Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm J. D. McNeil and welcome to part one of my character animation, Siris. In this first skill share class, we're going to be designing a character solely and after effects will start by creating the head in a really cool way for creating the mouth. Then we'll move on to creating the body and arms and finishing up the character by creating the legs, feet and hands. It's a strap in launch after effects, and I'll see in the next video.
2. Project Setup & Starting the Head: But all right, let's start by creating a new composition. We're gonna make it 800 by 600 and I'm going to name it Main animation frame rate 29 97 And then we're gonna change the duration to, let's say, 15 seconds. And we probably change that later on. When we do the animation background color will be white for now, and then click. OK, okay. First thing we'll do is create our background color. So select the rectangle tool and double click on it to fill the composition. And let's go to the fill color. And I'm thinking a bluish color for the background. Something, Um, let's see a little more saturation. Something like that. Okay, so let's go ahead and lock the layer. Close it and let's start making our head. Grab the rectangle tool again, and then let's ah, get a skin tone color for it on. There we go good skin tone color and dragged the rectangle onto the composition. Once we have the rectangle, we're going around the corners over, and how we do that is let's go into the search. Type in around and you'll actually get a roundness option and when you drag it out, Look around over the corners of our rectangle that we made. Okay, now that the rectangles corrected press y on your keyboard and we could use the pan behind tool to change our anchor point. And then let's name the layer head and close it. All right, let's scale down the head a little bit. We can go into the layer and go to contents. Rectangle transform. And then we could scale it from here. Spring it down a little bit, so it fits better in the composition. All right, there we go. All right. So next what we can do is we can make the eyes for the head. So we're just gonna grab the ellipse tool drag out our first I change the color toe white. All right, get it into place. Name it left eye. And then what we're gonna do is select the Ellipse inside of the contents and duplicated with the command or control D, we're gonna name one white and then named the other one pupil. Once we have a name, pupil, let's drop into it, goto our transform and go to scale and scale it down to a good size. And then we're gonna change the fill color to black. And that is our left eye. So let's close it and duplicated again and renamed this one too, right I and then we could just slide it over into place and then is our pan behind tool again to center are anchor points on the eyes. Select both of the eyes and let's just move him over a little bit into place, and we now have a left and right. I let's click on the head again and grab our lips tool and we can drag out a nose shape for our head. And because we have the head selected, it'll actually create the shape inside the head. All right, so now that we have the nose made, let's change the color just a little bit darker. Click on Word the rectangle and will rename that one head and click on the Ellipse and will rename that one knows. All right, Next up, we are going to make the ear so we'll use the pen tool for this part. Just click and drag. Get a nice sear shape. It's like that. Move your points around a little bit to get the shape just the way you want it. Here we go. And we will rename this shape from shape 12 year. And because we had our head selected, we still have everything contained within our head layer. Perfect. All right, Now what we want to do is link everything together. So let's grab our right eye in our left eye, and we're going to pick with them onto the head. And now everything is attached together. Okay? In the next video will work on making the mouth.
3. Creating the Mouth: but all right, welcome back in this video, we're going to take a look at a really cool way for creating a simple mouth. Um, we're going to start by creating a rectangle and dragging it over where the mouth should be . All right, then we're gonna change the color to White because this is going to be our teeth. Okay, De select. And then grab and the lips tool. This is what we're gonna use to make our tongue, so we'll drag this out. All right? Get it Just about a shape of what you would like for a tongue and position it. Okay, let's make sure the tongue is selected still. And we're going to use the rectangle tool to drag out the back part of our mouth just like that. And then what we're gonna do is ah, just rename these really quick. So we're gonna name this one mouth inside, all right? And we're gonna change it to a dark kind of red color. Then we'll put it below. Some will grab the ellipse, and we're gonna change this to a brighter red color for the tongue. All right. And then let's go ahead and rename it tongue. All right, Cool. Now we actually want the teeth to be part of the rest of our mouth. So we're gonna go down and select the rectangle and use Commander Control X to cut it. And then we're gonna paste it in with the rest of our mouth, delete that layer and move it to the top and rename it teeth. And now we have all of our mouthpieces in one spot together who moved that a little bit. And let's use our pan behind tool to center are anchor point and rename this layer mouth. So now we have all the parts we need for our mouth. So next up, what we're gonna do is grab our pen tool and when I click on one side of the mouth and click to the other side of the mouth and just create a simple stroke, get rid of the fill color, if you have it, and instead, at a stroke color, There we go. And then we're gonna tape in cap, put around, cap on it and reduce the stroke size. We'll go to like, 16 and then we'll rename this mouth mask and then I'm gonna change the layer color to fuchsia, which is the color I like to use for my mask. So I know what they are. And when you use the toggle button so that we can see our layer mats and choose Alfa Matt. And now that we have an Alfa Matt Weaken scale our mouth, go into the mouth mask and turn off the little chain and now we can scale just one direction. Now, let's go ahead and move the anchor point with our pan behind tool. All right? And now it will scale from the center and we have a working mouth that easy, and now you can make it look like he's breathing. You can open his mouth up, close his mouth all the way. You can get some pretty simple facial expressions by doing this. Um, I'm gonna move down the mass just a little bit so I can show just a little bit less of hiss teeth and we go, It's no. When I scale it, we get some really cool looking effects here with the mouth. And this is a really quick, really neat way to make a mouth with your characters. All right. In the next video. We'll work on finishing up the head by adding to my brows and some hair. See you then.
