Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi there.
I'm Kay Leathers, an illustrator and designer for motion from London, England. Are you an illustrator
on the lookout for new animation tools to add to your illustration tool belt? Perhaps you're looking
to breathe new life into your existing illustrations
with a bit of motion, or maybe you're an animator
looking for ways to improve and speed up your
workflow in After Effects. If you answered yes to
any of these questions, then you're in the right class. In this class, you will
learn how to animate your illustrations with just
a few clicks using Duik. Duik is a free animation
tool set for After Effects. It has this amazing
panel of automations which you can apply to
the position, scale, rotation, and opacity
properties of a layer to achieve different effects all at the touch and slide
of a few buttons. No complicated expressions
and no need for a single keyframe unless
you want one, of course. I love looping
animations and GIFs. They look cute and differentiate your illustration work online
when attracting clients. Animations are more likely to hold audience
attention for longer, meaning an increase
in engagement too. For this class, you need an
illustration to work on. One way you'd like to affect
one or more layers with my favorite automations,
Wiggle and Swing. This can be the
wiggling movement of the people in the eye, the swing of the wing, or like some of
my favorite work, using the effects on simple background elements
like these stars. If you don't have
an illustration of your own, never fear. I've provided the
same character files that I use in the
resources folder, so you can follow along with me. By the end of the class, you'll have an animated
loot to share with the world and valuable new tools to take into future projects. I was really excited
when I discovered Duik automations and I can't wait to share this
brilliant tool with you. If you're ready,
let's get started.
2. Project: [MUSIC] For this class project, we'll be animating
in Illustration After Effects using
Duik automations. We will specifically be focusing on the wiggle and the
swing automations, two of my favorite and
most useful effects. The project for this
class is simply to share your final animated video
on the project gallery, either as a GIF or
an uploaded video. In this class, we will
learn how to download Duik and prepare our
files for animation, apply the automations,
wiggle and swing, to parts for illustrations, and learn some super handy tips for adding that extra magic to both our animation workflow and the animations themselves. For this class, you can use any illustration
you have or will create in Adobe Illustrator,
Procreate or Photoshop. There's really no
rules on what you can and can't wiggle or swing. Depending on what
illustration you want to use, I think it's a good
idea to think about what layer you can affect
and what property. The properties you can affect on your layers are position, rotation, scale, and opacity. For example, will it be the rotations of
pupil in an eye, the swing of the wing
or hair or even legs? Will it be all the properties of a layer like this frantic star? You may be coming here from my other course,
illustration for animation, cohesive characters
in Adobe Illustrator, where you will have created a set of characters
for yourself, in which case, use those. If you haven't seen this course yet and
would like to know how to make your own characters, check the course link in the
description of this class. Either way, you can find
plenty of adorable characters in the resources file just waiting for you
to animate them. Once we've made our animation, upload your final files
to the project gallery so you can share them with our
community here on Skillshare. I love seeing the projects
there and it gives me the opportunity to comment
and share student work. Now, if you're ready
and raring to go, we'll need to
download Duik fast. Let's open up our
Internet browser to get started. [MUSIC]
3. Introduction To Duik: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we'll be learning
what automations are and how to install
Duik to After Effects. After Effects is an
amazing program. Rather than animate every frame like we do in
traditional animations, we can just tell After Effects
to move an object from point A to B and it fills
every frame for you. Automations take
this a step further. Instead of moving
from point A to B, automations can define the way that object behaves
on its way there. After Effects provides many different ways for
automating processes. You can automate animations
with expressions and scripts. If you're an animator
looking for a deep dive, definitely look
into expressions. They will change your life. For this class, we're very fortunate because there's
an excellent tool available that's full of ready-made scripts,
Duik Bassel.2. Duik has this amazing panel of automations which
you can apply to properties to achieve
different effects or touching slide
of a few buttons, rather than looking at
complicated expressions. In this example, I've simply put a wiggle automation on the
rotation of this star, leaving this awesome effect. [MUSIC] Now we're ready
to download Duik. If you go to your
favorite browser and type in Duik Bassel 2, or probably just Duik, it will likely be the
first result on there. Made by the lovely
people RXLaboratory, Duik has loads of
features other than the wiggle and swing functions I'll be showing
you in this class, so feel free to have a
read of the homepage. Maybe watch the show
real so you can explore the full magic of Duik. But for now, let's click
the Download button here. That will take us through
to the download page. Now, amazingly, Duik is a free plugin for After Effects. I really recommend that
if you find it useful, which I 100 percent
guarantee you will, then you donate a little cash to the developers if you
can, but no pressure. Let's try it out first
and see what you think. Let's click "Download"
and wait for it. Once that's ready, let's
show it in the Finder. Let's extract the zip file and open up the folder and here you'll see
script UI panels. Then we go to a
new Finder window, open up our applications, find Adobe After
Effects in there, go down to the scripts folder, and you'll find a
matching folder called script UI panels there. Go back to the Duik folder and just copy the script over by dragging it into the
After Effects panel. Now I already have it here, so I am going to stop
that and not replace it. [MUSIC] Now it's installed. Let's open up After Effects
and set up our workspace. If you go up to the top here, click on default workspace. If it doesn't look like mine, you can just reset it here and your workspace
will look like this. To find Duik, let's go up to
the window tab at the top. If we go all the way down
to the bottom of the list, you will see all
your scripts there. We click on Duik Bassel and this little floaty
window will pop up. We can set that in our workspace so it's not
floating around anymore. We click on the name and then we can just drag
it to wherever we want it. Personally, I like
it over here on the right and then we can
just resize it as we need. Inside the Duik panel, we have lots of
different sections. We're going to be looking
at the automation section, which you can find here, symbolized by the
COG and the arrow, or you can find it
at the top here. There are loads of automations
inside this panel, but the ones we're going
to look at and the ones I love are wiggle
and swing [MUSIC]. Now we've downloaded, installed, and checked that Duik is all present and correcting
After Effects, we will need to prepare an illustration file
ready for animation. I've provided my bug characters
in the resources and I'll be using the bee file if you want to follow
along with me. If you followed along
with my last class, we ended with an
