Easy Character Animation in Adobe After Effects - Make a Character Run

1. Introduction: In this easy character animation course, together we'll animate a character running in adobe after effects. This class is for anybody looking to take a step in the character animation. Can't wait to see you what you create. 2. Getting Started/Class Project: For this class, you'll need Adobe After effects, Adobe Media encoder to Export. You can download the artwork on the project and resources page, or you can create your own artwork. I'll also include a completed version of the class. So feel free to check out that as well. Your class project is to take what you've learned and apply it to your own animation. And please post your projects to the project gallery so everyone can see what you created. 3. Drawing the Legs: Before we start animating, I just want to let you know that if you don't feel like animating the donut character, there's two other character artwork that you can find up here. In this lesson, we're going to draw our legs. Turn our grid on. Zoom into 200%. Get our pen tool. Make sure there's no fill. I'm using 15 pixels, black stroke. For our first leg, we'll click somewhere around here. Remember to hold the shift key to draw a straight line. That looks good enough. We'll rename our layer to leg one. Toggle down the contents, shape, stroke, change it to round cap. To create our second leg, we're just going to duplicate our first leg, press control D, press P to bring up the position, and we'll drag over the y position. And there we go. Move our doughnut layer to the top of the layers. 4. Animating Leg 1: Now we can start animating. We can turn off our leg two. Turn our grid on. Zoom into 200%. Let's open up our leg one layer, and select path one. Select these two foot points. We'll drag the foot over. Remember to hold the shift key when you're dragging the foot to make it move in a straight line. Around one square looks good. Toggle down our path one. Press the stopwatch to put a key frame. Now let's move over ten frames on the timeline. Select our two foot points again. This time we're going to drag it backwards. Now we're going to move over another five frames on the timeline. We're going to add a new point in the middle of our leg by selecting the pen tool. I. Now, select our two foot points again, and we'll lift the foot up around three squares on the grid. Now let's drag the 1 ft point. Somewhere around there looks good, and there we go. We have our up position for our foot. Now let's head to 1 second on the timeline, and we're going to copy and paste our first key frame. Let's trim our work area to 1 second. And that's pretty much it for leg one. 5. Animating Leg 2: I just thought of an easier way to create our leg two. Since we already have the animation done for leg one, we're just going to duplicate our leg one and offset the key frames. So let's select leg one, press Control D to duplicate it. Let's bring up the position. We'll drag over the position. Somewhere around there looks good. Now let's bring up the keyframes by pressing U. We'll head to the last keyframe by clicking this arrow. Select all our key frames for Leg two. Control C Control V. Now let's select all our keyframes for leg two. Make sure you're on the beginning of the timeline, and we're going to drag them backwards until this keyframe is at the beginning of the timeline. If your leg two doesn't look like this, you'll know you're on the wrong key frame. This last keyframe, we can just delete it because we won't need that. And there we go. 6. Body Animation: Now we're going to animate our doughnuts body moving up and down as it runs. Let's select our doughnut layer, press P to bring up the position. Now using the down arrow key, we're going to nudge our doughnuts body down. Or you can type in 550 into the y position. Let's press the stopwatch to put a keyframe. This will be the down position for our doughnut. Let's bring up our leg keyframes by pressing. We're going to use these as a guide. A little bit before our second leg one key frame. Frame seven on the timeline. Let's move our body up by pressing 540 into the x position. Let's move to halfway through our run cycle. Copy and paste our first keyframe, to put another down position. Now let's move to just before the second last key frame of our leg two. Frame 23 on the timeline, will copy and paste our second keyframe, to put another up position. Now let's move to the end of our run cycle, and copy and paste our first key frame because we want our first and last key frames to be exactly the same. And there we go. 7. Ramp Up the Run Cycle: In this lesson, we're going to speed up our run cycle because I find it's animating a little too slow. Let's select our layers, press U to bring up the key frames. As you can see, it's animating just a little bit too slow for a run cycle. The first thing we're going to do is select our key frames, press F nine es. This will make the animation a little smoother. Now let's head to 15 frames on the timeline. Let's drag the end of our work area. Now, let's select our donut position key frames, and holding the Ault key. We're going to drag the keyframes within our work area. Make sure the last keyframe is on frame 15. Now we're going to do the same thing with leg two. Select the key frames, hold the Ault key and drag. And finally, the same thing for leg one. There we go. I think that looks a lot better. 8. Shadow: Now, let's draw a shadow. Zoom into 200% again. Turn our grid on. Let's get our pen tool. Same settings we use to draw our legs. Remember to hold the shift key to draw a straight line. We'll rename the layer shadow. Remember to press enter to rename a layer. Press to bring up the opacity, and we'll change it to something like 20%. We can toggle down our layer contents, shape, stroke, and we'll change it to round cap. We'll move our shadow layer to the bottom of the layers. Before we start animating, we got to make sure our anchor point is in the center. You can use the snapping tool to make sure it snaps to the center. To animate it, we're going to use the scale property. Press S to bring up the scale, unlink it. On our first frame, we want it to be at 100%. Let's press the stopwatch to put a key frame. Move over to our second position, key frame. Change the y percentage to 75. Move over to our next position. Change our scale back to 100. And to fill in the rest, we'll just copy and paste. As you can see, our key frames aren't lined up with the rest of our run cycle. What we'll do is we'll select our key frames, press the alt button, and we'll drag our keyframes until they line up with the rest of our run cycle. Select our key frames, press F nine, and there we go. 9. Loop: Before we loop our animation, I want to show you an easy way to make sure that your animation loops perfectly. Up here under the composition window, you can find the take Snapshot button. We can click that to take a snapshot. Now let's move to the end of our timeline, and right beside it, you can click the show Snapshot button. What we want is for both pictures to be exactly the same. If for whatever reason, your animation isn't a perfect loop. Take the first key frame of each layer and copy and paste it because we want our first and last key frames of the run cycle to be exactly the same. In this lesson, I'm going to show you an easier way to loop your animation. The first thing we're going to do is select all our layers, right click, precompose, I'm going to name it donut character. Let's right click on our donut character layer. Go to time, enable time remapping. Now we're going to move to the last frame with animation on it, which is frame 15 on the timeline. We're going to place a keyframe by pressing the key frame button. Now let's zoom out and delete the last keyframe on the timeline. So now you should only have the first two keyframes. Hold alt key and press the stopwatch. Type in the expression, loop out. Make sure the type expression exactly how it's shown on screen. And there we go. It's that easy. Now our animation loops. 