4. Finishing the Head: but all right, so now we're going to start finishing up the head. So we're going to start by creating the hair. So it's grabbing a lips tool and make sure to select the head and Drago our first piece of hair. That and then let's go ahead and change the color to a I'm gonna go with kind of a dark brown color. There we go. All right, So now, with the head still selected, we conserve Dragon out some more of our hair shapes here, and still another one right here and another one right there. And when I do, maybe one over here for behind the head. Okay, so now we can do is grab our hairpieces and start naming them hair. One hair, too. Hair, three hair. Four. And here, five. Alright. And here, five, we're gonna drag below the head shape. Okay? And shape one. We're actually going to rename ear and let's go ahead and just change the rotation on this hair and maybe every move it a little bit. There we go. I don't like that. It's grabbed the rectangle tool, closer head shape, and we're going to start drawing out some eyebrows so there's one eyebrow. We want to get rid of the stroke. Position it a little bit here. There we go. We're going to name this left eyebrow and then let's type in roundness in the search and adjust the roundness of it. Okay? And then we're going to do now. Let's not duplicate that layer. Let's actually rename this eyebrows and we go eyebrows, and then let's jump inside of it and grab our rectangle one and duplicate that. And then we can name rectangle one left eyebrow and rectangle to right eyebrow, and then we can take rectangle to and move it over above the other. There we go. OK, cool. Just move those around, find a good spot for him. I'm actually going Teoh, Just the height of the eyes. Bring him down a little bit and we go and I'm gonna go into the head and grab the nose and bring that down a little bit. Move it over. Just kind of reposition all this so it looks a little better. Now we go, OK, I'm liking that and then we're gonna parent the eyebrows to the head and the mouth mask to the head as well, the mouth to the mouth mask. Perfect. All right, let's grab her head pan behind Tool and re snapper Anchor point, cause it's changed after we added the hair and there we go, I think we're good with that, Um, we can now control both the eyebrows by just selecting the eyebrow. Let's move the anchor point center on that as well, and we go. So now we can adjust that make him look angry. We have our mouth shape working. Now that we got the eyebrows and the head and the mouth working and the head pretty much done, I want to add one more thing to it. So it's grab our pen tool, make sure everything's de selected, and we're just going to set him up for a blink. So where is gonna click a straight line across and remove the fill color and and replace it with a stroke? There we go. And then let's bring the stroke down a little bit. Something like 43 yeah, like three going to the search and type cap and round cap. Here we go. Okay, let's rename the layer blink, click on shape one and call it left blink and then duplicate it and we can move it over into place just like that, and call that right Blink. All right, let's select the bling clearer and attached to the head and then dragged below the eyes and we go. And now you can grab the left eye right eye and turn them off and on, and we can actually see what the blink is gonna look like. Cool. All right. And I think I want to change the color of the blink to be the same color as his nose. And now we can select eyes again. And every guy like that better that finishes up creating the head. So in the next video, what we'll do is we'll look at creating the neck, body and arms of our character. Okay, See you then.