AI file like this, with these six layers. Now I've made a new
file where I've given it a larger artboard
so I can animate all the background leaves and
I've divided the bee into more layers after decided to animate a lot more
of my illustration. For example, the pupils will be animated so they're now
separate from the eyeball. The legs will swing
and so they're on their own layers
and then I'll separate the wings and leaves
and I save this as 4A. If you'll be using your own
illustration for this class, open up whichever program
you have it in and make sure you have all your
pieces on separate layers. The rule is, if you
want it to move, stick it on a separate layer. When your file is ready, save it and we'll start our housekeeping
and After Effects. I'll see you there. [MUSIC]
4. Import And Prepare Layers: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we will prepare our illustration into layers for animation. This is what I like to call the housekeeping
part of the process. [MUSIC] There are a number of ways you can
import your files. My favorite is to right-click
the project panel here, or you can go up to File then
find Import on the list. Of course, the
quickest way is to use the shortcut Command I. Whatever works for you, then out pops our final window. For me, this conveniently open the character folder where I can find all the illustrator files. Here I've got my
prepared for Ae files. Now in the input
as drop-down menu, we want to select
composition rather than footage so that we can access
all those lovely layers. Once it's loaded, we'll see the file appear in the
project's panel on the left. The top one is our
composition and underneath is the folder with all the
layers of separate Ae files. This is useful if we need
to change something later. But we've probably made it
perfectly in the first place, so let's close that and
open up our composition. Here we'll be able to
preview our illustration. Let's check out our
composition settings. Here, the measures of
the art board are the same as we had in the
illustrator file. Also the frame rate. I like to use 24 frames, just like traditional
character animation. Underneath that we have the
duration of our animation. I've set it to 10
seconds here and you can adjust it to
whatever length you prefer. I will also show you how
to adjust this later on. Finally, we have the
background color. This is the background
of the art board. If you already have a background
on your illustration, it won't really matter. Here, if I turn off
the background layer, you can see that that
black background shows, but it's just going to be
our blue background anyway. [MUSIC] We should probably
save it at this point. Just go to "File", "Save
As," and I'm saving it in the After Effects
folder of my project. Let's save that as
Bee animation 01. Just in case we
have more copies, we can save as 02, 03 and click "Save." Let's begin our housekeeping. The first stage is
to color our layers. That's really going to
help us later on to differentiate between them
when we're animating. I'm going to start here
with the background layer. I'm just going to
give that no color and then lock it so I
can't move it anymore. Then we can group
the leaves together, pick a nice dark green
for them because they're green and I'm going to
lock those as well. Then the wings, I'm
going to go for yellow. Obviously when you're
coloring your layers, you can choose whatever
takes your fancy. It's just really to
find them later on. I'm going to continue
coloring my layers here. [MUSIC] I'm going to put the eyes together even
though they're not next to each other
in the layers, and put the pupils
together as well as a nice bright fuchsia color. [MUSIC] Now we're getting
to the second step of our housekeeping, and the second
step is parenting. At the moment, each part
of our bee here is on separate layers and
not connected to anything and you
can see that here. I can drag it around and
nothing is moving with it. Unfortunately, it's breaking
my bee a little bit. We need to parent the
layers that would naturally be attached to the body layer. Let's start with the
head shape here. We can use this pick whip, which says parent pick whip and click and drag it over
to the body layer. Now when I move the body, we can see that the little
head shape is attached. We're going to continue that for the rest of the parts
that are attached. The stinger we'll
pick whip that. The legs, click more
by holding Shift and parent tip, and the wings. If you're not sure which
layers to connect, just think about where
they're physically attached. We can move the body and
everything looks good. It's attached in
the right places. It's another way to check. Then we've just got the
parts for the face. Now I'm going to connect
those all to the head shape. We've got the mouth
to the head shape and two eyes which I'm going to select with command
and then we're going to pick whip both of
those to the head shape. Now the pupils, I'm
actually going to connect to the parent eye. Pupil 2 to eye 2 and
pupil 1 to eye 1. If I move the eye, you'll see that the
pupil moves with it. Let's just check that all of our layers are connected
and if we check here, we can see that it says
none in this links column. The bonnet isn't
quite connected yet, so let's connect it
to the head shape. Let's just check that
by moving it around, giving it a little rotate. Doesn't it look cute? We can check the
rest of the layers. Body says none also but we
don't need to parent that to anything and the leaves in
the background also say none. They don't need to
be parented either. That's it, our
parenting is all done. [MUSIC] Now the final
stage before we start using our automations is to make sure that our anchor points are
in the correct place. Now each layer has
its own anchor point. The anchor point is where the layer will scale
or rotate from. In order for your character
to move correctly, you may need to adjust your
anchor points on each layer. To demonstrate, we're
going to use the wing. Here I open up the
wing and go down to the Transform menu
and then we'll use the rotation to see where
it's rotating from. Now you can see that it's
rotating from the middle. Now we know that the
wing will naturally flap from where it's
attached to the body, so we'll need to move
the anchor point. To do that, we'll need to
get the anchor point tool. It's also known as
the pan behind tool, which is just up here. We can click here
or we can press Y to get to the
shortcut of that one. We'll need to just
click and drag the anchor point down to
the bottom of the wing. If I pop the anchor point
up here and rotate it, you'll see that it now rotates
from that point instead, which might be useful
for your own character. But for mine, I need it
at the base of the wing, so I'm just going to
pop the anchor point there and let's test it again. Now we see that it's rotating
from the correct point. Now when we get to
animating this layer, it's going to be
all ready for us with the anchor point
in the right place. Now we're going to repeat
that for the second wing. If we click here and just use
Y to move the anchor point. Then I've got another
shortcut for you. If you press W and hold, it will access the rotation tool really quickly and you
can just test the area. That shortcut is really good to know because otherwise
you have to keep going back and
forth from the menu and it can be really
slowing down your workflow. Remember W and hold. If you just click
W, it will stay in the rotate tool and
then you'll have to go to the selection
tool V to unselect it. Now I'm just going
to whiz through and correct the anchor point
on the rest of the layers. [MUSIC] With the stinger here, I'm just testing a
few different areas. It's good tactic to just
move the anchor point, give it rotate, move
it again just to check where it looks best from. [MUSIC] I'm just testing
out the head here. Although it looks okay
from the center here, I'm just going to move
