up there and this is the start point. Now the start point should often be placed where you have the anchor point and the endpoint should be placed below. So you just need to place it in a position where everything is visible. Also when it's, it's highly rotated. And that's also why I'm placing them underneath each other and not site here. Because if I drag it out too far and it rotates, you can see it becomes invisible over here. But actually before we place them properly, we want to apply an expression to both of them. Want to old option click, and then we'll type in to comp parenthesis and then value just a semicolon. We can copy that and we'll all click the end and just type in the same. Now it will become invisible because you can see that the points have moved. But you can actually just take it and place it where it's supposed to be and it should become visible again. Now the reason why we're using this expression is because of the fact that if we're going to move this, you can see that the points follow it. If we didn't have this expression. And you can see that I'm moving this, the points wouldn't follow and therefore you couldn't move it around. It would just become invisible. So with the expression on, were able to bend it. So you can see, you can bend it in both directions. And that way it's just not as rigid because we just have a bit of deformation to the punching bag. Now I'm going to give you quite a bit of a trick which will speed up your workflow a lot. And it just makes it possible for us to use the same rotation values for our bend. So we'll just copy all of these keyframes. Go to the very start, and then we'll select the bend CC dependent. If you don't see it, can open up your layer, go into the effects and the CCT bended. And you'll just select the bend and press Ctrl V to Paste it. Since you now it's actually bending, following the sort of rotation. But we wanted to be offset a bit and that way we just have some follow through. So the top part moves first and then the bottom part follows a bit behind. And you had that sort of swinging motion. So we can select all of the keyframes, hold down old, click the right arrow key free times. And that way you can just see that we have some follow-through. Now one problem that we encounter here is that you can see it actually goes out of the frame. So a way to fix this is by creating a null object will go to layer knew. Null object will just call this scale. And we just want to parent the punching bag and the two animations to that scale. And because it's already censored, we can just go ahead and scale the animation. So you can see it actually doesn't move out of the frame. Right here, does a tiny bit. And we can just adjust the scale again. Now you may want to adjust the composition of the carriers on the punching bag and go down here and turn on the title such actions save. Just to see if it's approximately centered. We just turned that off again. And now as you can see, it doesn't exceed the composition. And we also have that slight bend. So it's not that rigid. 33. Punching Bag: Shadow: For this next part, we're going to add a shadow underneath the punching bag. So as you can see, our character really has a shadow and it doesn't really make sense if our punching bag doesn't. Now to create one, we'll just zoom in. Press control are so we can get out the ruler and drag out some guides. And that's just to approximate the size of the shadow. Then we can go ahead and just go to a point where the punching bag is roughly in sort of the standard neutral position. So that's maybe somewhere around here. It's not completely perfect, but we'll go for it for now. Then we'll go up here and select the Pen tool. Click roughly in the sensor these two lines, and just hold down shift and click on the other side. Then we want to adjust the stroke width. And you can see that it doesn't line up perfectly. So we can just zoom all the way in here and try to get it centered between those two lines. Thing this should be about perfect, as you can see it lines up. So we can go ahead and change the color of the stroke to the same as the other shadow. And then we can just call this the shadow on the score punching bag. Place it underneath the punching bag. And we can also open it up just to find our shape and are stroke. And we can turn on the round cap. So that way it just looks identical to the other shadow. Then we can just take the shadow and tried to line it up approximately underneath. And also select the pant behind tool and hold down control to snap that anchor point to the center of the stroke. Now you can see it. Maybe it looks a bit weird because the punching beggars almost touching the ground. So we can actually select it and just adjust the scale. So make it a bit smaller. Now this may impact whether he hits it or not. And to fix that, we can just push it a tiny bit to the left. And that should solve the problem. So as you can see, you know, hits it. And we'll go ahead and animate the shadow. And I think the best way to actually animate the shadow is by using expressions. Because you have to imagine that if this punching bag where to swing to the right. As you can see right here, the shadow would follow it to the right, but it will also become smaller. And you can just see if we pursue, we have a whole lot of keyframes for a punching bag. And we don't want to add so many key frames to our shallow. So just go back to where it's roughly centered. Then will go into the shadow, press P, hold down shift and press S. And that way we can add an expression to both the position and the scale. So we'll start out with the position will just all click. And then we'll keep the transformed position. That way it just keeps the value and the position of the Shuttle. So now we somehow want to link this position up with the rotation. So when the rotation is positive and it swings to the left, we want the position to move to the left. And when it's the opposite and the rotation is negative, we