10. Boil/Background: Now I'm going to add a little bit of a background. Let's get our rectangle tool, create a new rectangle. Let's get rid of our stroke. I'm going to put a solid fill. I'm going to make the fill color the same color as this red sprinkle. Go to rename the layer. Remember to press enter to rename a layer, move it to the bottom of the layers. Go to nudge it down using the arrow key. There we go. I think that looks good. Now I'm going to add a background. I'm going to go to ayer, new, solid. I think I'm gonna keep this purple color as the background. Move it to the bottom of the layers, going to rename it. Now I'm going to add a boil effect, just like we learned in part one. I'm going to go to new adjustment layer. We can rename it boil. On our new boil layer, we're going to add the turbulent displace effect. We can start by changing our amount down to eight, size down to 15. Let's toggle down evolution options. I'll click on the random seed. In this field, we're going to type in our expression. Random 10,000. That adds a little bit of animation to our boil. And just like in Part one, we're going to make it better by duplicating our turbulent displace layer. And we're going to change these numbers. Let's change our amount to 30. Change our size down to two. There we go. That looks a little bit better. Gives it a more hand drawn look. One more thing we can do to make it a little bit better is change these complexity numbers. I'm going to change this complexity to two, and I'll change this complexity to four. There we go. Makes it look a little bit less computer generated. 11. Mouth Animation: In this lesson, we're going to animate our character's mouth breathing because I'm not convinced that our character would be smiling as he's running. The first thing we're going to do is enter our doughnut character layer. Enter the doughnut layer. Let's select our mouth layer. Turn our grid on. Zoom into 200%. Let's get our pen tool. Here we're going to place a new point. Let's lift our new point up around one square on the grid. Let's get our convert vortex tool. By dragging these handles here, we can turn our mouth into a circle. It doesn't have to be perfect. Let's make sure our anchor point is in the center. Open up the scale by pressing the S key. I'm going to shrink the percentage down to 60%. Place a keyframe. Move over three frames on the timeline, enter a percentage of 40%. Move over another three keyframes. Put our percentage back to 60. Now we can copy and paste these keyframes. Control C, Control V, move to the last keyframe. Copy paste, That should be enough. Because remember we have a loop out expression in our main composition, select our key frames, press F nine to Easy Es. Now let's right click and go into keyframe velocity, these numbers to 60%. Now let's head back to our main composition. There, I think that looks a little bit more natural for a run cycle. 12. Take the Run Cycle a Step Further: Here's an optional lesson for students that want to take their run cycle just a step further. We can turn off leg one for now. Select leg two. Bring up the key frames by pressing. So before the foot touches the ground, I would like it to be in the up position. So let's go toggle down our path options, Zoom into 200% and turn our grid on. Now, let's select our path one. We can select these three points. I'm going to lift it up around one square on the grid. Now I'm going to select these two points, move them over a little bit. Now, I will select the last point. This one point, going to angle the foot up. There we go. Let's see how that looks. There we go. I think that looks just a little bit better. Now we're going to do this to the second leg. We can just copy this one key frame. And then we'll go into leg one. Bring up the key frames by pressing. Let's head to 13 frames on the timeline, and paste our key frame. Now our other foot has the up position. Now let's see what that looks like. Turn our grid off. There we go. Another thing we can do is select the position key frames for our doughnut. Go into key frame velocity. Let's up these numbers to something like 60%, and let's see what that looks like. And now that I think of it, we can go into our doughnut layer and do the same thing to our mouth key frames. Right click key frame velocity. Let's try upping these numbers to 100%. Yeah, I think that looks a little bit better. 13. Optional Moving Background: This lesson is optional for students that want a moving background, like in Part one. Let's drag our background layer into our layer panel. We can delete these two layers. Let's select our background layer. Align it to the left using the align panel. Place a key frame. We want the background to animate a little bit faster than in part one. Let's move to 5 seconds on the timeline. Make sure to trim your work area to 5 seconds. Now we can align our background to the right. This places another key frame on the timeline automatically. Now let's preview what it looks like. There we go. I think that looks good enough. 14. Export: Here's a quick lesson on how to export your animation. Since our composition is already trimmed to 5 seconds long, we can go to file, export, add to Adobe Media Encoder cue. Once media encoder is open, we can click on any of these links to bring up our properties. On the presets tab, we can select YouTube, Full HD. Here we can rename it and choose where we're going to export. Click. And now we can click to Green arrow to export. 15. Outro: Congratulations on completing your character animation. Now you can post your project to the project gallery. I love seeing the stuff that you guys create. 16. (Optional)Bonus Lesson - Shoes: Here's a bonus lesson on how to add shoes to your character. Once you have the run cycle the way that you like it, you can duplicate one of your leg layers. We'll change the name. We'll change the color. Now we can toggle down the contents of the layer. Here we can add a trim path. Change the start value to 80%. If you want, you can change the size of the stroke. To make it a little more visible, we can go to layer styles, and we can add a stroke.