5. Creating the Body and Arms: All right, Welcome back in this video, we're going to start creating the neck and the body. All right, was going grab the rectangle tool and start creating our neck. All right, so in a drag out a next shape, it's is there, Pam, behind and bring the pivot point to the bottom. Okay? And then let's go ahead and type and roundness and round the edges like that and bring it up into place. And then what we're gonna do is rename this neck and go ahead and drag it below the head. And then we're going to do with its with the next selected Let's grab our rectangle tool again and drag out another rectangle on top of it. And this rectangle is gonna be our next shadow. So we're gonna call rectangle one neck and rectangle to neck shadow. All right, then let's go up and change the color to a slightly darker color. And then what we can do ISS, right. Click and convert to busy a path. And then we can click the path and we can adjust it so it zoom in and grab our two points over here and just make sure they line up with the edge like that and let's grab the path again and move this bottom left point up in the place. There we go. And then what? I think all right, I'm not 100% happy with that. Let's add a little bit of roundness to the shadow. So let's Ah, zoom in and let's grab the path, go to a pencil and grab the convert point. Let's convert it to some busy a handles and drag it out and get it just rounded. Yeah, like this. Move it up a little bit more and okay, let's take a look at that, right? That's better. Let's Ah, let's grab a path one more time and move that right point up a little bit. This a little too much space there. There we go. OK, so I think that's just about good. Let's move these two points in just a little bit there, hanging over right there. All right, let's close that. It's back out one more time, all right. I like the way that looks all right. So now we can start making the body, so we're gonna grab our rectangle tool again and drag it out it's like that. Okay, I'm going to call this body and drag it below the neck and we go and then let's ah, go to roundness and adjust around this on this and something like So ah, right there. I got it at, like 29. All right, make some adjustments, get it in. The place was changed, the color like a red for the shirt and we go cool. All right, so getting this, I sent her the anchor point with our Pam behind tool, and I think maybe. All right, let's click on rectangle one. Incan right click convert. Too busy a path. All right, select the path and let's go up and get our Delete Vertex tool and delete these points. And then let's go back to our convert for text tool and click on each one, and that will get rid of the busier handles. Now we can adjust the height of our upper torso. That's good. All right. And let's rename rectangle 12 ah ah, no torso cool. So now we have our torso. Let's grab our rectangle tool one more time and we're going to create the bottom half the pants area. OK, So let's drag that out. All right, hands. Go ahead. Change this color to dark blue on dark. Bluish gray. There we go. Right. And then we're gonna go back, type in roundness, and then let's round it off. Mm, Some like that. Convert Vertex. Select the path. And let's use the delete Vertex tool again. Let's delete those ver Texas just like that. Move it up into place and go toe convert for tax tool. Click on each one. And then let's just move these little handles over until we get the shape that we're looking for. All right, there we go. Perfect. Okay. All right. Now, let's go down. Click on rectangle one and rename it Pants. All right, next up. Okay, so let's keep attaching our parts together here. So we're going to go to the neck and we're gonna attach the next to the body when attached the head to the neck. All right? And select the body, grab our Pam behind tool, and drag it all the way to the bottom. So we have our anchor point at the bottom, and now we can move our body around and everything follows it, and let's just get this placed up a little higher. I grab your pen tool and let's ah, create some arms and we'll use three points, one for the shoulder, one for the elbow and one for the wrist. There we go. Now we can select these points and move them around and in the place of how we want it. Ah, there we go. Let's get rid of the Phil. And at a stroke, we want the stroke color to be the same as the skin tone. Here we go. And then let's go ahead and increase the stroke with to say, 20 ish 18 that looks good and then go into our cap and change it to round cap. All right, And that's an arm we're going to call this left arm right? Close that, and there we go and duplicate it and rename it right arm. Go and let's drag the right arm below the body, and then we can move that arm out into place and just do a little, uh, path change here, grab the path. And then what I want to do is let's grab our rectangle tool and we're gonna create us leave . Go make it red soon, man, it's just, uh, respect to all. Just a shape. A little bit. Eric, go. It's a just the roundness. So in a tape around this and again, just like that convert to busy A When a follower, Same path that we did before. So we're gonna do is go up and go to our delete for text tool And remove that bottom one and then go to convert and convert these two bottom ones So it's flat. There we go. Grab it moving into place. Let's move the pivot point to the end there, rotate it into the place that we want it go Just did a little bit. Alright, What I'm gonna do is actually copy the sleeve and paste it into the left arm. So copy command, see? All right. Contents and then paste. And we could pays that rectangle into the left arm and weaken. Delete that other shape. Now, um, this is Ah, this is what We don't have an extra shape. We can just keep this all contained. Rate in the arm just makes a little easier. It's going just pan behind. Move the anchor point to the top and then with this anger point, We actually to go down into the transform of the rectangle and then weaken, grab the rotation and put it into place. We can move it and there we go. OK, so now we have this made correctly heart. So now that we got the to merge together has one. Let's re duplicate the left arm, delete the right arm and rename this one too right arm. And then let's move it into place. Move our anchor point to the end of the sleeve, do the same thing to her left arm. Okay, there we go. Then grab our right arm and let's rotate it out a little bit. It's like that. Move it back into place, right, and we can go to contents, grab our shape, rename it, call it arm, grab a rectangle. One. Call it sleeve and let's grab the path past shape. And let's just readjust us a little bit. Here we go. Let's go to our left arm and do the same thing. We're gonna grab close this. Go to rectangle at one name rectangle, one sleeve name, shape, one to arm, and we can close that down and there we go Now we have both of our arms created. All right, now that everything's name, let's go ahead and save. And then what we can do is attach our arms to our body, go down to our left arm and attach that to body, and then right arm attached that to the body. All right, and then there we go. Okay. In the next video, we're going to finish up our character by creating the legs, feet and the hands.