want the position to move to the right. Now you can see that if we subtract something from this position, it will move to the left. And you have to remember that when the rotation is positive, it will also move to the left. So we're actually working with a positive and a negative. One way to make a positive into a negative and turn that rotation. So a negative position value is by simply subtracting it. So we'll type in minus then parenthesis, and we'll just pick whip up to the rotation. So this way we turned that positive rotation into a negative position change. If we go out of this, you can see that it's actually moving a bit. It moves in the right direction, but it doesn't quite move enough. And that's just because we're working with a very low number of very little value for the rotation. And with the position, we just need some larger values. So we can go in here within the parenthesis and then just multiply it by something like 25. So this way you can see we have a lot more movement. Now if we go to the very end here where it stands still, we just make sure that it's probably position in the center. And that way it just moves perfectly back and forth when the box and BEC is rotating. Now I think this is fine. We can actually maybe give it just a tiny bit more. Maybe put it to 30. We don't want it too extreme, but we just wanted to sort of show that the departures BEC is rotating from left to right. And I want to do something similar with the scale. We just want the x scale to become smaller whenever the potty bag is rotated either to the right or to the left. And the x scale is the horizontal scale. To do this, we'll also all click the scale. And we'll also use the scale as is, because we want it to be at 100 from the very start. Now we can do the same and just subtract the rotation value. As you can see right here, that changes the scale. But it doesn't quite work because you can see that it becomes smaller when it's rotated to the left, which is what we want. But it also becomes larger when it's rotated to the right, and we only want it to become smaller and not larger than 100. Now this problem occurs whenever the rotation value is negative. See when it moves towards the right and becomes negative, that's when it scales up. So actually, we just want all of the rotation values to be positive, meaning that it should convert this minus 3.6 degrees to 3.6 degrees. Now one way you can do that is just going in between the minus and the parent link to the rotation. And we'll type in a simple expression called math dot apps. And that just means that whatever is within this parenthesis will become a positive value. So if we click out of that, now we can see that no matter what direction it rotates and it actually becomes smaller and it doesn't extend any further than 100%. And this is because we take the rotation, make sure that it's only positive values because of the Math.abs, meaning that it converts every negative value into a positive value. And then we just take that positive value and subtracted from the already existing scale, meaning that we go down instead of going up. Now you can see in this example, we may need to exaggerate this a bit. So we can go in here. And as we multiply it up here, we can multiply this by two. And now we can see how the scale and the position of the shadow is linked up with the rotation of the punching bag. And then weights w1 through expressions. And we don't have to do any Keyframing. And now one final thing I want to change the terms of shadows is actually the shadow underneath the character. You can see that the scale of the shadow underneath the punching bag only changes in the x scale. But when the characters running, you can see that it actually also changes in the y scale. So if we drag out these guides and just remove them, zoom in, you'll see that the y scale actually also changes. And we just don't want too much of a difference in how the shadow reacts. So we'll just change it within the run cycle. So we can go in here and just choose the shadow. And then whenever we're at a point way up in the air, you can see that the y scale is 88. We just change that to 100 and copy that. And then for every second key frame, we just want to paste that. So we have the right scale. And we just wanted to go through all of these keyframes just to make sure that the shadow makes the same movement. Now for the last key frame here, we just want to keep it as this because you can see it's already one hundred, one hundred because this is the start of the idle pose. So if we go into the main composition, you can just see that now the shadows react in the same way, and that's what we want. One thing we need to change is just the fact that the shadow of the punching bag shouldn't go above the character. So we can simply just take that shadow and drag it underneath. And now everything with the shadow should actually be fine. And you can just see how they work together. 34. Parallax Camera Move: The very last thing that we're going to do is sort of the, the dot over the eye or the final touch. And this is really what cells this entire animation. Because right now you can see that he's just running with how really getting anywhere. And that's because either he has to move along the frame or you have to move the sort of elements within the scene. So if we were to actually take the punching bag and move that when he was running, it would seem like he was actually moving. So I think that's what we're going to do. And then we're going to create a perfect loop. So from the very start, you can see that when he starts to run, the punching bag will move to the left. And then when it's finished running, it will come in again from the right. So that way that's just this sort of parallax movement going on. And that will really sell the effect of the entire animation. So because of this MOOC, we will also be needing to punching bags and two shadows. So we can go ahead and select both of them and press Control D secreted