it behind the mouth. If you put the anchor point
there behind the mouth, it's going to feel a
little bit more natural than in the middle
and that's it. All my anchor points
are all fixed up and in place, ready
for animation. [MUSIC] Now that we
have our file prepped, we are ready to start adding our automations. Let's
get to it. [MUSIC]
5. Adding Wiggle!: In this lesson, we will use
direct Wiggle Automation. Wiggle is a very handy
automation as it can add some random
movement to the position, rotation, opacity, and scale up any object
in your Illustration. I use this one the most
and I'm sure you will too. [MUSIC] You'll be
able to find this in the resources folder as well. If you press "Command
I" to import, find the banjo-star
illustration and open that. If you choose composition and layer size and
then click "Okay". Double-click to jump
into the composition, lock the background
and just give your star layer a
different color. Now in order to use
the wiggle automation, if you click the drop-down here, and under the style menu, we can find all of the
layers properties. We've got anchor
point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity. Wiggle can be applied
to each of them, a combination, or even
all of them together. Let's have a little
test on position fast. Make sure you select
the property you want to apply the automation to, and then just click "Wiggle." Right away a few things happen. First, in the effect
controls panel, you get an interface with some controllers called
position wiggle. Second down at the Layers menu, you can see corresponding values which have been marked red, which tells us now
that the values are being controlled
by an expression. Don't panic, it's all done by Duik and you can just ignore it. If I click the space bar
to play, nothing happens. That's because we need
to change our amplitude and frequency at the moment
they're still in zero. But as soon as we start
playing with the numbers, you can see the
effect straight away. Hurray, we have Wiggle on
the position of the star. The way it works, the
star is following an invisible path and when
we increase the amplitude, the path is scaling up. When we increase the frequency, the star will go along that
same path, but even faster. The next control we
have is loop duration, and the asterisk
stands for seconds. This automatically takes the duration of
your composition. In our case, that 10 seconds, so it says 10 here. This will magically create a
seamless loop of 10 seconds. I'm going to slow it back down
so you can see it better. Notice when the
playhead is going from the last frame to
the first frame, it keeps on moving in a seamless path without
any interruptions. Let's just delete those controls and then to get rid
of the expression, we need to Alt-click on
this little stopwatch. This is how you can clear out any automation that you
don't need anymore. Next, let's try Wiggle
on the scale property. Select scale, then
click "Wiggle." Now let's add some numbers
and see what happens. That's unexpected. The star is squashing
and stretching in a very weird way
but don't panic. Here we have this link
dimension checkbox. If you click that, the horizontal and
vertical scale will wiggle together and maintain the
layer's ratio much better. Feel free to experiment with amplitude and frequency
to get different results. Like before, we'll
need to Alt click to delete the expression
from the scale property. Next, let's check out
Wiggle on the rotation, select the rotation property
and click "Wiggle". A good starting point is 100 on amplitude and one on frequency, and then tweak it depending on the look and feel you're after. Once again, delete
the controls and clear the expression
with Alt-click. Last but not least,
let's try it on opacity. Select the opacity property
and click "Wiggle." Add our starting point
values and then play around. If we just speed that up a bit, it will be more noticeable. It will seem like
it's shimmering or flashing like a twinkling star. You could use this effect
on fairy lights, candles, any lights really, it's a super quick way
to add interest. Now in case you're wondering, let's apply Wiggles
all of them together. You will have to
do it one by one, otherwise, you may
run into some issues. Keep it simple click one at
a time and then add wiggle. Then we can adjust the controls make sure you just check in
the scale controls that you've linked the
dimensions like before and drum roll, we
have an entire loop with tons of details
with just a few clicks, no keyframes whatsoever and it's looking pretty
good [MUSIC]. Now, a good practice before
making any of your characters move is to look at some
good reference footage. You can act it out
if you can all find videos online to observe. It's always best to
take examples from the real world and then try to inject that into your animation. This will make your
characters more convincing, more natural, and appealing. It doesn't have to be realistic, but it should at least be
inspired by the real world. I found this footage
on YouTube and I was specifically looking
for a moment whether bee is hovering. So here we can already see how the bees wiggling
around in space and how her whole body is
rotating from the wings. I noticed the way that the
legs are hanging softly from the body and a little random
motion on the antenna. If you have your reference
handy when you tweak your automation that can inspire you and guide
you through your work. The greatest anime series of all time do it and so
should we [MUSIC]. Let's try to add some
wiggle to our bee to imitate that hovering motion
we saw in the reference. And since everything is
following the body layer, we should apply the wiggle to the position property
of the body. Toggled down under Transform select position and
click "Wiggle", add the starting point values, and begin tweaking the behavior. I know that I want
the frequency on two, but you can try different
numbers and see how you like it on
your own character. Next, let's select the
rotation and click "Wiggle". Add some rotation to the mix, but we'll keep it
subtle this time. This is where I
wanted to get back to the seed that I
mentioned before. Right now, you can
see that position and rotation move together
in a similar manner. It's okay, but it looks
a little stiff to me and I want to show you how
we make it more loose. To explain that,
I'm going to jump back to my style composition. Click the layer to
see the controls and dropped down in
the details menu. Here we have three controls. The first one is complexity. I'm just going to play
this in the background so you can see it live. When increasing the complexity, imagine it's adding
details and noise to that existing path the
star style traveling on. The star didn't change
its main wiggle, it just added a shape to it. When I increase it to five, you can really start
seeing that shake. The second control here
is the multiplier. This is how big
those details and noise are going to
be on that path. It's taking the noise from the complexity and it's
multiplying its influence. That's super sensitive
so make sure you keep it in small increments. This can get crazy
pretty quickly and sometimes that might be
exactly what you're after. The last one on here
is that random seed. The star is assigned a path and the position is
following that path. Each seed number will
assign a different path. So you can use any random number and look for a path
you're pleased with. That's what I'm going
to do with the seed of the rotation on our
bee. Here we are. It's worth mentioning
that when you click "Wiggle" in
the Duix panel, we use the layer number
as the seed number. This is layer eight and our
seed numbers are both 82. So in order to make our
bee feel more loose, we're going to add a
different seed number to the rotation wiggle
on that layer. We can pick a random number. I'm going to go for a 108. Let's have a look.