6. Creating Legs Feet & Hands: but hi. Welcome back in this video. We're going to start creating the legs and the feet and finish up with hands and we'll have a completed character. Let's start by, make sure everything's de selected and grab our pen tool and let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit and move down and okay, so let's just click. Appoint one for the hip, one for the knee right there and then one for the ankle. Hope there we go and one for the ankle right there. Okay, let's remove our fill color and add in a stroke color, which is going to be the same as the pants. It's like that. Click OK, and let's go to cap and choose round cap. Here we go, and then we can call this left leg, close it and drag it just below the left arm. Okay, so let's make sure Lega selected and we can usar Pam behind Tool Grab Branca Point. Move it down just like that. Then let's duplicate our leg. Drag it below the body right there, and let's rename it to right leg. There we go and let's move it over so that it is in place. All right there. All right, Cool. Now we have two legs. Let's make this leg just a little bit darker. Let's make this leg just a little bit darker than the other one, so it looks like it's in shadow. There we go. Like that. All right, so now let's go ahead and attach our legs to our body. So, um, let's grab our right leg and pick Whippet to the body and we go grab our left leg. Same thing connected to the body and our bodies in control of our legs. Okay, so let's go ahead and make our feet. So let's grab your pen tool. Make sure everything's de selected, and then we're gonna click once for our he'll once for the ball of our foot and once for the toe. There we go and type in cap one more time. We want to change it once again to a round cap. Here we go. Now we can bend our toes. We don't want to be sharp like that, so let's adjust that point. So let's go to convert Vertex Tool and was just drag it out. So we have some busy handles there. This will Lois to bend our foot and it will be rounded. There we go. That's better. Perfect. All right, so now let's click on it, Rename it to left foot, and then what we can do is duplicate it. Dragged the new foot below the body and rename it right foot, Go right foot, All right, and let's move it into place and we go. Let's grab her left foot and move are left foot over just a little bit. There we go. Okay, so now we can connect our feet, too. Our leg. So the left foot to the left leg, right foot to the right leg. And now if we move the body, everything moves together. All right, So let's grab our feet and just use our Pam behind tool and same things we've done before. Let's just make sure the anchor points are in the right spot. So grab the left foot right now and let's move left foot and let's move that anchor point to the hell of the left foot. Now we have both anchor points at the heels of the feet. That'll be good for rotating. All right, so now we can create the hands Okay, So when you use an ellipse tool for the hands and no stroke and the and Phil is gonna be the same as a skin tone Okay. Okay. And we're just gonna drag out just a simple shape for the hand. So it's just gonna be kind of an oval shaped something like this. Go rotated a little bit. It's, ah, re select. It is they're paying behind. Move the anchor point to the center. Now we can rotate it. There we go. Something like that. Let's rename it to left hand. Perfect. Let's duplicated and drag this one below the legs and moving into place. Make sure we have our select tool and moving into place, and we can rotate this one a little bit. Scale it up just a little bit. Um, maybe a little less, you know? Yeah, Let's leave it like that. All right. Okay, that's good. Let's Ah, attach our hands to our arms. So right hand to right arm, left hand, toe, left arm. And I think that is good
7. Conclusion: I hope you had fun creating the character solely using after effects. This just goes to show how powerful after effects could be that you don't have to use a program like illustrator to create your character for animation in the next skill share class. We're going to take this basic character that we made, and we're gonna create a looping run cycle that you can use as a gift for any type of social media to share with your friends. So I hope to see you there. Thanks for watching.
JD McNeil, Sr. Motion Graphics Designer