duplicate. Now you have to select the shadow of the second punching back and press U two times because we're going to change the expression so it actually fits with the second punching bag up here as well. Constraint now we can see that it's referring to the layer punching back when it should actually be referring to the layer punching bag too. So we can just rename this. So punching bag to just make sure that it's the exact same name as the second punching bag. One way you can do that is by clicking it, then clicking into and just copying that, going down here and just pasting it within these quotation marks. So when that is done, we do the same for the scale down here, just at a space and type in two. So we have the exact same name. And now it should be responding to that layer, meaning that if we were to take these two layers and offset them, the shadow would also be offset with that punching bag. So let's create the position movement of the punching bag. Here at the start, we wanted to move from this position. And then at the end of the run cycle, we wanted to be all the way out here to the left. So another participate can appear from the right. So we will actually start out by deleting the scale null object. We don't need that. Then we'll go to layer a new null object. And we'll just call this the position. And right away, we're gonna take the punching bag and the shadow for that and parallel to the position. And we can just hide the two other ones. Because right now we're only working with that one. So at the very start here will go to the position and recipe, right-click and separate the dimensions and just edit keyframe to the exposition, which is the horizontal position. Then we can go to the point where it changes from one cycle to the island emission, which is where we want this animation to stop. So contract as punching bag out all the way. And you have to play around with this because she wants to move it according to how fast the run cyclists. And we also want to ease these keyframes by pressing F9. And that's just because you can see that he eases into its run cycle here. And he also uses out of it. But we want this to be very minimal. So we'll track in the sandals, of course, using devalue graph. So it's just a very minimal thing. And then we can try and play it back just to see if the speed is all right. And as you can see, that looks fine. The only thing that there's a problem with is the fact that when it gets to the edge here, you can just see that the C suspended effect sort of makes it part of it disappear. But we'll fix that in a bit. Don't worry about it. Now, the thing we're going to do now is go to the point of time where this animation m's. So right when it switches from the run cycle through the idle animation. Here we can enable the other shadow and the other punching bag again. And they are now in the right position. And therefore we can take both of them and present them to the position. And it's very important that you are at this last keyframe. Because when you do it like this and you go all the way back, you can see that it's now moved all the way to the right and you now have that appearing from the right side. So that way you don't have to animate both of them individually. You just use one null object. Now as you can see, maybe this moves in a bit too quickly at the end. We can fix that by adjusting the easing, skipping a bit more easing. We can also adjust the positioning of the null object so it doesn't move as quickly. But before we do that, we need to take the second shadow and the second punching bag and just remove the parenting. Because that way when we move this position, it will stay in that same exact spot where we needed. Just move it in a bit and then we can pair those again. Like so. And we can try and preview the entire thing. You can see that this just works a lot better. And now we want to loop it. So you can see that we marked the point where we wanted the worker, it's n. So we can press in and just pull it in that one frame. But now we can see that the punching bag doesn't loop here. And that's because we haven't continued the animation. So in C, we end up with the second punching bag here. And therefore we want to seek the first punching bag and push that back in time. But first one to mark where the work area ends on the punching bag itself and the shadow. So go to that point, right-click, go to Marcus and add a marker. So now we want from this point and out to be the starting point over here. So we can drag it all the way over and just zoom in to make sure that it actually lines up. And then we just have to make sure that we have turned on CSI bended again for the punching bag to check if it's a perfect loop and we can play it back, sees running it. So what's the punching bag? Does the punches and then it loops. So that's perfect. The only thing I want to change is perhaps easing at the start. We could give it just a tiny bit more. Just so it's a bit smoother in the transition. You can see that looks a lot better. Now for some reason, the issue with the CC appended at the edge here sort of disappeared all by itself. But if you still have that problem, you can go to the punching bag. Just pursue. So you can see the keyframes. And you just have to be sure that when it gets to what the edge here, you want the CC dependent effects to be at 0. And the reason why that's not a problem here is probably because it's very close to 0 or some other thing, fixed it. But if you have the problem. Just make sure to set it to 0 here. And then way in the case of there being an issue, you could just split the layer right here, delete the CC pendant effect. And therefore this dependent wouldn't miss anything up right here. So that's one way to fix it. Somehow mine just fixed itself, but that's just if you still have that same issue. A final touch I wanted to add is just when he's running. I think that it looks a bit odd. That is all the way to the side. When he said the punching