Yeah, that looks great. You can make movements
look much more realistic by just changing out the seed
number when you've got two, wiggle properties on a layer. I think I'm happy with how
that looks now [MUSIC]. Now we've added position and
rotation wiggle to the body. You can add the wiggle effect to your own illustration and tweak the details until you
have movement that you enjoy. If you did try on the character, why not try background
detail as well? In the next lesson,
we will look at the swing automation. [MUSIC]
6. Adding Swing!: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'll
be showing you how to add the swing automation to
layers in your illustration. As the name suggests, this automation
makes things swing, just like the
swings we see here. They are moving back-and-forth
irregular pulse. Another example is a
clock pendulum swinging. Every swing back and
forth marks one second like the frequency will encounter in the
swing automation. Let's dive into our
simple example. In the resources file, I have this cute little
cat clock that I designed, and you're welcome to
follow along with me here. Double-click to open
the composition. Here we have the
background layer, the tail layer, and
the body layer. I'm going to lock
the background and body layers because
they're static. I'm going to color my tail layer in orange and that will make it more
visible in the timeline. As we saw in our reference, the clock pendulum
swings back and forth, but it's connected to
the center of the clock. Let's sort out our
anchor point here so it looks just
like the reference. Let's click y or select the anchor point tool up
here in the tool menu, and we'll place the
anchor point where you think the piece
is hanging from, somewhere around
here I would say, pretty close to the
center of the clock, not at the edge. Now, when I test, it
seems to be working as expected. We're ready to go. Select the rotation
property in the panel here and click the swing
automation in the Duik panel. Like before, we get new controls in the
effect control panels. We have the familiar
amplitude and frequency. Let's start with some
small numbers here and see how this
affects the tail. Yeah, that's exactly
what I was hoping for. Notice how when we
get to the end, it loops perfectly even though we don't have
duration control here. We only have the frequency
option to work with. For example here, if
the frequency is one, it means you get one full swing, which is left to
right every second. If your timeline work area
is set to rounded seconds, your loop should look seamless. If I drag the work
area to two seconds, we can see here it should
loop perfectly and it does. But even if it's a few
single frames less, we'll see that the tail
then jumps in motion. As a rule of thumb, I would always go for
round seconds and keep the numbers
nice and simple. If you double the
frequency as two, it's still going to
work because you get to swings in every second;
left-right, left-right. But what if you want
it slower, say 0.5. This means it will move a
quarter of a swing per second, which means it would
take two seconds to complete a full loop. This means that multiples
of two will work, so 4, 6, 8, but our three here or any
odd number in fact won't. Let's just check that
by dragging this to four seconds and seeing
if the loop is seamless. Yeah, it works. If you absolutely have
to use an odd number, however, you can work out what your number
is divisible by. Say, for example
here, three seconds. I know I can divide it by 1/3. I'm just going to change
that to 0.333 recurring, and it should work.
Now we've done that. I'm just going to set
everything back to normal and let's move on. Let's look at one more
setting, the offset. If we go back to the
playground swings, we can see that they
move in a similar way but their timing
has some offset. That is exactly what the
setting here is going to do. To demonstrate on the cat clock, I'm going to duplicate the
tail layer using Command D. This gives us another tail with the same swing automation
and same controls. As we can see from the
matching values here, both tails are moving in unison, which means you
can't really see the back one at the moment. Now, if I dial that offset up a little bit and put the opacity down just to make sure we
can see which one is which, you can see that they move the
same but with some offset. Essentially, what we
did with the offset was move that starting
point of the swing. [MUSIC] I'm guessing
if you're still here, you have something
on your character that you want to swing to. Grab that layer and
we'll apply it now. I'm going to swing the wings. Let start with wing 1 first. I'm going to loosely base the wing movement
on our reference, but I'm going to stylize
the movement slightly. Let's go inside the Transform
menu and select Rotation. Then select the
swing automation. I'm going to let this play
while tweaking the values so that we can get
real time preview. But I see that the wiggle
on the body is going to make it hard to
focus on our wing. There's a cool trick
that we can use to temporarily pause the automation without having to delete it. Just go to their property
with the automation, toggle down the little arrow, and you'll see this little
icon with two lines. This is like an on-off
switch for the automation. When you click it, it goes gray, which means it's disabled
until you click it again. I want to disable the
rotation automation too, and when we're done working
on the other parts, I'll come back here
and enable it again. Back to our wing. Press "Play" and let's add some
amplitude and frequency. I like to start with 10 and one and just tweak