bag, that of course makes sense. But I want him to slowly move in to the sensor here and then move back as he gets to the punching bag again. So we can go to the start here, select the Run animation and p is in position, Right-click and separate the dimensions. Just edit key flip to the exposition. And roughly in the center of this position and emission of the novel and the punching bags. We just want to push them to the center of the composition. So you can see that's roughly right here. You could also go into the title and action save just to line it up and go out of that again. Then when we get to the punching bag, if you don't want him to be that far ahead. So we can copy the first keyframe and paste that. Select all of them and press F9 is Ysom, and we want him to move rather quickly from the start. So just reduce study sing and then increase it quiet a bit in the sensor here. That just means that it stays within the sort of sense of the frame for a bit longer. And then at the end, we just want to give him a bit of easing. So let's see how this looks. In just C moves to the sensor and then slowly goes back, and that's what we want here. And that way the composition and framing makes more sense when he's alone. And it gets back into his regular position at the end. And a bit more easing here and also then the exposition. I actually think we could probably smoothing it out by using it just a bit more. So let's take a look at the entire emission and see what we have gotten. So you can see we have him running. He stops idols, does one jab, jab, and then he runs again. And we just have this infinite loop and it's very seamless. You don't really notice where the sort of start or in this because we started on the exact same frame as we stop on. Now this is the end. We started out in Illustrator making our character, being sure that he had the right pivot points and that his joints would work when animating and aftereffects. And we also split his different lives on two different layers, so it will be easy and after fix, then we went on to rigging him using doing. And if you know objects as controllers. After that, we estimated the island emission with a few punches were enemy the run animation. And then I showed you how you could combine them, create a full and emission instead of just having two pieces at the end, we did a bit of compositing by actually telling a story and adding the punching bag. So he could punch something instead of just punching the air and just running nowhere. Basically. We also extended its reach and I showed you how you could do a bit of a step. So you could change the stance instead of just staying in the same sort of position. So this is really the basis for character illustration, rigging and animation. And I hope that you learned a bunch of new things that you can use in your future projects and perhaps learn some new clients. Now that you feel comfortable with character animation. 35. Exporting as a GIF: Now to show your final project on skill share, we need to export it. So we have already said the work area here in After Effects, receipts trimmed at around six seconds and set yours. You simply start by pressing the t and ended by pressing N. But it's very important to have it placed properly. So the entire emission actually loops. Now when that is all done, you can go to composition, adds Adobe Media Encoder Q. This will add it to the queue in the Adobe Media Encoder and usually go for the H.264, it will output an MP4 file, and it's a standard when you want high-quality on a very low file size, I choose the Match Source, high bit rate for the best quality. And I can simply select where I want to render my file two, I'll simply call it character animation loop. Then not press enter and start the render. Now this will not take a lot of time as it's very simple Shape layers. Then you can take that MP4 file uploaded to YouTube and later posted as a project on skill share. But you can also take it one step further and create a gift. So do that by taking the MP4 and dragging it into Photoshop. That way you should get a video group where you can also see a timeline down here and preview the animation. Now to create a GIF, you'll go to File export, and then you'll see for web legacy, then you can change some settings to optimize the file size. First of all, I want to change the image size because you don't really need that big of an image when it's a small gift on a website. So in my case, I will go for 40%. So just enter that. So you can see that way it automatically changes the image size. 40% is the equivalent of 768 pixels. Then you can save it, and I'll just save it to the same folder with the same name. Click save. Now when you click Create Project underneath the class, you'll first be asked to upload an image as the thumbnail. We had generated this with an After Effects. Just choose a fitting time, maybe right here. Then we can go to composition C frame.s file. And we'll just choose, instead of a Photoshop sequence, a JPEG sequence, click OK. And then we choose the render destination, which is just the same as the other files, click Render. And now we can upload it by choosing the file and clicking open. Then you have the possibility of cropping the image, clicking Submit inside when the project title. And in the project description, you inside bend a bit about the project and ask any questions. If you had some difficulties or want me to critique your work, then you can add an image which is the gift that we created in Photoshop. Just open that up and that way you can share your project with me. So I hope that you learned something new in this class, something new about Illustration, setting up a character for raking, raking IT with doing, creating all of the different animations. And at last exploiting it as an mp4 and a gift. If you enjoyed the class, make sure to leave a review. And you can also go ahead and watch all of my other classes on MySQL share profile. That's all for now until next time.