it from there. Seems like the movement
could be a little bit bigger here and the speed a
little bit faster. That looks good to me for now. Let's add the same
to wing 2 here, click "Rotation", add the swing. I'm just going to match
the numbers from wing 1 there because we know
that when wings flap, they're meant to be a
little bit symmetrical. Let's see if this going
to work when I play. No, it doesn't work. I see, because they are
moving exactly the same and what we actually need is for them to move
opposite to each other. That's super easy to do. All we need is to make one of them negative on the amplitude. They still rotate 20 degrees, but in the opposite direction. When we play it now, we get a nice little flapping action. Now, it's not perfect,
but we're almost there. The wings are going too far and they actually
overlap at the top. The great thing about
these automations is that we can always go into the actual property and just adjust it without
interfering with the movement. I can drag the rotation
to get the wing to rotate a little further
from the center. Let's say 20 on wing 2 and minus 20 on wing 1. Let's play that. Yeah, that looks a little
better. I like it. Just wondering if like can make it feel a little
bit more loose with some offset like
maybe 10 percent. I'm just trying some
stuff out to experiment and find the look and
feel I'm going for. You can feel free to make your own adjustments and make the choices for your character. Maybe your character is a bit more frantic and in a hurry, so you might want
very speedy wings. Or maybe it's super tired so the wings can be slow and lazy. This is where you can use this technical tool
in a creative way and put your own story into the motion and into
the character. Remember, it's great
having great tools, so don't get caught
up on technique. At the end of the
day, you need to keep your eyes on the
story you want to tell. I've tried some
different numbers, now I've ended up on this. Now, I'm done tweaking
this wing on the wings. I'm really happy with it
and I can go back and enable those automations I
had on the body of the bee, and we can see how
everything's working together. Here we are. It's just going
to buffer a little bit. There we can see that our bee
is now flying, doesn't it? Cute. [MUSIC] In the next lesson, we're going to look at
more examples of using the wiggle and swing
automations. [MUSIC]
7. Applying Automations: [MUSIC] This lesson,
I'll show you how I use the wiggle and swing
automations on the rest of my bee to
complete the animation. Let's start with
our stinger here. I think it should be a
wiggle on the rotation because I don't
really want it to swing around at constant speed. So let's click "Rotation" and click on the
Wiggle automation. Let's start with our 10
and one base values. We'll just play that
to see how it looks. There we go. It's
a little bit slow, so let's just adjust that to two and the top one to six. Let's check that out. Yes, a bit faster but just a little
bit less of the movement. Now, let's do the head. Let's open on that head shape layer and we'll click
on the Rotation. Let's go with our 10 and
one as a starting point, 10 on the amplitude, one on the frequency,
let's play that. Let it render a little and nice. I like the speed but I want it to be a bit more interesting, so I think I'll
add some details. Under the Complexity menu, let's put two instead. Yeah. That looks a little
bit more interesting. I think I'll leave it like that. You can obviously make
different decisions according to your
character's personality. If you want the character
to be more neurotic, you can have faster movements
and details to match. Or if it's a bit more
chilled and just having a nice day like mine, you can keep it slow. Now, let's move on to the legs. Open the Transform on
each of the leg layers. You can do it by selecting them all and then opening Transform. On this one, I'm going to use a swing on each of
the legs and I'm going to offset that
just like we saw on the cat clock with two tails. Hopefully, this will
give him a happy go lucky bee attitude. We will add swing to the
legs rotation property here. We've already fixed that
at the anchor point, so this should be
quick and easy. Click, "Rotation and swing,"
on the other two legs. Then let's just try
it out on number 1, we'll put our usual
frequency and amplitude in there,
so 10 and one. Let it render. Let's have a look at that one. Yeah. That's a happy little leg. It's just a happy little leg. Maybe we'll just have a tiny bit less so it's a little
less distracting. Yeah. Eight looks good. Let's copy those figures
over to the other legs. Eight and one on Leg 2 and
on Leg 3, eight and one. Let's play. I like the swing but it looks a little weird because they're
all moving in unison, so we need to apply that offset. If we go to Leg 2 and we'll
offset that by 20 percent. Then Leg 3, we'll offset by 30 percent and then we can
see that in the preview. Yeah. He looks really cute now. He looks like he's
enjoying himself, he's having a good time. Now, another useful shortcut
is you can click away from any layers and
then you can press, "L" and that will just
close everything for you. Now, we'll move on to the eyes. Well, not the eyes, just the pupils because the eyes will stay
in the sockets. Let's open the Transform on the pupils and click
the drop-down there. On this one, we will apply the wiggle on the
position of the pupils. Pupil 1 wiggle position
and Pupil 2 wiggle. Let's just zoom in
for a better look. Let's put it on 200 percent and let's start with
our 10 and one. Do you know what?
Let's just turn off our body movements to make
it a bit more manageable. Just go to the position, turn off the expression there. Again, turn off the expression, then let's have another look at that pupil now that we've
got the body nice and still. [LAUGHTER] He looks a little
bit loopy at the moment, which might be useful
for your character. But I'm going to fix it on mine. I'm going to use the
playback to just find the edge of the eye. Let's go up from 10, oops, a little bit too much 110 there. Let's go back down 20. Yeah. That looks a
bit more reasonable. I can see it's just overlapping a little bit at the edge, let's adjust in ones. Yeah. Sixteen looks good here. I'll keep the frequency
as one. That looks nice. I'm going to put that on
Pupil 2 now to match it, so 16 and one. Now, we see it still
looking loopy. You might ask why it's
not moving in unison. Well, that's because each layer, if you remember,
gets its own seed. Here Pupil 2 is Layer 1. It has the seed at one. Pupil 1 has Seed 3
because it's Layer 3. Let's just change
Pupil 1 to the Seed 1. Here we can see that they move
together now, much better. I do see actually that the pupil is just wondering outside of the eye a little bit. Let's just adjust that down
to be safe and let's make that 14, much better. Now, let's go back to a 100 and see how it works as
a full composition. He's just wandering around, he's just a little buzzy bee, having a nice day. [NOISE] Let's check that
with the full body movement. If we go back to the body
layer and just remember, click the little double lines to enable the expressions back. You'll see them appear in red. Then if you press the
Spacebar to play, it will just render. Now, he's little flap bee
buzzing around in the frame. Nice. So it all moves together and we didn't have
a single keyframe yet. [MUSIC] That's my bee pretty
much animated. Now, I could leave it here
and have a beautiful loop. That's what you may choose
for your character. But I really want my bee to
fly in and out of the frame. Now and only now will we finally add keyframes to this
animation. [MUSIC]
8. Automations With Keyframes: [MUSIC] In this lesson, this is the only time we'll be using some keyframes to move our character in and
out of the frame. Now you could leave the
animation here as it is and have a perfect four-second
loop ready for export. That's what you may choose
to do but if you stay tuned, I want to show you how
beautifully Duik works on top of moving character. Before we go onto that, I just want to let you know
that I added some swing to the leaves in the
background so that when my character is
out of the frame, the scene is still works
and is still alive. [MUSIC] First, what I'm going to do is shorten my loop
to four seconds. This is because I
want a shorter GIF. Now, it really is best to
put it to the right length at the beginning but
let's say, for example, your client suddenly changes their mind and wants
a shorter loop, you'll need to know how
to adjust your animation. Let's adjust our work area and see what happens
when we play it. We can see that some
of the elements jump in the loop rather
than our seamless. This is because all of our
automations are currently set to that 10-second duration
that we previously had. The amazing thing
about Duik automations is that rather than adjusting
a load of keyframes, all he has to do is
tweak a few numbers. Starting from the top, Pupil 2 let's change
that duration to four. We can see that live
playing in the animation, which looks pretty
funny [LAUGHTER] but I'll go through and adjust the rest of
the values now. [MUSIC] All of these layers
have the swing automation, so we'll just put
those aside for a minute and come back to those. Let's just check that
the body loops nicely. That looks good. Let's go back to the parts
that are swinging. This bee comes with [NOISE]
a bit of a math warning. As we said before, everything that's on
a frequency of one, swings once every second
so this will fit into any size timeline as long as it's rounded
to four seconds. Here the legs are able to do
the full swing four times. It's the same with the wings, they are doing three,
four swings per second. But we can see that the leaves in the background are jumping. That's because we can see
it's on-point to frequency. Meaning it's trying
to do a fifth of its swing cycle every second. If we had a five-second
loop, it would work, but we have four seconds, so we'll need to adjust that
value to fourths instead. Let's type 0.25 and by the
time we get to one second, it will have done a
quarter of the cycle, two seconds, two quarters, three quarters, and when
it reaches four seconds, the cycle is complete. I'm just quickly
going to jump through those leaf layers
and adjust them all. Another useful
shortcut, I'll just use command plus the arrow down to jump down
to the next layer. [MUSIC] Let's play, there we have it,
a seamless loop. Now we can see that using those
automations makes it very easy to make adjustments and revisions to the
duration of your loop. You don't need to
worry about getting lost in lots of keyframes. Automations make it very
easy to change your mind. [MUSIC] We know
that everything's connected to the body through
our previous parenting. Now we want to animate
the bee coming in, staying in the center for a
few seconds, then flying out. I have the body selected and
I'll click "P" for position. Then with the play
head at the beginning, I'll click this
little Stopwatch, and that will create a keyframe. Now the bee is currently
in the center, which is where I want
it in the middle of the animation so I'm just going to drag that
keyframe to one second. Then I can drag the play, head back to the
beginning and move the bee to the starting
point over here on the left. Again, you'll see a
keyframe appear on the timeline so from
no to one second, we go from the left
to the center. I want the bee to stay in the
center this whole time from one second to three seconds
so these two are the same. I can just Command C to copy it and paste it
where the play head is. Now when we reach four seconds, we want it to be over
here on the right, so move the play head
to four seconds, then drag the bee out to the right and you can see
it's traveling across. Let's just play that
and see how it looks. Great, we can see that all of our automations
are still running, the wiggling swing
are functioning perfectly on top
of that movement. Now there are a couple
of things that we can do to improve
the look of the bee, because at the moment,
it's looking a bit stiff, a bit unnatural. The first and most important
thing to add is easing. What we do is select
the middle frames and right-click and
then go down to keyframe assistant
and you'll see Easy Ease here or
we can click F9, a very useful shortcut. Now it has this ease into the center and ease out of the
center when it flies away, which is a much more
natural movement as things take time
to accelerate. Another thing, which is a core animation principle is to keep things
moving in arcs. I want to create an arc in and an arc going out of the frame. The tool we can use is
the Convert Vertex Tool, and we'll find it up
here under the Pen Tool. Now you click hold
and drag and we can see a little handle appears
and when we move it, that will affect the
path of the bee. I'm going to make a nice
arc here like that, and for the other end, I'm going to give
you the shortcut for the Convert Vertex Tool. From the selection tool, you hold Command and Alt, and you can see
that the cursor is transformed into that
Convert Vertex Tool. Then we click and drag to
pull the handle out again and let's get that into a nice
smooth S shape like that. Then when we play, we can see that the bee naturally passes
through in the loop, full character movement
from all our automations. Now you might want to
fiddle a little bit maybe the automation aren't quite
working with the path, you can adjust the
automations from there. I took a little time to figure out this bit
so make sure you make time to figure out
the right thing for your character too. [MUSIC] There you go. You can see just how
well Duik works to give a more character as it
moves around the frame. In the past, this
is coming really useful in all animations and it's really helped by all the excellent controls that Duik offers with their tools. In the next lesson,
I'll be giving you some advanced tips and using
Duik in your illustrations.
9. Advanced Automation Tips: [MUSIC] In this session,
we're going to check out a few extra tips and tricks for getting
the best out of Duik. Here we have another of our
characters, the Damselfly. As you can see, I've
animated the wings using the same
technique as the Bee. I've also used a swing
on the hair braid here, and I put a random
wiggle on the tail and legs to give it
that natural movement. My first tip is to look
at linking properties. On your own character. You might need two or more
things to swing in unison. Maybe pigtails and
the hair or legs or even earrings like I have
on my character here. To do this, select the layers together and click
"R" for rotation. That will open the rotation
property on both layers. Let's zoom in and check
those anchor points. Obviously, my housekeeping on
this character wasn't very good as they are in the wrong
place. Let's sort that out. Leaving them like this will mean they will swing from the center, rather from where they
attach to the head. Let's just solo those layers by clicking on the boxes here. Then I'm going to move
the anchor points on each earring to a
more sensible place. With earring 1 selected, click "Y" to access the anchor point and drag
the anchor point to the top. Instead of creating swing on this one and then
this one separately, because they'll swing
together like this. You can make it on one until the other to steal the
automation from it. Let us apply this
swing to this one. We'll set the amplitude here to seven and the frequency to one. Let's just change that to eight to get a bit more
swing out of it. Now we need to link
the rotation property using the pick whip
on the rotation, not on the layer itself, but on the property. Link that to the rotation
property of earring 1 here. Now you'll see the
numbers switch to red and they have
the same value, and if we press "Play", this one is going
to copy the first. If I stop in the middle here, you'll see that the values
are exactly the same. Let's look at that out of solo and in with the rest
of the animation, just uncheck the solo
boxes here and fit it to the frame. Press "Play". Yeah, they're swinging
together and it looks great. You can use this for any layers which need to imitate each other and it can be used to copy automations on any
property that you need. [MUSIC] For this one, we are learning another
way to copy automations, but this time by parenting
one layer to another. I'll demonstrate on the
pupils of my damselfly here, select the two layers
you want to effect, and press "P" for position. Let's put a wiggle on
pupil one's position. This time we're not going to
link the property because the position values need to be different to situate
them in each eye. Instead, we will parent pupil 2 to pupil 1 using
the parent pick whip. We will see if we move
the parent layer, the child layer will move too. This time I didn't use the
pick whip from the property, but I used the whole layer. You'll see that
if I parent that, it will change the
links column here. Let's put some values in. Let's go for eight
in the amplitude and 0.5 in the frequency, we'll set the loop
duration to four. Nice. It looks like
she's rolling her eyes, which is perfect for the
attitude to this character. Feel like she's a bit
of a petulant teenager. But we just need
to make sure that the pupils are traveling
inside the bounds of the eye. If we'd go to that most extreme position
here and just adjust that. That's where this
extreme point now falls and it's within the eye. Let's zoom out to
see how that looks. Yeah, I like it. [MUSIC] Some of your
characters' more flexible parts may look a bit stiff at the
moment, but never fear. Duik can work on
top of effects too. Let me demonstrate my
damselfly's braid here. I just want to remove
the swing for now. I'll click the stopwatch
and remove that expression, then delete it from the
Effect Controls too. At the moment, the swing is
just swinging our rotation, which is fine, but it's not giving the flexibility
we're looking for. Instead of putting the
swing on the rotation, we're going to use an
effect called bend it. If you search here, bend and you'll see CC Bend it, drag that over onto our
braid in the composition. It puts some targets, little targets
here on our layer. If I click one and
that's the end. Let's position this at
the end of the braid. This means we're telling After
Effects that this is where the beginning of the braid
is and where the end is. Let's make it bend
by clicking and dragging on the bend control. Look at this. Already much more flexible than
just rotating. Obviously, we've
encountered an issue here where the
illustration gets cut off. This is because the
bounding box is automatically set to the
current size of the layer. We need to grow
the boundaries of that box and we have
an easy solution. If we go back to effects
and search grow bounds, so utility grow bounds, double-click that
one and we'll see it appear in the effect
control panel. Drag it up to before
the bend it effect. If I just put bend it
again out to the extreme, then we grow the bounds, you can really see
how that's working. You can be safe and put it into much higher than
you really need. I'll put mine to 350 pixels. Now when we bend it, the image is no longer cut off. What I'm going to show
you is that Duik is not limited to just
transform properties, but you can unleash its power on any effect or anything
in the Effect Controls. In this example, we are going
to add it to the bend it. We will need to find bend
in the drop-down menu, because if you drag it
in the effect controls, it won't have any effect. Click it in the drop-down
menu on the layer. Click "Swing", and then it will appear in the effect
controls panel. Let's put the amplitude here to eight and then
frequency to one. Let's play that. Nice. I wonder if we put the start
point a little higher, that will make more
of the layer bend. Let's just adjust the
amplitude a little more. There. This is much
more natural than the stiff swing on the rotation. Let's see in with everything. Yeah. You can adjust it again when you see
it in the composition. Personally, I think
it's a little too much, but you can have more swingy if you want to make it funnier. It depends on your character. The same applies for any things which should have flexibility. Make sure if you have a look at your character, if
anything's flexible, like hair or wiggly arms, perhaps, put a bend it
on your automation. [MUSIC] This one is just a quick tip and
a reminder about how useful link
dimensions is and how you can see it in practice
on one of my characters. If we take a look
at the gum here, I wanted her to blow the
bubble up and down so we can put wiggles or swing
on the scale property. The anchor point is set
in the right place. Let's try out wiggle first
and if it's too crazy, we'll use swing instead. Duration four, we want to link the dimensions so it will scale up and down
proportionately. Let's start with 50 and
see how that looks. Pretty great, but let's speed it up by adjusting the frequency. Yeah, I like it. I think I'm going to
leave that one there. [MUSIC] You might be thinking, when would you not want
to link dimensions? I'm going to show you. Here we have the butterfly character. Let's just solo the wing
layer and have a play. We want to make it
flap and to do that, we need to scale it in and out from the center
anchor point. Now you might think we could add a swing automation and not linked dimensions,
but if I do that, you can see that
swinging the scale on the y and the x-axis, which isn't right
for this animation, what we need to do is separate
the x and y dimension, so we only affect the x-axis. With scale selected, click on Separate Dimensions over here. In the effect controls, you'll now see x and y. Let's adjust x and add
our swing. Let's try. I forgot to shorten
the work area to four seconds. Let's do that. Now, I don't want it to stretch more than 100 as it will walk my illustration and you can
see here that it's on a 110. If we click on X and
instead start on 80 and tell it to
swing 20 each way. Plus 20 will reach 100. The biggest it can be, and the lowest it
will be is minus 20, 60 percent of its original size. It looks more like this, which is much more convincing. Let's do the same again
on the other wing. It could probably
be a bit faster, so let's make that two. Here we go, a flappy
little butterfly. After animating all the parts of the butterfly, here it is. Finished. [MUSIC] The folks
at XLab are so on it. They have released an update to the Separate
Dimensions function. Now when you add swing, you'll see an access control in the Effect Controls panel. Instead of going back to the automations and separating
the dimensions there, we can click the
drop-down menu here, then just select the x-axis, then do Duik separates
it all for you. [NOISE] There we are, some helpful tips on how to
make your animation look more natural and how you can use automation on effects
as well as properties. In the next session,
we'll learn how to export your animation as
Video and GIF. [MUSIC]
10. Export And Upload: [MUSIC] In this
lesson, we're going to export a looped
animation as video, then as GIF and I'm going
to show you how you can upload it to our
Skillshare projects page. First, we'll export from
After Effects as a video. Then we're going to
put it into Photoshop to export it as a GIF. Unfortunately, you can't
directly export GIFs from After Effects so
that's why we need to do it in these two stages. But I use this Photoshop
technique for all GIF projects, so it's great one to learn. First, make sure the
work area is set to four seconds or whichever length you need for your animation. Then we'll go to File, Export and then Add
to Render Queue. Here the render queue opens and we're going to choose
best settings up here, that's like our full
settings over here. Then click on the
'Output Module. " The output module
settings pop out. Windows will have
different options. But for Apple we want to select QuickTime and then in
the format options, there's a big selection
for Video Codec. We will go for Apple 422 LT, because this one is a good-quality and it's
not a very big file. It's perfect for this project. If you're on Windows, you can go for something
like H.264 MP4 file and that should work
perfectly too. Click "Okay". Next we'll change
our output location by clicking on the Output To. Then a Window will pop up and we'll find our export folder. Videos work in progress. Bee_01.mov and save. Then we click "Render." That will just take a
moment and it's done. Let's check that in
our exports folder. Videos, work in progress, and there's our little bee mov. Now we have a video mov file but if we want to have that as a GIF however you prefer, will lead to open this
mov file in Photoshop. Let's say it in the
app, file open, then we find our file
and click "Open." Now Photoshop will show you
your file with a timeline, and we can play that
using the spacebar. It plays the same mov as we had from the QuickTime player. But this time we can
save it as a GIF. We go up to File Export,
then Save for Web. Just wait for that to load. Then this is the save
for web pop-out window. It will open on this
optimized window. Initially, I can see that my file size is pretty
heavy for GIF for over nine MEG but let's
just preview that in the browser to check
it's all working well. It's working really well, but it's also humungous. Straight away, I can
definitely reduce the overall size
of the image and that will reduce the
size of the file. Over here, let's just
reduce the image size to 50 percent and the
preview should update. We will see that the file
size has been reduced, and if we click on "Preview" we can see the size of the GIF. That's much more
reasonable size. I could save this or the previous version as my high-quality GIF
but I do want to upload it to Skillshare
and it's a good rule of thumb to have the GIF
as small as possible. The next thing I can try
is to adjust the colors. There is a preset menu here
that I can choose from. We can choose those 32 Dithered. That reduces the
number of colors from 256-32 making a big difference
to our file size again. Let's just preview that. It still looks great, but it's a bit grainy
so I think I'm going to try 64 instead of 32. Again, that affects the size. Let's preview. Looking much better
on the color. Let's reduce the size
of the mov 40 percent. There we go and we'll
just preview that again, and that looks good. Our file size is now just over
one MEG. Let's save that. Find the folder and resources, bug illustrations, exports, stills, and then you find GIF. Even though it's not still, it's series of still images. Here you'll see that I've actually already
created a folder. Here's my higher-quality
files that I saved earlier but
for Skillshare, we need to reduce size. I'm just going to make a
full Skillshare folder. You can do that for your
own animation so you have high-quality
and lower-quality. I'm going to continue
this to export all my characters
ready for upload. [MUSIC] Let's check
all our GIFs. Here I have my full-size GIF
and my Skillshare size GIFs. These will also be
better for e-mails if I want to send
them there as well. In Skillshare, let's create our project, upload our image. I'm going to just choose one of these final PNGs from
the previous course. I'll just upload the bee
as he's my main character. Now you could create files to the correct size
if you don't want your image to be cropped. I don't mind it being cropped as my bee is quite
centered in the frame. Then put the name
in of the projects. I'm going to call it
busy bee and then you can upload your GIF by clicking
over here on the image. If you wanted to
save your video, you can paste it at YouTube
or Vimeo link here. But I'm uploading a GIF, so click "Image", and finally GIF in the folder. Then click "Open."
Wait a moment, and your GIF shall appear. Also, you can tag me
any notes in here or questions or any tips that you need and I love to read them, so please do and I'll
get back to you. When you're all
done, you can click publish and that
will be your project done [MUSIC] That's how you export and upload
it to Skillshare. Don't forget to post
your projects in your portfolio and
social media as well. I'm sure clients
and friends will be super impressed by your
new skills [MUSIC]
11. Conclusion: [MUSIC] That's it. In
this class we learned how to download Duik and prepare
our first animation. Apply the automation,
wiggle and swing two layers of our
illustrations and some super handle
tips for adding that extra magic to both our
workflows and animations. By now, you should have a
super animation to share on our project gallery and
on your own portfolio. Remember if you share on
Instagram, do tag me. I always love to see students work and share it where I can. Do also pop any
questions or comments in your published
project and I will do my best to help if you
encountered any issues. I really hope you enjoy using
automation as much as I do and that it help you with
your future animation work. I can't wait to see
what you've been up to. All the best with your
animation journey and I hope to see you again
soon. Bye. [MUSIC]
Kay Leathers, Illustrator/Designer for Motion Graphics
